Learn how to create and manage view templates for level one and level two gross area plans in your architectural software. This in-depth guide covers steps like hiding unnecessary grids, setting up color schemes, adjusting line visibility, and applying templates to multiple views for consistent presentation.
Key Insights:
- View templates can be created based on existing plans, like a level one gross area plan. From there, unnecessary grids and lines can be hidden to clean up the view.
- Details such as color schemes and line visibility can be adjusted within the view template. For instance, the color and weight of the area boundary line can be altered for prominence, allowing for clearer distinction of different areas on the plan.
- Once a view template is created, it can be applied to multiple plans, ensuring consistency across different views. Any changes made in the template will be reflected in all the views where the template is applied, saving time and maintaining uniformity.
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I'm going to go ahead and use the Level 1 Gross Area Plan as the basis for the view template that we're going to create. So there's a few things that I just don't need to see on my Area Plans, and one of those is going to be our grids. So I can go ahead and hide in view by category for grids.
I can hide in view by category for my section lines, and that cleans up the view pretty well. The other thing we could do is use the scope box that we've already established for this project to be the basis for this view, and so I can set this to be scope box for the view, and it'll automatically pull in the crop region. We do that for both Level 1 and Level 2, and that just breeds the consistency between the different views, which is nice to have.
And so now you can see the crop region is going to be the same. So I'm going to jump back over to our Level 1 plan because this is the one I want to make sure I set up all the different settings before I create the view template. And so the next thing I'm going to do is go to my color scheme, and I'm going to go ahead and click Edit on here or where it says “None, ” and then you can see we've got color schemes already for that.
So by just doing it through here instead of from the View tab like we have before, it's kind of the same process. We can go through and it says, you know, Gross Building Area is going to be this color, and if that's what we want, we can go with that or we can change it to something else. That color may not be what we're looking for here, so I'm going to find something kind of in the bluish tone—blue-green. This is very subjective, so you can obviously pick any color that you want to use there.
So I'll hit OK. It fills it in for the Gross Building Area, and now I'm ready to go ahead and create my view template. The other thing that we could do here is, if you wanted to have your area boundary line be a little bit more prominent—because sometimes you might need to show that a little bit more clearly—we can actually adjust that a couple of different ways. In this case, I think just adjusting it through our visibility/graphic overrides is going to be the way to go here.
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We're going to go ahead and scroll down to Lines, and if we expand that, you can see we have our area boundary lines here and we can override the line style here. So the pattern I think is fine. The color—we can adjust that to something different if we wanted to—but the line weight we definitely want to increase. And so before we do this, I want to just pop into our Object Styles, and then we can kind of take a look at what it's set at originally, and then we can decide how we want to change it there. And that's actually not in Object Styles—that's going to be from our Manage tab, Additional Settings, and then Line Styles. And then when we expand Lines here, we can see here's our area boundary line.
So this change that I could make here is something that we could do to make it change globally. So this is the color you see, and that's the line weight you're seeing there, and it's obviously a solid line. If I make the change here, it's going to change it across the board in all of my views. And so if that's something you want to do, then this is the right location to make that change.
If you want to have that same area boundary line be typical across most of the views and then have a few exceptions, then what we're going to want to do is make that visibility/graphic overrides change like I talked about. And then we can make that adjustment to change it. If we went in here and changed the color to that magenta and made it line weight 6, it's obviously not going to make any difference. So that's where you'll want to go in and make a change for your boundary lines. If you wanted to have a different line pattern, a different color, and then a heavier line weight—like I'll go to line weight 8—we might change this later. I just made it a blue color so it stood out against the green. Again, yours might be different. And then when I hit OK, you can see now we've got a heavier line that's showing where that boundary line is drawn. And same thing—if you wanted to make it look a little different, I know it's common to maybe have this be a dashed line—again, totally up to you. It's something that you'll determine as you go through.
If I made that dashed, you can see we now have the dashed boundary line. Either way that you want to do that—again, totally fine. Now that we've got all of the settings here that we want to establish for our view template, we can go to our View tab and go through that same process: View Templates > Create Template from Current View. And then I'll call this one Gross Area and hit OK. Then I can apply that to both our Level 1 and Level 2 plans so that it's automatically assigned to those views. And then anytime we create new Gross Area Plans, we can set it here in the type properties for Gross Area, and then it'll automatically be applied to any new Gross Area Plan views that we create in the future. Now we can take a look at Level 2, and you can see the settings have been applied there and it looks good. And I think it's important to probably note this giant white space that's not being identified as area—to show that that's open—and we've already drawn that graphic a handful of times, right? We can jump into our Level 2 plan, and I can just copy these lines over using the Copy to Clipboard and then popping back over to my Level 2 Area Plan and pasting to current view.
The next thing that we'll look at here is a change that we'll want to make to the template, and it's because the color fill that we have for our Level 2 and Level 1 Area Plans is set to the background. So things like our columns and stairs are sitting in the background, and so it doesn't look like we're necessarily calculating the area to the exterior face because all these walls are covered up. And so if I go into our Gross Area view template, we can see that we've got settings for our color scheme, and it says Color Scheme Location here. And if I were to go in, I can change that to Foreground. And by setting that to Foreground, what it'll do is pull it to the front. And so now, where our boundary is being drawn, you can clearly see even better because now the color fill goes all the way out to those extents. So I'll go ahead and save, and then in the next set of instructions, we're going to go through and put these views on the sheets and set up a schedule for it.
