Explore the intricacies of setting up design options, a particularly useful tool when planning architectural layouts. This guide will teach you how to use these options effectively, by demonstrating the process with a restroom design scenario.
Key Insights
- The article explains the process of setting up design options in an architectural layout, using restroom design as an example.
- An in-depth walkthrough explains how to create new options, rename option sets for clarity, and move elements into the chosen option set. The author stresses the importance of ensuring all elements are correctly associated with the right options to prevent confusion.
- The piece demonstrates the power of visibility graphic overrides, which allow you to control which elements are shown based on your chosen design options. This is particularly useful for managing complex layouts with multiple design possibilities.
For our first lesson, we're gonna go ahead and explore the concept of design options. And before we do that, we wanna do a few things to get this set up. So the first thing I'm gonna do, and this is gonna sound a little weird, but I'm gonna go ahead and delete my rooms and room tags for these two restrooms.
And it gives me a warning every time I do that. It's just letting me know that I've removed the rooms from the model view, but it still remains in the project. And essentially what that means is that if I go to place a room again, then it's still available as a room option within this dropdown here.
And we're gonna use this to our advantage in a little bit as we create the new options here. So the next thing we wanna do is we wanna make sure we have the restroom options set ready to go. And so to do that, we're gonna go ahead and navigate down to this bottom bar here where it says Design Options.
And from there, what I could do is I can create new option sets and then new options within that set. So first thing I'll do is I'll just hit new. And then I can rename these sets if I wanted.
So instead of option set one, because that doesn't really mean anything to anybody, what I could do is I can rename it and I can call it the restroom options. And now we know exactly what it is. And so if I wanted to give these more descriptive options, I could do the same thing as well by renaming those options.
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So what I wanna do is I wanna make sure that all the elements of this option are set to option one. So I'm gonna leave option one here by itself for right now. And I'll go ahead and hit close.
What you'll notice is that because this is set to main model, that everything within here is gonna be set to main model, and I can still select it. If I were to change this from main model to option one, you can see everything essentially goes gray and is not able to be selected. If I were to uncheck this box that says active only, then I can actually still select these different items.
And what's great about that is I can select the items that I want, like say all of our fixtures here. And if you recall from BIM 101, what I'm doing is I'm just selecting one element and then holding down the control key to add to the selection. And then I could use this button here, which will then move these to that set.
If I click move to the option set, now they're on the set. And I can do the exact same thing in level two. So I'll do the same process where I'll delete the room and the room tag.
I need to switch this back to main model here. First, and then I can go through and use the exact same process going back to option one, making sure that this is unchecked, the active only. And that'll allow me to grab the items that are not associated with level one, which those walls were.
And I can move them over into the option one set. Now, what that does is if I were to change it back to the main model, these elements are now part of that option one set. So they no longer show.
If I were to go in and say, create a new option in Design Options here and create a new option. Now I have option two. What we could do is we can actually create more elements on option two.
And this can be controlled pretty neatly with our Visibility/Graphic Overrides. So VV on the keyboard, if I go to design options, you can see here it's set to automatic, which means what it'll do is it'll automatically show the primary option. But if I were to change that to option two and hit okay, it's gonna show all of the main model elements, which is everything that we haven't messed with and the option two items.
If I hit okay, it's gonna give me an issue because we don't have a room boundary here. So that's fine. We'll just hit okay here.
And you can see that now in level one, we have the option shown because the Visibility/Graphic Overrides haven't been changed. But in level two, we don't have anything shown here. And that's because we don't have an option that shows those walls.
So what I'm gonna do here, and this is our last bit of prep work for this, is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna add a temporary room separator along this line here. And what that'll do is it'll just keep the room that's associated with this hall contained within this space. And then that'll allow me to work within here without getting constant errors.
So I'm gonna do the same thing on level one as well. We'll add that room separator. And again, that hall room is gonna stay contained within this space here.
And that'll allow us to do any work within here, meaning we can go in and create our new restroom layout. So I'm gonna use the same Visibility/Graphic Options here where I'm gonna set it to option two. And then we can draw in our option two restroom.
