Explore the different components of user interface in this in-depth article, demystifying the basics of application navigation and functionality. It provides a comprehensive walkthrough of the user interface for various Windows applications, highlighting key features and their uses without overwhelming the reader with excessive detail.
Key Insights
- The article systematically explores the interface, starting from the top with the application menu. It details features such as the home window for easy access to recent files, and the quick access toolbar for customized functionality.
- It delves into the properties of different tabs, explaining the modification tools in the 'Modify' tab, creation tools in the 'Architecture' tab, and how to import external components using the 'Insert' tab. It also highlights the importance of the project browser, which serves as a roadmap to the project.
- The piece presents practical insights on managing the workspace, including tips on selection options and avoiding inadvertent movements of elements. It also introduces the 'View Control Bar' for adjusting view scales, detail levels, and toggling shadows for sun path analysis.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we're going to go through all of the different components of the User Interface. Now, just a disclaimer, this is not going to be a button by button description of everything that you see in here, because that video would be a few hours long and I don't think anybody would necessarily make it through it. We're going to go ahead and we're just going to cover all of the basics.
And then as we go through the class and all the different videos and lessons that we have, you will see that we'll cover quite a bit of the primary buttons that you'll see on the User Interface. So I'm going to start from the top and just work my way down so you can see all the different elements here. So first we have the Application Menu, and this is just pretty typical for a lot of different Windows applications, and we will not be using it too much in here.
The next one we have here is your Home window, and this takes you back to your recent files, which in this case is going to be the files for the Revit models and the files for the Revit families that you've previously opened. As we move along here, we'll have open, save, and then we have undo and redo. This is a shortcut button for print, and then there's a few tools that you can add here.
This is your Quick Access Toolbar, and if you wanted to add a button to that, you just simply right click on it, and then you can say add Quick Access Toolbar, and it'll throw it up there for you. A couple of the buttons up here that are going to be really important to keep in mind are going to be your Default 3D View. You'll use this one quite a bit.
Thin Lines, which we'll cover in the next video. And then we'll have the Close Hidden Windows and our Switch Windows, and we'll see what that ends up doing here in a little bit. As we work our way down, we have the ribbon, which across the ribbon, we have all the different tabs, which we just customized.
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And within each of these tabs has a series of buttons, which are associated with that ribbon heading. So in the View tab, you can see these are a lot of different ways to create and modify the attributes of views, where if you go to your Modify tab, these are all the different tools that you'll use to modify the elements within your Revit model. And some of these icons might look familiar if you have some AutoCAD experience.
The Architecture tab, for example, is the one that's going to be creating all of the elements, just about all the elements that you're going to use within this class. If it's something that can be built and located in the real-world, there's a really good chance it's going to be located within the Architecture tab. If you need to go in and describe something that's within that Architecture tab, you're probably going to find that within the Annotate tab.
So you can see we have text, we have keynotes, we have dimensions, and then we have different ways that we can add detail to those model elements that we've created in the Architecture tab. The Insert tab, we use that to bring in outside components, so we can link all of these different types of files pretty easily. And we can also import files as well, which means we're just going to bring in the file and it no longer maintains a link back to that original file.
Loading in from our different libraries, so we can load in families from the default family library, which installs automatically with Revit. And we could load in Autodesk content from some of their providers and also insert different things from other files. If you have other elements and other Revit files that you want to load in, you can do that through here.
As we work our way down, we have the Properties palette, which contains the Type Selector. And by Type Selector, I mean if we have a command activated, like for example, walls here, I can pick the different type that I want to use. If you remember the hierarchy, it's category, family, type, and instance.
So the category I happened to pick was walls. And then the family we're looking at here is basic wall, and then generic eight-inch is the type. And so within that Properties palette, we also have the instance parameters that you'll see.
And that is always going to show the properties of the current element. When we're on our view here, which is the current selected element, it's going to show the view properties. But if I were to pick, say, one of these elevation tags, you can see that Properties palette is now going to show the properties of the elevation.
So I have something selected here, and to deselect, we can use the escape button. And when you hit escape once, sometimes it only goes back one level, so a lot of times you'll find yourself hitting it two times to get completely out of a command or a selection. As we work our way down, we have our Project Browser, and this is essentially your roadmap to the project.
So everything that's loaded into the project or exists within the project is going to be located here. So you can see we have all of our different floor plan, ceiling plan, elevation views. And then if we had sheets created in this project, you'd see them here.
Legends and schedules are the same way. And then all of the families that we have loaded into the project are located in here as well. We will be spending a lot of time in the Project Browser going back and forth between views.
Now we're going to jump to, this is called the View Control Bar. And what this will do for us is this will allow us to change the scale of a view, adjust the detail level, adjust the graphic display of the view. If we wanted a 3D view that had shaded or consistent colors, or we wanted to jump to wireframe, we could do that pretty easily through here.
We have options to turn the sun path on. If we're trying to do a sun path analysis to make sure we're shading an area properly or we're getting plenty of sunlight into a courtyard, something like that, we could definitely adjust the sun path to a real-world time and location. We can toggle shadows on and off based on that sun path location.
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And then we have our Crop View and Crop View Visible options here, which we'll get into as we start creating sheets. The space in the middle here is conveniently called the Workspace. And that's really where the majority of the work takes place, because if we're drawing, we are drawing through our Workspace.
On the bottom right, we have our Selection Options. And so there's one button that everybody's going to want to press, and that's this Press and Drag button here. We want to make sure that we are not set with Drag on Selection, because if we have it set to Press and Drag, then essentially what will happen is we don't have to do a two-step to select and move items.
We can just press and drag them. And until you become familiar with the software, I highly recommend that you turn that off, because with it turned off, I can't just drag elements. I have to select them first, and then I can move them.
And you can see how you could easily or accidentally move stuff around inadvertently. And we don't want to do that, because that'll just cause some issues and create some unneeded frustration. So I'm going to make sure that X is always on there.
Same with the one next to it, which is Select Elements by Face. Same issues. It's just a lot easier to have that off until you become familiar with your own workflow.
The one on the far right here is going to be everybody's favorite, because that allows us to filter through different selection options. So I have a wall and some elevation tags here. And you can see if I select all three of those using the Crossing, that I don't really have any options, and it says multiple items selected.
But if I were to go to Filter, you can see that I have all of these three items selected. So I could easily say, well, I just wanted walls. And just pick walls as a selection option there.
In the next video, we're going to go ahead and open up our Sample Project. And we're just going to take a look at some of the capabilities of Revit and some of the things that we can do by controlling Visibility and Graphics of the model, and just see how we can create some different views before we start our first project.
