Discover practical tips on how to clean up and enhance the appearance of your floor plan designs. This article provides valuable insights on optimizing your floor plan by deleting unnecessary elements, adjusting location cuts, moving section views, modifying color schemes, and adjusting the graphics of stairs.
Key Insights
- The article emphasizes the importance of cleaning up floor plans by removing unnecessary elements such as outdated dimensions and reference planes, which can clutter the design.
- Moving section views to more interesting locations, such as through lobbies or stairs, can enhance the overall appeal and readability of the floor plan. Adjustments to color schemes and line weights can also make a significant impact on the visual presentation, making the plan less bold and more viewer-friendly.
- Visibility and graphic overrides play a significant role in enhancing the look of stairs and railings in a floor plan. Turning off certain lines and components can reduce clutter and make the plan considerably cleaner and easier to understand.
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Now we're going to take a look at some things we can do to help clean up our floor plan a bit. So one of the things I want to do is I want to go in and I want to remove anything that we're not really using anymore. So a good example of that is we went in and we added these three-foot dimensions and reference planes.
Well, the windows have been placed and we no longer need those. So I can select these elements and I can delete them. And the next thing I can do is I can see that when I look at my section, it's an okay place to cut a section, but it's not exactly the most exciting location.
I'd rather go through maybe the lobby here or something like that. So I'm going to move this section down through so that it's going to cut through the stair and through this lobby portion, because it's got a little bit more going on and it's a lot more interesting to look at. Because I did that, I'm going to move my room tag for the stair over and just kind of tighten that up a bit so it looks good.
And then I'll do the same thing with the section. It doesn't need to go out as far as it's shown there. Okay.
Now that I'm looking at it, I can see that there are a few things that I should probably update. I think this is a little tight with those room tags, so it's probably not a bad idea to move these room tags out and then adjust the leader. And a lot of that's already taken care of because we added the tag, had to add the leader first, because we added the type to the tag.
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And so we should be able to move these pretty quickly. I do notice that it's a little tricky with keeping that tag horizontal. So I've noticed that if I move it just a little bit beyond the horizontal line, and then I can move the actual dot back to where it needs to be.
So just doing those two things kind of makes it look a little better. The other thing I can do is I can take my furniture, and if I go into my object style settings, so if you remember from one of our earlier lessons, object style is going to be the baseline for how we determine our line weights on these objects. So I can go into object styles, which is going to be from our manage tab, object styles, and I can find furniture.
And instead of using a black color, I could tone that down to like a medium or even like a medium light gray color. And that'll give it the appearance of halftone. So it's not as bold on the plan.
You can see it lightened it up quite a bit. The other thing I can do is I have the option with my color fill legend or color fill scheme that I can set it either to be in the background, which is what it's doing now, which is why we're seeing these white spaces here. And I can change that to foreground.
And now this is a personal preference thing. If you wanted to have it this way or the other way, that's totally up to you. Personally, I think it's weird how it cuts into the walls.
So I prefer to use background because I prefer to have the walls stand out a little bit more. The next thing we're going to look at here is the graphics of the stairs. So stairs contain a lot of different components and there's multiple different ways that we can go through and update the way they look.
And this is all going to be from visibility and graphic overrides. If I were to go to visibility, graphic overrides or the keyboard shortcut VV on my keyboard. So VV Victor, Victor, then I can go in and I can find there's two things that we have to mess with the stairs.
So I just hit S on the keyboard to advance to the S section here. And if I expand it, you can see there's quite a bit going on. And what we're seeing here is these are all the lines above the cut line.
So all these above lines here are what we're seeing across. And sometimes it helps to maybe knock a few of those back. If we were to say above, right.
And I said, OK, well, let's turn off the supports for stairs and then maybe we can turn off the riser lines. If I turn off both of those and hit OK, it takes down quite a bit of the information that we're seeing there and it's less cluttered. If I go back in there and do the same thing, but for railings and for this one, what I'll do is I'll just turn all of those off, meaning it won't show the railing beyond the cut line.
So I'll hit OK. And you can see it takes out even more of the lines and cleans up the plan considerably. And that took place on both of our stairs because they're both part of the same plan.
Another thing we can do is with our department legend, you may notice that we're stuck with these kind of square shapes here, and that's simply not the case. We do have options to where we can actually adjust the shape of our color swatch here. So that's going to be through edit type after you select your color fill legend.
And you can see the swatch width and the swatch height are going to be the same here. And so if I wanted to make the width a little bit wider or reduce the height, I can do all those things here. The other thing we can do is we can go in and we can adjust the text that you're seeing.
When you look at the text here, the three-sixteenths text, that's what you're seeing is administration, assembly and core. And then you have the title text, which is the quarter inch for department legend. And those can be updated through this window here.
If I wanted to adjust my swatch width to be more of a rectangle, I can make it more of a two-to-one ratio. So I could set that to three-quarter inch and hit OK. And you can see it makes it a little bit of a larger swatch.
But if you're looking at it and you're like, oh, man, that's a little too heavy now. Well, we can go in and we can easily adjust the height of that swatch to be a little bit smaller. So instead of three-eighths, maybe we go down to a quarter inch and that narrows it up a bit.
It's more in line with the height of the text. And that's just a way we can make these things look a little better. Also, depending on where you place this originally, you might want to shift it around to get it to look a little cleaner.
And those are some of the things we can do to the floor plan to tighten it up a bit.
