Discover the advantage of creating a 3D section perspective in a Revit model to better explain your design intent. This in-depth tutorial will guide you through the steps of creating a camera view, utilizing the navigation wheel, activating a section box, and filling cut items with solid pochet to enhance graphical representation.
Key Insights
- The tutorial guides in creating a 3D section perspective in a Revit model, emphasizing the advantage of sharing 3D model information in 3D views to assist in explaining the design intent.
- It provides step-by-step instructions for creating a camera view, navigating the model using the navigation wheel, and activating and modifying a section box to create a section cut.
- Additional useful techniques explained include how to change what items are cut and filled with a solid pochet to graphically convey design intent, adjust the perspective view size to a specific scale, and ensure vertical lines are parallel by setting equal eye and target elevations.
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In this video we're going to take a look at creating a 3D section perspective. Although this isn't a conventional detail view, when creating a Revit model you'll notice that there is a lot of advantage to sharing the 3D model information in 3D views to help explain your design intent. We're going to create a section perspective across this building.
So let's go to our level one plan and the first step is to create a camera view. So let's go to view in the ribbon and we're going to create a 3D view, expand that menu, and select camera. And the first point will be our eye position.
So let's zoom out a little bit and you'll notice it has a little camera icon and you can pick outside of this crop region range if you want to back up a little bit. So click once with your left mouse button and you'll notice now it's giving me the target which is going to be where the camera is pointing and the angled lines to the right and left are the field of view. So let's kind of just select the top right corner of this open office room 101 and it brings us to our 3D view.
Let's name this view section perspective so we'll find it in our project browser under 3D views. And it's called 3D view 2 so let's go ahead and just rename it section perspective. And let's zoom out a bit and get a better look at this model.
So I just selected the full navigation wheel and let's select walk with it held down with your left mouse button. Just move your mouse back down and you'll see it's basically walking away from the Revit project file and then back it up so you can see the full extent of the addition to this project to about this distance. We can also pan a bit if you want to kind of get a different vantage point.
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Now let's turn on our section box. I'll hit escape to get out of our navigation. Scroll down under properties.
One of the parameters under extents you'll see a section box. Click that box and hit apply and you'll notice a box appears around the extents of this view and if you zoom out you can kind of see the extent of that that box and these arrows that you see on all sides of this box represent the edges that will be cut and they're basically the section edges of the box. So any of the edges as they move through the model are going to be creating a section cut.
If we select this arrow and pull it back notice that it's moving in perspective towards our building and you'll notice it cut out some of those site elements. The palm trees have disappeared because they're being cut by the section box. Let's find the arrows again and move it back a little bit further until it starts cutting away at our building.
You notice some of the information is being lost beyond and that's the result of the far clip being active. So under extents again in properties we can uncheck far clip active and apply and you'll see that it's no longer clipping away from the eye. It's basically seeing all the way through the model.
Now something that helps graphically to convey your design intent is to change what items are being cut and fill it with a solid pochet and right now we see it being cut with a heavy line which helps but it's sometimes even nicer and more easily read if we fill these regions with a solid black or even a colored fill. In this exercise we're going to just fill it with a solid black fill so let's go to our visibility overrides and we can type in vv as the shortcut to bring up visibility graphic overrides and what we're going to do is select all of the categories. I'm just hitting shift left click to select them all and we're going to change our cut patterns and select override and this is going to override all of the items we have selected and we're going to change the pattern from no override to solid fill click okay okay again and you notice everything has been filled with a solid pochet but you notice there may be some items that aren't being filled such as this slab edge so you have to go back and expand some of these categories which have subcategories such as slab edges and then override those patterns.
Zoom extents and select the section box and right click and let's tell it to hide in view so that turns off our section box. Okay let's position this view a little bit differently and adjust it using pan and orbit in the navigation wheel to find a nice position that you're happy with that's within the crop region and then the next thing you want to take a look at is changing the actual size of this perspective it's not necessarily to an architectural scale but what it is set to is an actual scale that will appear on the sheet so this rectangle is set to a certain crop size so with the rectangle selected select size crop in the ribbon and you'll see the model crop size has a width and a height dimension so let's change the width to 24 inches and make sure that we change not just the field of view but actually the scale so select scale and you notice our height scales with it to 18 inches and that's just maintaining that ratio of width to height select okay and you'll notice the line weight's thin up a bit because the larger that this thing gets scaled the line weights just like any other view in Revit update accordingly and become thinner relative to the scale of the view. One last item to note in perspective views in general is if you want to have vertical lines be parallel to one another and not have a slight arc or not arc and not a slight angle like you can kind of see in this view is you set the eye and target elevations to be the same value and if I set these both to nine feet you can see my view adjusts a bit and all of my vertical lines are straight up and down because I no longer have a third point in my perspective the vanishing points are going to the right and to the left and there's no vanishing point in the vertical axes so make any more final tweaks you want to make panning orbiting you might want to walk in a little bit more to get a little bit more detail of this view and then that concludes our look at section perspectives in the next video we're going to take a look at a new feature in Revit where we can create exploded axonometric views