Master the nuances of visibility and graphic overrides in Revit with this comprehensive guide. Discover the benefits of learning key shortcuts and understanding the distinction between model and annotation categories.
Key Insights
- The article highlights the importance of learning keyboard shortcuts in Revit for efficiency, specifically the 'VV' shortcut which brings up the visibility and graphics overrides dialog box.
- The visibility and graphic overrides are emphasized as being view-specific, meaning their application does not affect all views in a project, but only the current view being worked on. This allows for different customization of each view.
- Another notable point is the distinction between view-specific settings and project-specific settings. While the former only alters the graphics in a single view, the latter changes the appearance throughout the entire project, regardless of the view.
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Picking up right where we left off, we're going to go ahead and bring back those gridlines. And like I promised, we're going to take a good look at the visibility and graphics override dialog box. So I'm not a huge proponent of mandating that you use keyboard shortcuts, but I am a huge proponent of mandating that you learn at least a few of them.
So there's some that it doesn't make that big of a difference, but there are a few that I firmly believe will make a big difference in your workflow. And this is definitely one of them. And it's one of my favorites because it's the same key twice.
If you hit VV on your keyboard while you're selected into the workspace, so I just click first, and then VV, so Victor, Victor, the visibility and graphics overrides will pop up. And we have two different categories that we're really going to be focusing on for this class. We have model categories and we have annotation categories.
When you look through the model categories, you can see you've got all your different types within here, your categories in here. And then if you look at annotation categories, you have the same thing. And as we scroll down, you'll notice when we get to grids, the box is unchecked because in that last video, we went through and we did a hide by category.
So essentially, without going into the visibility graphic dialog box, we unchecked grids. And they give you a good hint here. It says if a category is unchecked, it will not be visible.
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If I were to check it, grids are going to come back and we can see them in this view. Now, what's really important to note is that visibility and graphic overrides are specific to that current view you're working on. So here, I just undid our bringing back of the grids.
But if I were to go to my level two view, you can see that the grids are turned on. That's because in the view properties and the visibility graphic overrides of level two, grids are turned on, whereas in the level two callout, they're not. So I'll use VV again, and I'll go to annotation categories.
And you don't have to necessarily always scroll down here. What I do is I'll hit the first letter of the item I'm looking for. So in this case, I'll just say G, and it'll take me to the first G, which is generic annotations.
But that way, I only have to go down a couple and I can hit OK here. So the same thing goes for other elements. If I were to go to my level one view here, what I can do is I can go to visibility graphic overrides.
I can find, say, furniture, and I can turn furniture on in this view, whereas in level two, it was already on all along. And you can see that there's even a difference in how it appears in these two different views where it's kind of a darker color here, whereas in level one, it's kind of a gray color here. So those are examples of different visibility graphic overrides that we could do to customize our views.
Another one you may notice is that our detail level in level one is still set to course, even though in level two, we changed it to medium. That is another view-specific setting that will determine the graphics of that particular view. Now that we've covered view-specific settings, let's take a look at our project-specific settings.
When I say project-specific, I mean it's going to change it everywhere, regardless of the type of view that you're using. If I were to go to my manage tab, you can see here on the left, we have materials and then we have object styles. Object styles is going to be the one setting here that's going to override the view across the project.
And so this is the baseline for how everything looks within the project. If I were to go to object styles, and let's just say if I went to walls here, and I were to change walls instead of them being black to like a magenta color, which you probably would never do, I can hit okay. And now my walls in all of my views now have magenta as their cut line.
If I were to go to visibility graphic overrides in this particular view and change my cut line to be a different color in this view, say red, what I could do is I can then override that in that specific view. So it's important to understand that the object styles are going to be your baseline setting, and then there's a series of different overrides that we can do to change the appearance of these elements. So I'm going to go back into visibility graphic overrides for walls here, and I'll just clear the overrides.
And just quickly, when I'm talking about cut lines or surface lines, so cut means we're cutting this because it's a floor plan, which is essentially a horizontal section. We're cutting those walls, that's why they're showing that way. And same thing when we go into object styles, we have the option to adjust the projection, which is looking in elevation, or the cut lines.
So for walls, I just change them all, and I'll put them back to black so we have a normal looking plan again. So that has to do with the baseline settings. There's also other settings that we'll want to look at really quickly here just as an overview, but you may notice that the stairs, for instance, have a different line weight than the walls.
And that's based on these object style settings where stairs has a cut line of three and a projection line of one. Whereas when we look at walls, it has a projection line of two and a cut of five. When we look at the stairs, we're seeing projection lines here of one, and walls, a cut line of five.
And you may be asking yourself, what is he talking about? What does it mean when you're saying one versus five? And that's just how the line weights are determined within Revit. If I go to additional settings in the manage tab again, and then look at line weights, you can see here, depending on the scale of our view, the number of line weight is given in actual dimension in inches. Whereas one on our eighth inch view is 0.003 and five is 0.018. So it's a much thicker line weight, which you can see here demonstrated within our view.
If you have it in you to go through and customize these things, more power to you, but I would suggest looking into making that part of a template so you're not doing this every single time. That would be pretty exhausting.
