Discover how to effectively manipulate view templates, visibility graphic overrides, and graphic display options to optimize your 3D designs. Learn some tricks for enhancing your visuals with wide lines and shadows, tweaking your in-session lighting, and customizing your sun path diagrams.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to use visibility graphic override by turning off imported categories, which can help eliminate unnecessary line work and improve the clarity of your design.
- You can enhance 3D views by adjusting the graphic display options. The article discusses the utilization of the 'silhouette' function for a visually appealing effect, while the 'wide line' feature can make the view pop out more. Also, the use of 'shadows' can add depth to the design.
- The article explains how you can control your in-session lighting and sun paths to influence the shadows and overall visual impact of your design. You can set specific angles, define unique locations, and manipulate the time of day to create varying effects.
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I'm going to jump back to my title sheet here, and I'll just work from this view so that we can kind of see what they look like together as we go through this. And so the first thing I'll do is I'll jump in to this view, and we're going to use this as the basis for our view template. And so what I'll do is I'm going to go to my visibility graphic override, so hitting VV on my keyboard here, and then I'm going to go to imported categories, and I can turn off my X site base import here, and it'll get rid of a lot of the line work.
And so now if you're finding that to kind of remove some of the context, and you're like, I kind of liked it better the other way, then it's good to just look at it in both ways. And we can leave it on for now, but it's something to consider that you can remove that, and it's easy to bring it back if you're not sure about the decision. What we're going to focus on mostly here, though, is our graphic display options, and that's going to be within our visual styles, or it'll be the graphic display options here.
We looked at this when we were working on the elevations, and it's a lot of the same settings, but we're going to take a look at a couple of the other tricks here. So I'll go ahead and select that, and we can use the silhouettes option here as well. This tends to look pretty cool in 3D views.
And then we want to turn on our shadows. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do one of these at a time, and then we can kind of see what it looks like. So I'm going to go ahead and turn on the wide lines, and let me move this over here, and then I'll hit apply.
And this one's kind of hard to see from this angle, but you can see it put the wide lines on the outside of the view, and it just kind of helps it pop a little bit. I'll go back into that graphic display options, and then I can go in and I can take a look at shadows here. And the two options we have both have different effects.
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If I just cast shadows and hit apply, what it'll do is it'll just cast shadows based on the settings that you have in lighting here. And so the in-session lighting is essentially just going to be a specific angle. So you can say, well, we'll just do sunlight from the top right or sunlight from the top left, and it'll give you different options there.
If you were to change it to a still, you could define a location, a specific location, and this used to be a lot more straightforward than a Google mapping service thing here. But if I were to pick our headquarters here in San Diego, you can see it automatically chooses the one in Venezuela first, which is interesting, or somewhere in Boston. Or you can just pick the default city list since you just witnessed how much trouble I had trying to find just the city on here.
And there we go, found San Diego. And so I can pick San Diego, and then I can pick the time of day, which will have a really, really dramatic impact on when and what your sun is going to look like in here. So I could pick kind of early morning, you know, high noon type of thing here.
Or I can do like a late, late evening shot where it's just going to be a low sun angle and you won't see much of a difference here. This is the south side of the building according to our sun path diagram here. So the changes are really going to be coming from the opposite side.
If I wanted it to have a different look, I want to be, say, below noon here to get that sun coming from the east side. And you can always use these default settings too that they have for the solstice or the equinox. Those tend to work pretty well.
And alternatively, if you're just not interested in any of that and you just want to have the shadows on your building, you could just use some of these default plugin settings. All of those are going to work just fine for you.
