Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Floor Plan Backgrounds

Let's say you're doing your own mechanical, electrical, structural or other drawings that require a floor plan that is greyed or halftone (a background). We've found two ways to accomplish this:

Display Model As Underlay: The easiest way is to Duplicate your Proposed Floor Plan view (without Detailing) This is done by right clicking on your floor plan view in the project browser and selecting Duplicate. Now go to the View's Properties and you'll notice a Display Model parameter. By default this is set to Normal. Switch this to As Underlay. Now you can add your view specific tags, annotations, symbols, detail lines, etc. on top of the model. Unfortunately your lighting, furniture, electrical and other families will also be greyed out. If you need to show some model elements Normal then it's on to the next approach.

Visibility/Graphics Halftone: Duplicate your Proposed Floor Plan view (without Detailing) This is done by right clicking on your floor plan view in the project browser and selecting Duplicate. Now go to the view's Visibility/Graphic Overrides (VG). Under Model Categories select ALL. Now unhighlight Electrical Fixtures and Lighting Fixtures and check the Halftone box for one of the highlighted categories. Notice all the highlighted categories are now set to halftone. Click OK. You now have a floor plan background for your lighting and electrical work. Do the same for Detail Items, Electrical Equipment, Plumbing Fixtures, Furniture, Structural Framing, etc. for other disciplines. Go to View... Save as View Template... and you can save these changes to a View template for use in all your projects. To further configure View Templates go to Settings... View Templates.

To transfer View Templates and other standards from your project to a template file see Jay Polding's Importing Wall Styles.

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