Working with axonometric view settings

- In this movie I'd like to dig a little deeper into some of the settings that pertain to our 3D Views. Specifically, I'm going to look at some of the settings that are available for an axonometric view. So, I'm actually in the default 3D view here. If I go down to my Project Browser, if you watched the previous movie you saw that if we clicked the icon here on the Toolbar, default 3D View, it will either open or create this view with the curly brackets around it so I affectionately refer to that as the "Curly Bracket 3D." What I'd like to do here is talk about some of the settings that we have on the Properties Palette that can control the behavior of this view.

So, I'm gonna zoom out a little bit just so that we can see everything when we start to manipulate this. Make sure that nothing is selected, and, as per normal in Revit, that will display the Properties Palette, and specifically the properties of the view itself. So, if something is selected it's going to give you the properties of the selection so that's why you want to make sure that you have nothing selected. Now we have all the normal stuff here, like, you know, the View Scale, the Level of Detail and that kind of thing, and I'm not really gonna pay too much attention to that for the time being.

What I want to focus on is the Extents area. And, there's a series of check boxes here that we can begin to look at. Now, the two first check boxes, Crop View and Crop Region Visible, you can check and uncheck them here, but they also have icons down on the status bar. So, usually it's a good idea to start with Crop Region Visible, which I can either check here or click the lightbulb icon there, and you might need to zoom out even further to see it, but that will actually create a rectangle around the view.

Now notice that by turning it on, it actually enabled it as well. Now it's possible to disable it just as easily by unchecking it, and notice that won't turn it off. So, the first time you click it it's gonna turn them both on, but then after that they're independent. Now, if you select this rectangle and use these grips here, you can start to reduce the size of this, and then it starts to become kind of obvious what this actually does. So, if you don't really want to see the entire model here, and you want to focus in on just the building itself, then this can be an effective way to do that.

Now if I use my keyboard shortcut ZF to Zoom to Fit, it will zoom in on the cropped down region as opposed to the entire model with all of that excess stuff, and we can focus more in on our focal point here, the building. Now, I like to think of this crop region out here as kind of like a picture frame. If you roll the wheel or drag the wheel, you are zooming and panning the picture frame itself, but if you hold the Shift key down and roll the wheel or drag the wheel, you're working within the picture frame.

So, you can fine tune the view that you're seeing here. Now if it's orbiting in a kind of unusual way, if it's a little bit difficult to control, then a little tip for you is that if you select something in the model first, like I'm gonna select one of these columns out here on the portico, and then hold the wheel and drag, notice that it's actually orbiting around whatever I have selected. So that sometimes gives you a little bit more control over exactly what you want to see in there.

Alright, so, now, what I'm gonna do is temporarily disable the crop, and notice that the rectangle actually stays the size that we changed it to, but it just turns off the cropping behavior, and now if I do Zoom to Fit it will go back to zooming to the entire model. A little bit further down here at the bottom of this Extents area is an item called Section Box. Now the Section Box is a different kind of cropping behavior. Rather than just a picture frame that is kind of 2D and allows us to view within that frame, this is actually a 3D Section Box, and it will display this large box that goes out around the entire model, and if you click it it's got its own little grip points, but now what you'll notice is as I start to resize this, it's actually cutting off the model, and if I zoom in here you can see we're actually cutting through the ground plane there, and seeing the earth as we cut through it.

So you can use this feature to kind of crop this down, and make it appear a little bit more like a traditional physical model. Like imagine that this was created out of chipboard and foam core, and sitting on a base there, and it kind of gives more of that effect. So, by kind of manipulating the various settings that you see here, you can get different kinds of effects. Now it's possible to actually rotate this Section Box using this grip here, but it's not terribly interactive so you have to actually drag it and let go before you see the result.

So that can actually be a little bit challenging to get exactly right, and it might take you a few tries. I'm gonna do Control Z to undo that. It can also stretch it vertically so if you wanted to kind of pull off part of the roof, and kind of peer down into your model here, I could orbit so that I could see down in it. So that's another option that you have here with the Section Box. Now if you don't want the Section Box to display, you can hide it. It doesn't have it's own little Hide control like the Crop Region does, but you just simply select it like any other 3D element in Revit, and go to the lightbulb and choose Hide Elements.

Now that will hide it until you're ready to see it again, at which point you'll use the Reveal Hidden Elements on the View Control bar. It will show up here in this reddish color, and then maybe I've decided I want to bring the roof back so I can go ahead and stretch that back up again. When I turn off Reveal Hidden Elements it will remain hidden so that could be a nice way to manage your 3D Section Box. Now, I've showed you the manual way to work with the Section Box. You enable it by checking the box, and then you use the grips to adjust its size.

There's actually another approach to setting up a section box that we'll look at in a future movie so at that point you'll have two different techniques that you can use, and you can decide which one you like best. But ultimately what you want to do is after you've created your axonometric view, you want to look through the Properties that you have available here on the Properties Palette, and make any fine tuning adjustments that you want, either to the angle or the cropping, to make the view a little bit more pleasing and focus in specifically on the items that you want to showcase.