Avoiding Elevation View Pitfalls: How Small Changes Can Have Big Impacts

Let's take a look at elevation views and a seemingly harmless change that we could make to the project that actually has a big impact. So I want you to take a look at our plan the way it stands now, and then we're going to go to the east elevation. We're going to make a couple changes, then we're going to take a look at our floor plan again and see what happened, and we're going to look at processes that we need to go through to make sure that we're not inadvertently affecting other views within the model.

So I can go to the east elevation a couple different ways. I could know that this is the east elevation tag by hovering it, seeing that it says east elevation. Just like with the callout view, I could right-click and I could say go to elevation view, or I could double-click on the triangle, and this is a little trickier because you have to get it in just the right location, but both will take you to the view.

So what I'm looking at here are our grid lines, and let's say I wanted to create more of a presentation view, and I wanted to go in and adjust some of these values here so that maybe my grids are sitting differently. So you can see here that I've got a 3D extent on the top and a 2D extent on the bottom, and then they're both set up with a dot or an open circle. Now what I see happen all the time is that the open circle, which represents the 3D extent, gets adjusted, like this, and then grid line three now has a 3D extent here, whereas the rest of them follow suit because they're all linked together with this lock here.

If I were to go in and say adjust them to look like that and then do the same thing with grid line one, now I've got a view that I'm a little happier with because the grids aren't going through it, but if I go back to level one here, we have ourselves a little bit of a problem. And what I've done is I haven't deleted the grid lines; I've just moved them outside of the boundary of the view for level one. So the view for level one is going to go from level one to level two, and it’s probably cutting somewhere along here, right? So that means these grids are nowhere to be found, and that’s because I adjusted the 3D extent to be beyond the extents of level one.

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So by adjusting it back, you can see that these three, which were connected to each other, went back into level one because now they’re within the extent again. So what you want to do is, when you're making these types of adjustments, make sure that those are not being adjusted by the 3D extent, but you're adjusting them by the 2D extent. And to make that happen, here’s a pretty simple trick: I take my crop region, which you’re seeing here, and I’ll move it so that it’s above the grid lines.

By doing that, all of these extents down on the bottom are synced together. They’re all set to 2D. If I were to move this line now by clicking and dragging, you can see that the grids have all moved above my elevation view.

But when I click on them, you can see that the 3D extent is still below level one. And when I go to my level one floor plan view, all my grids are still showing.

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And this is something that I see happen quite a bit because people will be going through a model and making changes without fully thinking through how it might impact other views.

So it's one of those things where you have to shift how you're working because we’re now working in a three-dimensional environment, and we’re not working on isolated views that won’t impact other views we've already created.