Creating Dynamic 3D Perspective Views in Revit: A Comprehensive Guide

We're going to take a look at another 3D view type, and in this case we're going to look at how to create a Perspective view. This can be done a couple of different ways. I can take the view that we have here and change the Projection Mode from Orthographic to Perspective, and it'll tweak the view so that we're now looking at it in more of a Perspective view.

This gives you a more realistic look at what the building looks like. I can do the same thing with the Section Box, but one thing that I will caution is that this can get a little out of hand and be hard to navigate with. You can see it's already kind of twisting on me a bit here.

We can also turn on or off the Section Box just by unchecking or checking that box again. So that's one way to create a Perspective view. This can come in handy if you need to do a quick view to show somebody the proportions of the building.

It's a very simple way to create that view. If you wanted to create a more Presentation-type view, what I would recommend doing is going back to Level One. Instead of using that default 3D view option from our View tab, we can actually pick the Drop-down arrow.

You'll notice that a few tools have this Drop-down arrow on them, and that just means there are more options that we could use to create that view type or even that element type. In our case, with 3D views, we have Default 3D view, which is what we were just looking at, and we also have camera and walkthrough.

We're going to take a look at camera here. When I create a camera, it'll allow me to place the starting point of the camera, which, in our case, I'm going to pick in this area here. I'll do that by left-clicking to start it.

Then I can pick the end point of it. The key here is to make sure that you cover the entire building with this end point. If I stop at that point, that's essentially going to clip the view at that location.

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I want to make sure I cover the entire building with it. You can see here, if I'm not covering it with the field of view—which are those two lines on the outside—that's not a big deal, because I can change that later with the Crop Region on that 3D view. If I were to do something like that, you can see that I've now got a 3D view, but I missed a whole section of my building.

So I can go ahead and adjust that Crop Region to show my view, and now I've got a pretty cool Two-Point Perspective of the building. Some things I can do to make it look better are turning on the Shadows.

That instantly gave the view a lot more depth. I'll zoom in a little bit more so we can see it a little closer. Then I can also go to a Shaded View, which turns on the color and the texture of the materials that we see here.

You can see the brick patterning there and, obviously, the color of the brick. Another thing I can do that's going to give me a little more texture is click on the Visual Style Dialog at the top; it says Graphic Display options. I can go in here and adjust some of these items.

One of the things that I like to do is turn on what's called Ambient Occlusion. That gives you a little softer light; it creates gradients on walls where you have shadows.

You can see here this went from a harder shadow to more of a gradient. I could also go into the Lighting section and tweak the sun brightness, the ambient level, and the shadows. If I were to take Shadows down to, say, 15 and hit Apply, you can see the shadows become a little less pronounced.

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I could even increase the sun to brighten up the model a bit, and I can adjust the lighting to be from a different angle. This one seems to be fine here, but just for our demonstration purposes, I can go to Lighting where it says In-session Lighting. These are the default options, but if I were to choose Sunlight from top left, you can see it changes the sun angle, or I can go back to Sunlight from top right.

That changes it back to essentially what we had before. We can also go in here and set it to be a Still Shot, which means I can pick a specific location and a specific time and date of the year. If I choose the Summer Solstice and leave it at noon in Boston, I'm obviously going to get very different lighting than what we had with just a generic Sunlight from the top left.

If you want to go back to the generic one and you're not too worried about it, you can definitely do that. As I mentioned earlier with the Sun Path diagram, we're able to locate our building on Earth at any time to see how the sun is going to react to our different design elements. Another thing we can do, which will help create some depth, is use a Silhouette, which will give us a wide line around the building.

You can see that gave me a bold line. That's definitely a preference thing—add it if you like. We can also go in here and experiment with adding Sketchy Lines to it.