Enhancing Clarity: Graphic Overrides for Existing and Demolished Elements

Now we're going to take a look at the graphic overrides and see if we can come up with a combination to clearly highlight the existing-to-remain elements and clearly highlight the existing-to-be-demolished elements. To do that we're going to go to our Manage tab, Phases, and we're going to go to Graphic Overrides. And so the ones we're going to focus on here are going to be the Existing and the Demolished.

So what I'll do is I'll take a look at what we have set for the Existing cut lines because those are the ones that are really going to have an impact on the plan because that's what we're seeing in a floor plan view or a section view. We're seeing the wall actually being cut. So I'm going to take a look at this one and it looks like it's set to 127, which is a good gray color, and the line weight is set to three, which is fine.

One thing I do want to change, though, is the pattern is shown as Hidden and I'd rather show a pattern here that's a solid pattern with that same color, the 127, and so the default is 128, which I think Autodesk just wants us to type more, but we'll change that to 127 so they match because if they're off just a little bit you'll kind of see an outline there. We'll change that and let's see what that looks like. And so now we can really see the existing-to-remain elements. It gave us a lot of clarity there, and the one complaint I always have about the way demo plans look straight out of Revit is that the demo lines are never really heavy enough, and so we can change that really easily.

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If we go to Phases again, Graphic Overrides, we can see that the Demolished cut lines are set to three, and then we can maybe go to four. I'll hit OK and apply and let's see what that does, and then maybe we go to five. Let's take a look at it.

These are things, once you've established what you want them to look like, you don't have to keep going back and changing, obviously, because you can set up a template to keep this consistent. Now that we've got the graphic overrides set up we can look at how our second-floor demolition plan and our roof demolition plan are showing the fact that those are being demolished. So you can't really tell because it's two lines on top of each other, but there is a dashed line here and here, so what I do is I cheat a little bit and that's okay because sometimes we have to force the software to do something we want it to. And what I'll do is I will override the graphics of this one, so I'll right-click on it—and I'm on the Level Two plan here, but it's the same for the roof—but I'll override the graphics in view and I'm going to say By Element because I just want to override this one element, and I'll turn on a surface pattern. And I like to use one of these diagonal crosshatch ones here and we can set it to the black color. It's going to be fine. We'll just hit apply and you can see it just gives us a crosshatch over that location, and then we'll create a legend that clearly communicates that that's floor to be demolished.

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So I'll do the same thing on the roof, right-click on it, Override Graphics in View by Element, and then I'll go ahead and set that surface pattern to diagonal crosshatch again and hit OK. And so what I've been doing is I'm just doing all the work on the sheets now, but you could easily have been doing that from your demo-level floor plans here. So I just go to the sheet, double-click to activate the view, make the changes, double-click outside to deactivate it. We're a couple steps away and we're almost there. So next thing we're going to do is now that we have our graphics established we can go ahead and create a graphic legend to communicate how we want it to look.