Optimizing Graphic Display Options in Revit for Enhanced Visualization

I'm going to jump back to my title sheet here, and I'll just work from this view so that we can kind of see what they look like together as we go through this. And so the first thing I'll do is I'll jump into this view, and we're going to use this as the basis for our view template. And so what I'll do is I'm going to go to my visibility/graphics overrides, so hitting VV on my keyboard here, and then I'm going to go to imported categories, and I can turn off my X site base import here, and it'll get rid of a lot of the line work.

And so now if you're finding that to kind of remove some of the context, and you're like, I kind of liked it better the other way, then it's good to just look at it in both ways. And we can leave it on for now, but it's something to consider that you can remove that, and it's easy to bring it back if you're not sure about the decision. What we're going to focus on mostly here, though, is our graphic display options, and that's going to be within our visual styles, or it'll be the graphic display options here.

We looked at this when we were working on the elevations, and it's many of the same settings, but we're going to take a look at a couple of the other tricks here. So I'll go ahead and select that, and we can use the silhouettes option here as well. This tends to look pretty cool in 3D views.

And then we want to turn on our shadows. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do one of these at a time, and then we can kind of see what it looks like. So I'm going to go ahead and turn on the wide lines, let me move this over here, and then I'll hit apply.

This one is kind of hard to see from this angle, but you can see it put the wide lines on the outside of the view, and it just kind of helps it pop a little bit. I'll go back into those graphic display options, and then I can go in and take a look at shadows here. The two options we have both have different effects.

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If I just cast shadows and hit apply, what it'll do is cast shadows based on the settings that you have in lighting here. And so the in-session lighting is essentially just going to be a specific angle. So you can say, well, we'll just do sunlight from the top right or sunlight from the top left, and it'll give you different options there.

If you were to change it to still, you could define a location, a specific location, and this used to be much more straightforward than this Google mapping service here. But if I were to pick our headquarters here in San Diego, you can see it automatically chooses the one in Venezuela first, which is interesting, or somewhere in Boston. Or you can simply pick the default city list, since you just witnessed how much trouble I had trying to find the city here.

And there we go—we found San Diego. And so I can pick San Diego, and then I can pick the time of day, which will have a really, really dramatic impact on when and what your sun is going to look like in here. So I could pick an early-morning or high-noon setting here.

Or I can do a late, late-evening shot where it's just going to be a low sun angle, and you won't see much of a difference here. This is the south side of the building according to our sun path diagram here, so the changes are really going to be coming from the opposite side.

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If I wanted it to have a different look, I would set the time to, say, just before noon here to get that sun coming from the east side. You can also use the default settings they have for the solstice or the equinox. Those tend to work pretty well.

Alternatively, if you're just not interested in any of that and you just want to have the shadows on your building, you could simply use some of these default plug-in settings. All of those are going to work just fine for you.