Use miscellaneous view features

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In this video, we will cover using section boxes and scope boxes, applying color schemes and creating plan regions.

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Let's begin by looking at section boxes.

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Section boxes are available in 3D views.

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I'll open the 3D mechanical view and then in the Properties palette scroll down to the Extent section and you can see the Section Box parameter.

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I will enable section box and when I do nothing really happens at least that we can see.

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And the reason is because the visibility of section boxes are turned off,

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and this is pretty common in some project templates, especially out of the box templates.

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So I will type VV to open up the Visibility/Graphic Overrides dialog switch to the Annotation categories tab,

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and then scroll down and you can see that section boxes is turned off.

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So I'll turn the visibility for that category on and click. Ok.

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And then you can see the section box.

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When I select it, you can see controls on each edge and those can be used to control that edge.

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And when I move an edge into the model, you can see that it clips the model.

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And so section boxes are a great way to take a look inside your model.

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Once again, section boxes are only available for 3D. views.

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And there is another way that you can control the extents of a section box and that is with the Selection Box tool.

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And let's take a look at that.

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When I hover over this fan coil unit and press tab to select the attached ductwork and then select it on the contextual ribbon.

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In the View panel there is a selection box tool,

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and when I click selection box, it will adjust the extents of the section box so that it surrounds the elements that I had selected,

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and so you can see the other components that may be in that area.

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And so I can see here that I have a clash.

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And so I really like to use the selection box tool, daring coordination.

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So when you're in a 3D view and you use selection box, it will adjust the extents of the section box in that view.

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If you are in a floor plan view and you use the Selection Box tool, it will open the default 3D view and then adjust the section box in that view.

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And so in in this default 3D view, there are architectural components turned on and so you can see the walls and ceiling and so on and so forth.

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And so that's using the Section Box tool and then using the selection--

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sorry, using the Section Box and then using the Selection Box tool to control it.

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Next, we'll take a look at scope boxes

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and so on The View Ribbon In the Create Panel there is a Scope Box tool and so the scope boxes have a few different uses.

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And so I think most people use scope boxes when they have a large building that won't fit on a sheet at the desired scale.

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And so they will use scope boxes to indicate certain areas.

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That's especially in MEP that's used quite a bit.

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They can also be used to control datum elements and we'll take a look at, We'll take a look at both of those.

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So if I select if I click Scope Box to activate the tool, I can then simply click two points to place the opposite corners of a rectangle.

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And I have created a scope box.

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I'll name This one, Area A and then we'll create another one and we'll call it Area B just for the sake of example here,

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and we'll create another one and we'll call it Area C.

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Now if I go to a 3D. View and I disable Section Box, let it turn it off, I can now see those scope boxes.

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And so when I select it and orbit around, you can see controls on each edge similar to a section box.

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And so you may be thinking, well what's the difference. Right.

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Well first off, they are not clipping any parts of the model and you can see them and in this view, they really don't appear to be doing anything.

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But there are several things they can do.

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And so if I go back to the Floor Plan view, I'm going to duplicate this view.

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I'll duplicate it as a dependent.

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And now I have a Dependent View and I'm going to rename it and for sick of example I'll just rename it area A,

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and if I scroll down in the Properties palette here, you can see there's a scope box parameter and I can assign area A to this view.

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And what it's going to do is it's then that scope box is then going to control the crop region.

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And so as you can see, that's a quick way to create views for smaller areas that are still associated to the larger floor plan view.

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And so I can now place this view on a sheet and it'll fit at the desired scale.

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The other thing you can do is control datum elements.

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And so if I select a level and this could be used for grids or reference planes as well.

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You can see there's a scope box parameter and once again I can associate it to one of the scope boxes.

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And so in this case, I have scope boxes for areas.

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But if you wanted to control levels and grids, you may want to create an overall scope box that you can use to control your datum elements.

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The last thing on scope boxes here. When I select it, you can see that there's a Views Visible parameter.

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And when I click Edit, you can see that I can then control where the scope boxes will be visible,

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and not only that, but associated datums to the scope boxes.

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And so if you want to control those for different 3D views or elevation views or plan views,

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you can do that here in the scope box Views Visible dialog.

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All right. I'll close the dialog and then switch back to the Floor Plan view and we'll take a look at color schemes now.

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On the Analyze ribbon. In the Color Fill panel, you can see several Color Fill Legend options.

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The first one just being Color Fill Legend.

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And so when I click that, I can then place a legend in the view,

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and then a dialog will open up where I can choose what I want to apply it to And then the actual color scheme.

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I'm going to click Cancel for now and I will open up the ground floor HVAC Zones view which has a color scheme applied for zones.

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And when I scroll down, I can see there's a color scheme parameter for the view.

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And when I open up the Edit Color Scheme dialog, you can take a look at what the scheme is doing.

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And so in this case, we have it applied to HVAC zones and the color is simply based on the name.

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But there are several things you can do.

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If you wanted to apply a color scheme based off of area or even based off of load or airflow, you could do that as well.

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Okay. Last view feature we will cover is Plan Regions.

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If you have a certain portion of the building model that needs to have a different view range, then you can use a Plan Region.

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And if you switch to the View ribbon and then in the Create Panel, if you expand Plan Views and then select Plan Region,

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you can use the tools in the draw gallery to sketch your plan region.

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For example, in this lobby we may want to have a little bit higher view range, and I'll finish it,

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and then when I have it selected, there's a View Range parameter in the Properties palette,

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and then I can adjust the view range for that plan region, separate from the plan region of the floor plan view.