Understanding Visibility Graphic Settings: Winning the Game of Hide and Seek with Revit

TADEH HAKOPIAN: Hello and welcome. This is "Understanding Visibility Graphic Settings-- Winning the Game of Hide and Seek with Revit." Let's get started.

Today we'll learn about Revit graphic overrides, how to uncover common visibility settings for your views, create view templates to recover your settings, understand how hardware and graphics card affects the model performance, and develop a unique project plan to help you fix graphic problems.

This is a little bit about me, the presenter, Tadeh Hakopian. I have over 12 years experience in the world of design technology, BIM, VDC, and quite a bit of experience trying to untangle visibly graphic problems. So I've been down a lot of winding paths when it comes to visibility graphics.

So before we get into the meat of the presentation, I want to define the problem of what we're trying to deal with so we're not just talking about the open-ended issue of visibility graphics. And I'll start with a personal example.

I worked on a large project years ago with multiple buildings, like this example you see here, over 1,000,000 square feet. And this was 25 architects and designers, worked in 12 models. And it was all the way from schematic-- well, really actually concept to schematic to development to construction documents, with minimal cleanup in the early stages.

So what could go wrong in this kind of scenario? Everything went wrong. Everything. I personally spent hours sorting through many visibility problems, amongst other issues. That applied to the whole team. That applied to our productivity and work. And I've calculated about half my time was spent dealing with visibility problems with one or another for months on end.

And this is architecture, but it applies to just about any discipline because I ran into similar issues in many other disciplines. So this is an issue just trying to get work done in construction documents done that affected our overall productivity. And it was an actual impact in visibility.

So in order to find a better way forward and avoid repeating this, we have to find a clear path to the solution. For most of us, it's usually a trial and error process that may not lead us any closer to solving the problem. But when you're not sure how to solve a problem, you don't know what the path forward is, it's best to zoom out and have a broad understanding of what you're dealing with before you continue.

And that's where I want to start with first principles. Revit is a 3D environment. Everything you see with plans is generated from 3D models. Even though most of us are trying to get a two-dimensional output, those two-dimensional outputs don't exist on their own. It's a 3D-generated environment. If your 3D model is incorrect and your settings for that 3D model are incorrect, your 2D model is incorrect. So we'll keep that in mind as we go through this presentation. It's all about three dimensional settings, first and foremost.

And Revit also is a hierarchical system and is not all just lines. It is based on a family of different elements. And it starts with the Revit elements environment, and it goes into different categories from model elements, data elements, and view-specific elements, as you can see here in this graphic.

So pay attention to what kind of content you're working with because there is a lot of content in there. And depending on what you're using and how it's organized, it will affect the way you work. It's not all one thing. It's a variety of things, and they all behave differently. And we will get into more detail about that in the presentation as well.

So remember that we're talking a couple specific things in this presentation. Project settings, which is several categories, and project settings will make modifications to the entire model, not just any one part of it. There's view settings. That's one category of things, which is how view is presenting the 3D content in any other format, whether it's 3D or 2D section plan, you name it. And there's view-specific elements, which is something like visibility graphics, one category, which affects the superficial graphics you're seeing in a given view and a given setting in the view.

With that in mind, let's talk about view settings. Views in Revit of any kind will affect the graphic visibility of your project. And this includes plan views, elevation views, 3D views, schedules, legends, drafting views, you name it. And views can be applied to sheets. And any view can be controlled by templates. So let's understand this better.

Like I mentioned before, 3D elements explain the structure of Revit. The 3D content you have is placed on different levels. And those levels, then, will be host for your floor plans. And then the floor plans will either be used for sections or elevations, which could then also be used for callouts. And all of this gets packaged into sheets. So remember, no matter what you're drawing, no matter how two-dimensional it looks like, it always goes back to a 3D element with a datum element to it.

So the 3D model becomes a building model with hosts in the form of levels and reference planes. So we got the levels themselves from negative however many feet or meters to the level 0 and then upwards. Everything in Revit needs to be hosted into a level. And then the grids also help you manage the two-dimensional space.

Then we have the reference planes. Don't forget these, as they can come in to either help you or become a problem-- usually a problem if you forget about them later. And you can't see views without these hosts.

So real quick, let's go over to a review of how views work in 3D. This might be elementary to many people, but it's important to review. Otherwise, you're going to miss the rest of this presentation's more specific content.

Your model in 3D and the project is a 3D as part of a database. So all the information in the project is connected through the three-dimensional information. In this example, we have a 3D building with rooms on the left, as it is as you modeled it. And you might have an awkward transition from 3D to 2D because you're having a slice in the model, and we have many different slices here.

So we see the whole entire model on the left, starting from upper left corner. Clockwise, we have floor plan. Join the slice at about four feet, and everything there, walls and windows and doors. Then right, we have the ceiling plan, where we only see doors and a window, but nothing else. So that changes the way you see the view.

Continuing, we then have a section that we reference from the floor plan that shows the view in the other way. And then finally the elevation on the outside. Same exact 3D content, four different views. That's something people need to remember because depending on what you're trying to show based on the 3D view, you'll get very different results from the same thing.

So floor plans-- floor plans are a representation of the 3D model at a given plane of reference, whether it's 10 feet above a level 0 or any other reference. All controls for floors start from the 3D environment. And there's many different settings for that-- view range, depth clip, crop, scope box, so on.

View range is our friend here. It could be a enemy. It could be our friend that people run into all the time. Starts from the cut plane, which could be manually changed per range, and hosted to the level of the view. If you're a floor plan, you are looking down from the cut plane. As you can see on the example on the left, if you're a ceiling fan, you're looking up.

And depending on your settings, you could be seeing more or less things. And this is a problem for many people where the cut plane in the bottom or the cut plane at the top are not gelling. And you have to recall, what is the default for the view range? What is my template? This leads to a lot of problems, but do have a reference in mind.

And part of view range and other view settings is depth clip, like view range but hosted from a given work plane, usually the level. Each setting determines how much beyond that plane you can see. If you have no clip, then everything beyond that line can be seen. If you clip without line, then it stops depth at the plane but has no outline, just surfaces.

Clip the line stops at the depth at the plane and keeps the outline. So depending on how much of an object you want to see within a depth, it will change the way you perceive it. It seems very complicated, but that's all it is with these depth planes. It's a separate setting from the view range, so be mindful that they work in tandem.

And then views and elevation-- elevation is views from the outside of the model, orthogonal to the surface. In this case, view depth and clipping are important parameters of control. In this example, we have a elevation depth clip. Depth clip in elevation functions the same as in plan. There's no real difference. No line, line with nothing showing beyond the line, and everything in the view. As you can see here, clip without line atop, it just shows a blank outline, no lines. Clip with line, it cuts it, and you can see the outline. And no clip just shows the entire extent of the environment. So be mindful of these settings as you work.

Then we have views sections. These are also orthogonal to a given plane within the model, but they're based on a reference within 2D space that needs to exist before you work. Clipping options are prominent in effect with sections. You see on the right here, the depth of the plane, of the section plane, goes all the way to the drag box you see on the left here. That can either prevent you from seeing windows or other details, if you mind to drag those out.

And then views and elevation have a similar effect if you're talking about protruding elements. Be mindful of where you cut. Otherwise, you can't see certain detail, like on the right here. You can cut off or minimize certain extruding elements on the facade if you're not mindful. The clip function is the same as in plan or elevation. And view depth will affect the way you see it. So sometimes your visibility issues are as simple as your view range, depth clip, or other issues generated from your taking and granted the 3D environment as representing two dimensions.

Now with that out of the way, let's talk about project settings that affect globally. Think about your project settings as a system control cockpit. Some settings have impact on entire projects, others just on a view. Depends on the control you're using. So review the controls here.

So the global controls and the local controls are how you define them. Global is something that affects your entire project. Local, just something unique to a view or a setting. So let's look at these lists, and we'll go into more detail each. So you have work sets, design options, coordinates, project units and object styles for your global settings that will affect all of your views. And local would be your scale, your hiding elements in views, and level of detail.

So I want to start with coordinates. Why? Well, your model-- again, 3D. I can't emphasize that enough, it's so deep. Your model is relative to the Revit origin. So whatever the Revit origin happens to be, your model will float around that. It always exists in every project as an origin.

And in this example here, we see the origin on the left, far away from the model on the right. And on the two-dimensional view, we see a model and an origin point very far apart. The origin's upper left corner, and the model contents, lower right. So of course, if the model content gets linked in as a background, as we see in the right, we can't find it because it's about a mile away, over a kilometer away in this example.

So if you're not paying attention to how you link things in or place things in the model, you cannot see them, no matter how well you try it, no matter how good your depth clipping is. It's not within the bounds of the model environment. So don't take the model origin for granted or the linking of content into your model for granted. Otherwise, you'll run into these problems.

Next is object styles. These are default graphics in every Revit project based on the Revit template. We'll have more of this in the next section, but be mindful if something looks default kind of awkward in a graphic, it might be something to do with the object style. Or if it's not looking at the object style, you might have overridden it.

Next, worksets. And I want to get this out of the way first and foremost. Work sets are not visibility controls whatsoever. They were never meant to be visibility controls. They are meant to control memory load in your model. This comes from the early days of Revit, when we had limited computer resources but a lot of model content. So you would turn on and off certain sections of the project to help with that limited memory content.

That's less of a problem now with modern computers, but people still use workflow control as a type of visibility graphic control. I'm telling you, do not do that. There are problems for using worksets as your visibility control. So just be mindful that there are user worksets and system worksets. The system worksets are beyond your control. They're just baked into Revit.

The user worksets are the things we call worksets conventionally that are what I'm talking about, the things you can create at will to put elements in, like walls in one workset, floors in another if you so desire. Try to avoid doing that as much as possible and only use it for memory control, like loading links. Otherwise, you're going to have a whole world of problems with workset control.

In this example here, we see worksets being problematic the way I described, where these are all we're looking at here just interior walls, just interior walls in that example right there. But they're all over the place in this rainbow of worksets, which can easily affect the way we see them in plan view.

So if it is one element like interior walls or walls in general and you want them in a workset, then make sure they're not in 10 different worksets. Otherwise, you're going to have problems up and down. So I highly recommend you minimize the worksets just a handful at this point to avoid these kind of scenarios because, again, this is something I dealt with over and over again that could affect the visibility views.

Next are design options. Design options are not visible to controls, either. They are meant to contain versions of design in your model early on to help figure out what your project's supposed to look like, provide optionality to the team, and make sure you can see different situations resolved in your model. That's all it's there for.

Do not use it for visibility control, turning things on off conventionally or conveniently. It sucks at that. It will lock you out. It will freeze the objects. You cannot edit them. It's a modeling feature for developing a design. It is not a visibility control. So once you're done with your early phase of design, set one of these domains, delete the rest, and move on with your life. Do not use these for visibility controls.

Next is the scale, and scale is pretty straightforward. Depending on the scale you use, it will change the way the graphics are laid out. For example, the two floor plans we see here, the one on the left has a large scale, and the other one on the right has a large small scale. And they change the way the text is displayed and the linework, but the actual size of the object is not changed.

So make sure you have a standard scale available. Because you can see at the bottom here, from left to right, we have three different scales on the same object. And depending on the scale, we can have different object thicknesses for the lines as well. So if you're having problems with linework or the readability of your annotations, make sure the scale is within range of something that's logical to your template.

Next is hidden elements. We've all been here. We've all hidden things in Revit. All hidden elements does is conceal an object in a very specific view. It is not global. It's just that view. Reveal hidden elements can show everything hidden in view except closed worksets and hidden filters.

So while that might be convenient to hide certain things in some views, I highly recommend never doing this because you will not know in a given view what's hidden, ever. It's really hard to sort out. Even if you have some third-party tools to help you, other people might not have third-party tools to help them with your file.

So do not use hidden elements for any view. That's going to be a view that's going to show up multiple times in a project, like floor plans, sections, or anything. Only use them for very specific views that are not part of your set or a very unique item or graphic that needs to be adjusted specifically. Otherwise, it will be a mess to sort out.

And then concept, detail level. Detail level-- just changing detail levels baked into our Revit elements that change the way the model appears. You can see from left to right here we have a basic set of doors at low level, coarse content. The center has medium level content, which shows you just enough of the doors to understand the overall development. And on the right, we have fine level of detail, showing you a lot more of the features of the doors, like the mechanics of the handle. So be mindful of sometimes if you can't see something, level of detail comes into play.

Then we finally have project settings, project units. And all this does is change units and tolerances which can affect the appearance of dimension information to the nearest n-th degree, whether it's in decimal or fractions. So sometimes it's the project settings that will control the way you see graphics.

Now with all that education in mind, let's go into this next topic here that will help you guide. Everything before was study material. This is visibility hierarchy. With this handy-dandy material, we'll go into more detail.

And what the visibility hierarchy is is Revit has a lot of designated visibility graphic controls and tools that help you navigate the environment. All these tools are meant to control the visibility properties of a given object in a given view. And unlike other tools, they do not create content, just modify the appearance.

So we saw the depth clipping, the view range, and then the global controls user settings. So those augment the views, but they're not necessarily specific to the view settings. These are.

And here is the pyramid-- or if you prefer, ziggurat-- developed to help guide you with 8-- the lowest setting I have here is 8 at the base here, going all the way up to 1. So the lower on the ranking here, the more consistent it is across views. And each step along the way-- 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1-- will get you to something that overrides the previous content. So 1 will override 2, 2 will override 3, and so forth till you get to eight. So things override each other when it comes to the visibility graphic controls in Revit.

And I'll go into more detail for all of these, but it starts with linework being the most overwritten, meaning linework will overtake anything else you do in a given, view followed by painting, then display options, then override graphics in view, then view filters, then phasing, then visibility graphics, and then object style.

So each one from the highest, from top to bottom, will override the thing below it. Keep that in mind as we go through this exercise. And I also color-coded them. Yellow is project setting, which is the object styles. The purple is view-specific-- so whatever view you're opening, it'll change that view. And then red is element-specific, or part of the element. So it's not the entire view. It's just whatever you're modifying in the element. So this is my handy-dandy guide to understand what overrides what in your view to help you understand what's going on with your view settings.

So object style is the first thing since it's foundational. Every view begins with whatever the object styles are in Revit. So on the left here is the object styles for given graphic settings. And you can also see that you can change them in categories to colors. This is everything in Revit setting default templates, and it's the lowest priority. So anything can modify an object setting in view styles.

There's main categories and subcategories, and it specifies most element default graphic appearances. And if this doesn't work, nothing works. So if you find out your object styles are problematic, you have to fix that first.

And here's an example. I drew here a very basic model that you can see is a 2D and 3D. We'll see these in all the other examples. It's just vanilla. It's whatever the object styles define. No change in element, just whatever the template gives us from object styles. A plan in 2D view, so you can see all the walls are white with black outlines. The window is blue, and the door is gray. That's it. This is just whatever the Revit template generates from object styles as is.

So if I want to modify it, I have to go to do something else, like visibility graphics override. You can control category settings in each view. So if there's a given object you want to change in a view and you want change consistently in the entire view, you do visibility graphics. And that's as simple as going through the VG or VV shortcut key in Revit.

This is my starting point in most graphic changes in Revit because it's an easy-to-access menu option and it's easy to find if there's something that's changing here. This is where I would always start modifying any view in Revit.

And essentially you can go through the categories and turn on or off certain categories, like model annotation content. You can modify their appearance through the settings in the project surface and cut. And it's also based on the hierarchy in Revit. So settings above it can affect these things further.

So I would always recommend if you want to change the template, start with the graphics overrides to avoid complications. But it's going to be-- the next lowest thing in the ranking is graphics override. Many things can then override the graphics overrides, including--

Well, before I go on, here is an example of the graphics overrider work. In this example, we took the object styles, and I said, OK, for all the walls, make them red. This is true in both the plan and 3D. There's no section cut here. So you're seeing effect in the--

Excuse me. There's a section cut here, so we have a red section cut fill and a overall projection surface red. So I only changed the walls categorically to red in both views. That's all I did. The door stayed the same. And the other 2D graphics, 3D graphics stayed the same. So this is an example of how it overrides.

Next on the hierarchy is the phasing override. Phase filter can be used to control model layout in the graphics. The idea is you use different phases for existing, demolished, temporary, and new, as you see on the right there. And you can also set the graphics for that per the element.

And it can be affecting different graphics for lines, patterns, cut patterns, and fills. So you can control them in a fine-tuned way. The phase, however, must be applied to the element first. And that is a specific element, not the view. So you have to do that yourself.

It's usually very easy to get this mixed up with the other overrides because there's not a lot of obvious indication that the phase filter is on. So make sure for any of these views you have a phase filter that you're aware of that they're active in your view.

And in this case, what we did here is that we made certain walls-- the west wall and the east wall-- into different phases. And then we set them to the designated phase to activate the phasing override graphics that we set here so that the partitions in the middle are still red, but the exterior wall now has different graphics to it because we have the phase override.

So because we said to make sure the exterior walls are set to a different phase but the interior wall was not, the interior wall stays red from the visible graphics override, but the exterior walls are now set to a phase filter. And you can see this effect in the graphics. It's overtaking the red walls it just made.

Next is the view filter. This is also located in the visibility graphic override tool as a tab on its own, all the way to the right. It's like a phase filter. They can override graphics as based upon index categories, not selected elements. So you'd have to define a category of wall, door, pipe, whatever it is. And then you can set the selection there through basically a search filter with a parameter value.

It's a useful way to control specific content on a view without editing the elements directly. I prefer to use this whenever I need to control specific elements consistently and not override the general settings of visible graphics. Be mindful of how you create the filters systematically. Otherwise, you'll have too many filters with too many settings. So I highly recommend having the template there. And too many filters can confuse users, so make sure you don't have an overwhelming number of filters, where people don't know what they do.

This example here, again, we're creating a filter called wall. We're setting the wall category in the middle. Then we said the function is our parameter, and the function equals foundation. Set the filter. That's all it is.

In this case, I set the filter to a wall to change them all to blue. So if the wall type doesn't match the filter type, then it will not be changed. In this case, you can see that the window is still dashed per the phase filter on the window. And the linework around the walls, you can kind of tell, is still set to the phase filter for the prior override. But then it didn't affect the red wall in the middle since that's a different type of wall. And we're specifically targeting the walls on the outside. So phase filter overrides whatever you did-- or excuse me, view filter overrides whatever you did for phase filter.

Next is override graphics in view. I think we've all done this before. Can be set to elements or categories. Just right-click on any object. So in this case, you can't just control categorically. You have to click, right-click, go to override graphics in view by element or by category in the view. And then from there, you can change settings there.

This is a good choice if you want to modify it for non-sheet views so you don't confuse other users with these edits. I recommend this for working views, not your sheet views for that reason. Otherwise, if somebody else needs to pop in and look at your view and edit it, how would they know you did this? Again, you cannot track it like you did with the visibility graphics overrides, phases, filters, or view filters. So do this sparingly if you really have to, but don't do this consistently. Otherwise, you're going to make it hard for somebody else to edit.

And here's an example where I picked the two walls on the outside and the interior partition wall, and I set the override graphics to those specific elements to green. So the blue from the view filter was left alone because I didn't select it, but it did override everything else I wanted to do in the view.

And remember, I can't tell I did this. I have no idea why. If you didn't tell me the history of this, I would have no idea why the view filter works on blue here, based on the settings of the model. But then it's green here. I would have no idea what had happened. So that's what I'm saying. Use it sparingly.

Next, graphic display options. This is also a view modifier. It's a little tiny box in the lower left corner next to the level of detail. It's a preset for different surface and renderings available and stacked in a hierarchy. And you can ignore a lot of the other visibility controls if you want it to take precedence. It's more obvious in 3D effect than 2D effect.

So you can see here, we go down to the option at the bottom of your tool set, graphic display options, and you can see model display showing hidden line, shadows, and depth cueing, everything that we talked about as well. So it's easy to modify, but there's a lot of fine-tuning here you wouldn't get in necessarily other versions-- of other settings in Revit.

So in this example here, we set it so it has realistic effects. But it only seems to work on the right side, the 3D. That's because it renders 3D. On the left side, that one effect is that it removed the edges of the walls and its rendering. So it's applying in both the 2D view here and the 3D view, but it's doing it differently. The 3D view, you can see it reset all different colors I used because it wants to do realistic settings based on the material properties of the elements, not whatever I set in those prior edits.

Whereas in the 2D view, the colors are maintained because the sections don't necessarily have material properties assigned to them. So it's retaining whatever the colors are from the settings prior. But because it's trying to render, the lines are reduced.

And talk about material properties, that's the next highest thing on the hierarchy here. It's a setting in the Modify tab of Revit. You can change surface color material and 3D display. As you see on the right there, we have different settings of red. And it starts from a basic white cube, and you can just apply red to any side of it at will.

Easy to change, but it's also easy to forget you made this change. So again, only use it sparingly, perhaps in views that are only meant for rendering and graphic editing only. Do not use these for your sheets views unless you have a particularly good reason to use them.

If you know it's painted, another tool can remove the paint. But if you don't know it's painting, you going to have a lot of frustration. So again, uses for render views and special textures. Avoid using it for typical work because it's very high on that totem of edits.

Example here, I applied a wood surface on the outside of one wall. And you can see it overridden the rendering settings I put there. So if you really do have to change, you only use it for render and texture work.

And finally, at the very tippy top of the hierarchy is linework. Linework is part of the Modify tab under Line Style, or under Linework you can change the line style. And it's a useful tool if there's some specific lines that aren't behaving properly. It's very specific to the sub parts of the element itself. It will let you override the graphic styles. Highest on the hierarchy of visibility edits, meaning it's on the top of the stack. Pretty much nothing else can edit it unless you get really clever, which I don't recommend unless you're just feeling like it one day.

Usually not too difficult to discern because they do stick out. They seem like they're doing something separate from the other linework, as in this example here. But the column on the walls, the wall, the lines around it are very thick. So that's your cue that something's going on there. That might be linework. But you shouldn't really use it for anything other than detail views or drafting views. Try to avoid using these for your plan views of any kind.

And you can see the linework here. We put a dot-pen on the right side. And now we can see the linework on the pen here. So it gives you a sense of how all the tools work together and how many layers they are.

And to review them all in one view, we have all of them together. So I'll start from the top, and we'll go with that. In the 3D view, the paint is higher than the display options, which is higher than override something in view element or category, which is higher than the view filter setting, which is higher than the phase filter setting, which is higher than the VG, visibility graphics override settings, which overrides anything in object styles. Back to our beautiful white box there at the base.

So that's a helpful way of thinking about how it works is just following the guide. If you're trying to unravel something, start with the basic assumptions and then work your way through, and maybe it's paint.

Same with 2D view since they work a little differently. Linework overrides anything in display options, which overrides in view, which is higher than the view filter, which is higher than phase filter, which is higher than visibly graphics override, which, again, is higher than the object styles. Remember this process and these settings, and you can't go wrong.

So review here. Different overrides can be used together for different graphic effects. The more overrides you use, the more likely you will experience a visibility issue. Keep track of how your overrides are organized and which ones you should be using.

Try to designate them for your project. Otherwise, it will be a complete mess. Again, certain overrides only in plans versus textures for rendering views versus detail views. And that'll help reduce the uncertainty of what you're trying to deal with. If you need to reset, then create a new view of the level and turn off the phase settings.

So if you ever want to unravel this, just create a brand new version of that view and just turn everything off and see what that looks like. And this works. This applies for elevation sections, 3D, and other views. It's all working in the same hierarchy.

So we talked about all these settings for Revit. Let's talk about troubleshooting them. And we're going to navigate a little maze here because it's not obvious. Troubleshooting is not simple. So the methods and means and your preference and your history reviewing the troubleshoot will inform me of how you can create fixes.

And the general settings that look for troubleshooting is it's not obvious, so be aware of what templates you have in effect. Maybe you want to create a copy of the model and edit that freely so you don't worry about affecting the main model. Do you have project parameters, share parameters, 3D views, filters. What's in there? I've worked on many different projects, and they're all a little different with these kind of settings.

So be mindful first and foremost, what is in this project? Study a little bit. Remember what's in there to have a functional beginning. And in this case, I created a path of least resistance format, where this is kind of like everything I would check in Revit on the left here, starting with reviewing the entire 3D models, then looking at templates and view depth and clip, then loaded settings, then the visibility graphic settings.

That pyramid we just saw would be then the middle steps. It wouldn't be the first thing I'd look at because I'm looking at the global. That's what we talked about with depth settings and the controls and the projects. I'll go through all those next. Then I would look for hidden objects, design options, create a schedule, and look through the schedule to help me, edit family, then further diagnosis.

There's a lot of things you can check, so make sure you start with the bigger settings and then get very specific. If you don't know too much about the model or it's been a while since you dropped in, this is my preference for how you would work through there.

So first of all, the first step I recommend to anybody when they're trying to help somebody, they themselves aren't sure what's going on, or they're trying to help somebody who's not sure, make a 3D view. Check that the worksets are loaded. Check if view range is OK in plan, Check crop and annotation. Review your template settings.

And make sure the objects aren't on the wrong host or wrong level. That's why I talked about data-- objects on the wrong level. And check visibility graphics hierarchy. So make sure you do a global check if it's not an obvious problem, and then do a deeper dive.

So a deeper dive is if existing plans may have too many settings which obfuscate the graphics. In that case, pretend we have the visibility graphics pyramid, and I give you the end result, and you're like, what the hell is this?

Go into your view settings and go to, for example, floor plan. And make a fresh copy of a floor plan. Duplicate one of the levels in floor plan. And it will give you the default view in object styles. This is what I do. I don't make a template version. I don't make a copy. I just find a brand new, fresh, never before made floor plan to see what it's supposed to look like.

And that's the result on the right here. And you can see what is correct in the original object styles view compared to what you're trying to control. So you can at least have a baseline. Otherwise, you may not know what's the baseline. I've had many projects where I had no idea what the baseline is.

And sometimes the new view might be preferable. Maybe the view we have that was way too much work done to it is obsolete. Let's get a new view. Copy over the annotations with a simple Control C, Control V, and move on with our lives. This might be the simplest way to control the-- or fix the graphics settings is just start over, copy things over, and move on.

Because I've had problems where I've spent hours trying to unravel an existing view. And I said, you know what, let's just make a brand new one, spend 5, 10 minutes fixing it up, and move on. So I highly recommend just doing the most basic thing and creating a brand new view with template settings.

You can also do a temporary view. If you don't want to build a brand new view, you can go to the bottom of your view, given view, and create temporary view settings so you can bypass a template so you don't have to worry about editing the template that has to be applied. And you can just click on the Enable Temporary View Properties at the bottom and then just go all in and try to adjust as many things as possible. And if you fix it from there, you can create a template from the current view, restore the view, and then have an existing template after that. So consider that option.

Next, if I have to use an existing view and I just want to mess around with it, I don't want to affect the original view. That could be a sheet view. So what I do is I just go to the view settings in the browser. I click on the Duplicate the View so that I can duplicate it, reproduce it, and try to see if I can sort the problems out through duplication. So if you ever have to specifically work on a view and just work through it, just duplicate it and work through the duplication to see if you can just freewheel modify it.

Next, use a filter. If you're specifically looking at an item-- just one item in your element, whether it's 2D or 3D-- and you're having trouble sorting it out, use a filter. In this case, on the right here, every little object there is a bed from a building. This was a housing project for students, so we had hundreds of beds in each building. And we had several that we couldn't isolate because they were stacked on top of each other. And we were having a hard time differentiating these 2D elements in 3D space.

So we just select them all, filter them all. And you need to review them to figure out where they were. And then from there, we can compare the selection. So I filter them, selected all of them, got a count of like 502. And then my schedule is like, well, we only have 500, so where's the extra two? This is an easier way to sort it out than just trying to look through plan views.

Next, use multiple views of the same model to help view object orientation. In this example here, we have a ceiling view and a 3D view. Sometimes what happens in the view range, we can't tell whether ceiling is up and down the elevation. So it's really hard to sort that out through the view range. And I've spent-- I think we've all wasted lots of time trying to sort out where it is on the elevation in a view range.

So my recommendation is just create a 3D view of that same area, like we have on the right. You can see exactly where that 3D element is floating in space. Sometimes if it's too high, the view range doesn't account for it, it disappears. But you don't want it to be too low. Otherwise, it's wrong.

So just use a 3D view or a section view to help you orient it. Don't just stay on one view. Use as many views as you need to help you figure out where that object is in space and adjust it so you don't get stuck in one view all day.

Next is finding elements below elements. Sometimes three lines could be seen in content like floor finishes, even though they're effectively invisible. So I'd recommend using a 3D sections of the models to see lines and moving them above objects.

In this example here, the terrain topography was below a floor, and we couldn't tell in the floor plan because it was so far apart. So on the right here, you can how far apart they are. In that case, you have to have the view range clipped or put a floor beneath it to avoid these kind of problems.