Documentation

Orthographic Views & Section Drawings

Snap the 3D camera to standard top, front, side, or back orthographic views, and generate scaled IFC-direct section drawings with line-weight hierarchy and material hatching.

Orthographic Views & Section Drawings

Orthographic views snap the camera to a standard axis-aligned position, looking straight down for a plan view, straight forward for a building cross-section, or sideways for an elevation. The perspective camera is preserved; the view simply animates to the new angle. This is the fastest way to read a floor plan when the corresponding PDF isn't open, and the foundation for generating scaled section drawings.

The six preset views

Key / Control	Action
Top View	Look straight down, plan view
Bottom View	Look straight up, reflected-ceiling-plan angle
Front View	Look at the building from the front, elevation
Back View	Look at the building from the back, back elevation
Left View	Look from the left side, side elevation
Right View	Look from the right side, opposite side elevation

Open from View → Top View (and equivalents) or from the orthographic view picker in the 3D viewer's top overlay. Every snap is a 600 ms smooth animation so you don't lose spatial orientation.

Tip: Top View paired with a Section Box on the Z axis is the fastest way to look down through a single floor, combine the two when the PDF for that floor isn't loaded yet.

Generating a scaled section drawing from the view

Once you have the camera at the angle you want, use File → Export Section as PDF to generate a scaled orthographic drawing. Pick the cut depth (how far behind the camera plane to draw), the sheet scale (1:50, 1:100, 1:200, custom), and the line-weight convention (cut/visible/hidden), then export to PDF. The output is a calibrated drawing you can mark up immediately with the full LocusBIM toolset, no separate calibration step required.

Line weights matter

The biggest visual difference between a section drawing that looks like a real drawing and one that looks like wireframe junk is line-weight hierarchy:

Key / Control	Action
Cut edges (at the cut plane)	0.5 mm solid, thickest
Visible edges (in front of cut)	0.25 mm solid
Hidden edges (behind cut, within depth)	0.13 mm dashed
Centrelines (cylindrical elements)	0.13 mm chain-dashed

LocusBIM's defaults follow ISO 128-50 / ANSI Y14.2. You can override per category, for example, push all mechanical-discipline edges to a heavier weight if the section is intended for MEP coordination.

IFC-direct material hatching

Cut elements get a hatch fill identifying their material. LocusBIM reads the IFC material classification (IfcMaterial, IfcMaterialLayerSet) and applies hatch patterns from the bundled library, concrete diagonal, steel solid black, masonry hatched, insulation wavy. If the IFC lacks material data (common on models exported from non-Revit authoring tools), the fill defaults to neutral grey so the cut is visible without making false claims about material.

Tip: For a deeper walkthrough of when IFC-direct section generation is the right workflow (vs going through Revit), see the blog post How to generate 2D orthographic sections directly from 3D IFC models.