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How do *you* handle floorplan graphics?
John Gonzales
Posts: 609
I'm working on a resi project where the home footprint is quite large and irregularly shaped and doesn't fit very well on the 12" or smaller touchpanels. In the case of a very large floorplan and outdoor area, what do you do to make things easy to see and easy to select for your clients?
For that matter I was wondering what cool tricks in general others have for using floorplan graphics in their touchpanel designs (my floorplan graphics always seem so boring).
For this particular application I was just going to make the floorplan small enough to fit on the screen, then have zoomed in pop-ups of that section appear when the client touches that part of the house, but in this case, I need to select zones that may include rooms from opposite ends of the house, and there are so many half levels, and full levels, I'd need about 6 different pages just to handle the different floors/levels of the house.
Have a great weekend everyone
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--John
For that matter I was wondering what cool tricks in general others have for using floorplan graphics in their touchpanel designs (my floorplan graphics always seem so boring).
For this particular application I was just going to make the floorplan small enough to fit on the screen, then have zoomed in pop-ups of that section appear when the client touches that part of the house, but in this case, I need to select zones that may include rooms from opposite ends of the house, and there are so many half levels, and full levels, I'd need about 6 different pages just to handle the different floors/levels of the house.
Have a great weekend everyone
.--John
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I think for this project I might try to do a different view angle on the floorplan. If I change the perspective from a plan view looking down from the top, to a viewpoint from the side but elevated, that should allow me to fit more of the floorplan in and even handle the multiple levels of the house more easily (there are about 9 levels in this house). I may have someone add a little color and make it 3D with the walls like curbs to give it some pizzazz.
To share one cool trick I use, I place simple 2-state buttons on the rooms with the off state transparent and the on state a semi-transparent color. Then I have the security motion sensors light up the rooms where they detect movement by changing the button state for a few moments. It's kind of a wow factor for the client when they can see in an overview where there's movement being detected in the house. You can even see the path that people are taking when you see the rooms lighting up in sequence then turning off in sequence. Maybe not the coolest trick, but I think it looks pretty slick when it's happening.
--John
That said, the last I did, I got an Autocad file from the builder, and played around with visible layers until I had what I wanted. Then I exported it to a JPG, flattened it to grayscale, then colorized what was left so it was blue on white, like an old-school blueprint. After that, it was just a matter of scaling it and cleaning it up a tad. It sounds like a lot more work than it actually was ... I don't think I needed to spend more than 20 minutes or so per floor (that particular project had two buildings of three floors each). Heh, it was far easier than the old Landmark days, outlining the rooms with that crazy room editor .. I spent an entire day doing floor plans with one of those projects.
Thanks.
I use Visio and Photoshop
I use the same algorithm as bano. Here is a screenshot of an HVAC page from a few years ago. I haven't had much call to do this type of thing lately.
Paul
Nice graphic! Great job!