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Autodesk Architectural Desktop: Adding a Door Threshold

By Kelcey Lemon
The advantage of using Autodesk Architectural Desktop is that many of its
objects, such as doors, walls, and windows, have multiple ways of displaying
themselves. For example, if you draw a door and a wall in plan view, you can
easily extract an elevation or a section from your designswithout having to
redraw everything and use Layer Manipulation. But did you know that Autodesk
Architectural Desktop doors also have a Threshold Display that you can easily
turn on and off in your Standard Plan View in order to create exterior doors? With
a working understanding of Display Representations, this is possible.
In this example, we have a specific door that we'd like to add a threshold to. The
first step would be to find this door's Threshold Representation and turn it on. To
do this, simply highlight the door and right-click. Now you should see the contextsensitive menu for Doors. Next, choose Entity Display (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Choose Entity Display from the context-sensitive menu.

When the Entity Display Dialog Box opens, click on the Display Props Tab and
scroll down to Threshold Plan* (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Scroll down to Threshold Plan* in the Display Props tab of the Entity Display
dialog box.

When Threshold Plan* has been set current, you can now attach an override to that
specific door by selecting Door as your Property Source and clicking on the
checkbox in the adjacent Attached column. The override has now been set. Now
click on the Edit Display Props Button in the lower right of the dialog box (see
Figure 3).

Figure 3: Click on the Edit Display Props button in the lower right of the Entity Display
dialog box.

Note: Attaching an override to Door Style will turn on the threshold for
every instance of that specific Door Style. This is recommended if you'd
like to create a specific style where the threshold is always visible.
Attaching an override to System Default will turn on the Threshold
Representation for every single door in your design, regardless of style.
Once you have clicked on the Edit Display Props button, you will see two tabs.
The first is the Layer/Color/Linetype tab (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: The Layer/Color/Linetype tab of the Entity Properties dialog box.

This tab allows you to control the visibility of your threshold. Currently, the
visibility for both thresholds is turned off. For this tutorial, we will only turn on
the visibility of Threshold B, the threshold on the exterior of the door. Turn on its
visibility by clicking on the "lightbulb," just as you would do if you were working
with AutoCAD Layers. Now click on the Other tab (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: The Other tab of the Entity Display Properties dialog box.

Note: This tab also allows you to specify the Layer, Color, Linetype,
Lineweight, and Ltscale of your threshold.
On this tab, notice the diagram. "C" and "D" control the respective values for the

Extension and Depth of the exterior door threshold. Type in 2" as the value for
both. Click OK. Now that the exterior threshold for the door has been set, we must
specify that we'd like to have the threshold of the door appear in our drawing's
Plan View. To do this, you must go to the Display Manager.
Go to the Desktop menu and select Display Manager (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Select Display Manager from

the Desktop menu.

Once in the Display Manager, expand the Representations By Object folder. Scroll
down to Door. You should see all of the available Display Representations for
Doors, including Threshold Plan (see Figure 7).

View Larger Image

Figure 7: You should see the available Display
Representations in the Display Manager.

Since we want the Threshold Representation of our door to appear in the Plan
View of the drawing, scroll down to Threshold Plan in the Display
Representations column and click on the adjacent checkbox for Plan. Click OK.
Voila! You've just created an exterior Door with a threshold (see Figure 8).

Figure 8: The finished threshold.

If you move the door or copy it, the threshold remains attached to the door. By
taking advantage of the Style Manager, you can also create your own Door Style
that has a visible threshold and share it with your design team for use on current
and future projects.