Draw More Efficiently When You Understand the CABINET VISION Hierarchy [VIDEO]

G’day, it’s Clayton from Planit Canada. Today, let’s talk about a really important aspect of drawing up our projects in Cabinet Vision: the Cabinet Vision Hierarchy. Understanding this fundamental of how the program works will really help you because every single design choice, every single modification follows this hierarchy. This is the basic structure of the program. And once you have wrapped your head around the structure, you will be able to draw very complex projects so efficiently. Just to the left of the wall is an image depicting this hierarchy. Each box represents a level where we can make adjustments in Cabinet Vision. The job level box represents the job properties up to the top here. These are the properties that appear when we create every new job in Cabinet Vision. The room level box represents the room level properties. The assembly level represents the properties of a cabinet or an assembly on its own.

So when we double-click on an assembly, these are the cabinet or assembly properties. The part level and the operation level. The part level represents an individual part in the assembly and the operation represents an individual operation on the part. So why is this so important for you to know? Well, changes made in one job will not affect any other job. Changes made in one room will have no effect on any other room. Changes made to one assembly will have no effect on another assembly. Changes made to one part will have no effect on another part. And finally, changes made to one operation will have no effect on any other operation. But what does this mean practically? Well, let me paint the scene: You’ve drawn up the next project according to specs, and then you have a meeting with the client and they decide that none of the colors specified really work for them anymore. And we need to change the materials in our job to correspond.

Probably so that you can give them a more up-to-date price or see how their new choices will interact, it’s important we can change our job so that they can see it. If you had to go through and change each and every single cabinet in your project to be the right color, it would take ages, which is why understanding this hierarchy will allow us to make those changes very quickly, very efficiently. Here I have a basic job for us to change. This is the brief: The customer would like all of the door faces in my kitchen should be changed to white. Well, I don’t want to change the job settings because that will change all of the door faces in my job to be white. So I’m going to change the door faces on the room level. Making the change here will now introduce an override or exception to the program but only on that room level.

So if we click on the room…and cabinet…doors. We change this to be white now. All of the door faces in my kitchen have changed. But my laundry and my vanity, which are following still the job level, haven’t changed with it. So I can introduce a different colour on this job level for them. If I wanted to change now the uppers to be a different colour as opposed to my bases, that’s very simple. In their room properties, I would go to my cabinet, my door settings…and here I could introduce a different colour for my uppers. Like so. We could give them the maple. And that will change the uppers in my room. But in this kitchen I have base cabinets and island base cabinets. And in the island base cabinets, I would like them to be maple too, for example.

Well now I can go into the assembly level and change just that cabinet so that it ignores both the room and job level. So if we go to our island, I can double-click on my cabinet, go to the section, go to my assembly properties, find the doors, and here I can change this so that he matches the maple of the uppers. Now when I click on return you’ll see that this cabinet has a new introduced override or exception that takes priority or precedence over even the job or room level. Now if I changed the room again…let’s say the customer says “That’s fantastic but in actual fact, I would like to see a different woodgrain colour…birch on these…on all of these door faces too. I could go into the room properties and I could go to my cabinet and my doors and change all of the doors to be birch. But you’ll notice that there is an exception on cabinet 13 and that’s the one that we’ve changed on the assembly level.

So while they’ve changed there, you’ll see that my base cabinet here is still following the maple door material that I’ve chosen because it’s following the greater exception that I’ve introduced. As a designer or engineer, there is a danger for us if we go through a job and we change all of our cabinets individually to have a different handle, a different door material, a different schedule, whatever the change may be, if we make that on the assembly level, well, it can cause a lot of frustrations for us, a lot more work than there needs to be. If the customer would like us to change all of the cabinets in that room. For example, I provide a kitchen “what not to do” example. And you’ll see in this room that I have manually changed all of the cabinets on this face myself, on the assembly level. That means if I make a change to the job or room level, I will not be able to change all of these cabinets at the same time, at the moment, as it is. So if I click on my room…go to my cabinet, go to my doors, and if I change them to be cherry, for example, all of these overrides, all of these exceptions are going to take precedence.

So even though I’ve changed the door colour on my room level, because I’ve changed all of these individually at the assembly level, they’re not following the room level properties anymore. If you have done that, it’s not that difficult to undo. If it’s a very simple cabinet, I could probably just delete this cabinet and bring in another cabinet from the object catalogue, which will default to the room level settings. Or I could double-click on my cabinet, go into the modifications button, the overrides, and it’s here where I could remove all of the overrides for this cabinet. Now this cabinet is following the room properties. It’s not following the assembly level anymore. You can see also on the…cabinet base here, the three-drawer system. If I double-click on this three-drawer system, I could manually change now just a single face to be a different material too. So I could change him to be…let’s go slab, and we’ll change him to be birch as well. Now if I go to my 3D and my render, you can see that I have changed one of these three faces. If I went into my cabinet properties and changed the door material now, the two that are following the cabinet properties will change but the one that I’ve introduced that exception to will ignore it. So let’s go cherry. So now we can see how these different levels are interacting with each other. The part level takes greater priority than the cabinet level. The cabinet level takes greater priority than the room level. And the room level takes greater priority than the job level.

So really, what does that mean for you as the designer before you begin drawing a project, maybe ask yourself some questions like, “What job level preferences are going to account for the majority of your cabinet standards?” If 90% of the cabinets in your room are using this handle, choose this handle when you create a new job. Then you can change the 10% yourself, later on, on a more specific level like the room or assembly. If my vanity is going to use a different material schedule than the rest of my job, I’ll only worry about changing the room properties of the vanity when I create that room. If my kitchen island is going to have a different door style to the majority of the base cabinets in my kitchen room, I’ll only change the island cabinets on the assembly level because the room properties account for the rest. Sometimes we might even begin a job but not have all of the materials or hardware specified yet. In that case, we can begin drawing with our default standards and only make adjustments to the job properties. Then, when the customer specifies what goes where later on in the job process, then we can begin to modify our design on the room and assembly level where necessary. Doing so will ensure that no matter what the customer throws at us, we maximize how efficiently we can produce, design, and modify our jobs.

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