How to Use Cross Sections in CABINET VISION for Clearer Drawings

Cross sections! What are they and why are they useful? That’s what we’re going to be looking at today in this Cabinet Vision video tutorial. My name’s Tayla and let’s jump into it!

What are Cross Sections

So a cross section is basically a vertical slice through your cabinetry or through your room, so that you can see more of the interior details inside of your cabinetry.

Most of us are very familiar with our plan view, which is where we’re sort of looking down on our kitchen and we can see the detail there. And we’re also familiar with our elevation view where we can see the front of all our cabinets. But we also have in Cabinet Vision the ability to look at that vertical cross section.

To do that, we can look over here on the left-hand side at the cross-section button. So if we click on that, at the moment it’s just going to show us that one wall, that we were on the elevation of. And you can see up here in the little dialogue box, we’ve got a red line going through the middle.

We can use our mouse to click and drag that red line across different parts of the wall. So we can move it right to one end, where we’re just looking through one singular cabinet. Right to the other end, we’re looking through everything or where it was in the center.

Window Example

This can be really useful in situations like this where we’ve got a window, and the benchtop is going into the window. You can see if you zoom in here, we can actually see how the benchtop is relating to that window and that it’s sitting just underneath the window frame.
So this can be really helpful to add detail to your plans. To get this view onto your plans, all we have to do is right click and either use the “To Drawing” or “To Live Drawing” functions. And then once the little cross section view is added to the drawings, we can also add some notes if we want to.

Section Direction

So with this little dialogue box too, you might have noticed that there are two different arrows. So it’s saying the red line is sort of like ‘where is the vertical section that we’re taking’ and then the arrow is ‘which direction are we looking in’.

So at the moment we’re taking this section here and we’re looking to the left-hand side, so we can see everything to the left this line. But if we were to flip that over to the right you can see it flips the section view and now, we’re looking the other direction.

So you can play with those two as well as all these different features here. If I move my little self—yep, there we go. So now you can see that if you had cabinets on both the front and back of the wall you could show one or the other or both.

As well as a few different options, you could hide or show different things. If you didn’t want, say, benchtops to be shown in the section you could take them out or add them back in. So you can play with all of those different features to customize your section.

Pantry Example

Another good example of why you might like to use a cross section to add information to your plans would be for a pantry setup like this. From the elevation view we can see quite clearly, we’ve got a few drawers in there, a benchtop and a few shelves.

So it’s probably going to be used for maybe a little bit of a coffee bar inside this tall unit. But what we can’t see is the detail about these shelves, whereas if we use our cross section view now, we can see inside that these upper shelves have actually been set back so that they’re out of the way when somebody is using this tall unit or using this benchtop to make coffee or whatever in the morning.

So this would be a really good, detailed view to add to your drawings to show both the client and the installer that these shorter shelves are really intentional, rather than only having a little note on our elevation saying that these are short shelves.

Cross Sections in Plan View

So that’s how you do the cross sections for each individual wall. You can also use cross section in the plan view as well.

So if I’m in ‘Plan’, if I go ‘Cross Section’ from here, this is going to basically give me a cross-section through the entire room. So you can see as

I’ve moved that red bar, it’s taking me through the whole room.

And because we’re looking towards the top, like the top of the room, towards the top of that dialogue box, we can see halfway through that pantry unit and the front of that whole wall.

If we use this little red double arrow button, that will just change the direction of the section. So now we’re looking through the cabinets on that wall and towards the front of that pantry unit. And again, our green arrows, we can flick back and forth, and we can add or delete different details from these cross sections.

So that is a really brief overview of how cross sections work in Cabinet Vision. If you have any questions about how to use them, about how to add notes to them once they’re on the drawing pages or anything like that, please let us know and we hope you found this helpful. Thank you!

Hey thanks again for watching. And we’re rapt to announce that we’re going to be launching soon an online learning platform that is going to help you learn and master Cabinet Vision at your very own pace. So if you’d like to learn more, or sign up to be a beta tester and receive exclusive early access, please feel free to click on the link in the description below.