Model Views covering Model Views

Joe Dunfee

I have submitted this issue to support a week or so ago, but they have not been able to address it.  So, perhaps the forum can help.

I need to show pipe routing for a refrigerated warehouse.  My goal is to show the piping on outside of the chamber in a continuous linetype, and the pipe on the inside of the chamber as hidden linetype.  In the past I had done it by creating two overlapping views. The 1st model view has everything and is set to print using Hide. The 2nd viewport overlaps the first, but only has the pipes themselves on. I also set this 2nd viewport override to make the linetype for the pipes hidden.

This approach used to work years ago, But, now I am getting inconsistent results. Sometimes it works fine, but sometimes it seems that my 2nd viewport is obscuring the other viewport.

Another issue is that, for some reason, whI save a PDF and try to view it, it takes a VERY long time to load, and it is an unusually large file size. One clue to what is going on is that as the PDF is opening, you see the 1st viewport show its objects fully, but then as the 2nd viewport starts to display it eventually covers up the 1st viewport.

Attached is both the drawing and a PDF created by it using the PDFCreator printer driver.

Any ideas about what may be triggering the mis-behavior, or perhaps alternative ways to obtain the same results?

David Waight

Joe,

I'm no expert, but I have opened your PDF in a Graphics package (Corel Draw) and your drawing has been turned into PNG bitmaps.

Unless these have been created with transparency there is no way you will see what is underneath, hence you are seeing one view and as the second overlaid image is rendering it obscures the one beneath it.

I presume this is because you created it using PDFCreator.

I'm not familiar with that software, so I don't know why it is doing this, perhaps it doesn't understand 3dimensional information.

I created a PDF from within Bricscad and it remained as vectors.

Again the reason the file size is so large is because of the bitmaps as they create large files than purely vectors.

I know this doesn't help but it may explain some of what is going on.

Regards,

Dave Waight

Joe Dunfee

Thank you for that idea.  

If I try to export a PDF from BricsCAD, I get the error that I must install BricsCAD Communicator 32-bit and have a valid license for it.  However, when I use the Publish command to create the PDF, everything works as I had hoped.

-Joe

Jason Bourhill

Hi Joe,

I believe currently with if you set the viewport to anything other than 2dWireframe, then BricsCAD will render the view as an image on printing. It's not to do with your PDF printer. You can test this for yourself by printing a simple drawing to PDF, first with the viewport set to 2dWireframe, then repeat with it set to Legacy hidden. You should find the file size of the legacy hidden PDF is bigger, and if you can open it in a graphics package like David did, then you'll find that the legacy hidden has been output as an image.

What you have done should work! One of the key features of paper space is the ability to create overlapping view ports, which is what you have done. That's where the system variable TILEMODE gets its meaning from.

EXPORT to PDF should be available to you, I think you may have picked "3D PDF file", which does require a Communicator license. If you got back to EXPORT, and pick "Adobe PDF" instead, it should work, and I found it created the PDF correctly.

Other options would be to use DWG Trueview to print, or change the pipe route viewports to 2dWireframe.

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

Joe Dunfee

 I had hoped that the Legacy Hidden was going to be like they way AutoCAD used to do it, but I see now that I was wrong.  At least I was wrong when I use a PDF printer driver.  That method produced a pixelated output, even for the Legacy Hidden method, and the results were not overlapped as I had hoped it would be.

I was unaware that some of the commands in BricsCAD's menus required an additional purchase.  I see now that I was trying to export the PDF using the method that required the $605 communicator license... definitely out of the question for me to purchase.

I did find the regular export to PDF, and was surprised to find that it worked great.  The legacy hidden output was NOT pixelated, but line art. Furthermore, the viewports overlapped as I had hoped they would. The output was almost instantaneous  so I wonder if it somehow remembered my prior  printout and its rendering of the viewports? Perhaps the real time consumption is not in calculating the hidden lines, but rather from rastering the output?

It have had issues with pixelation for a long time.  It seem there is no escape from it.   When I use the internal PDF export, embedded PDF's of spreadsheets get pixelated. But, if I print to a PDF using BullZip, the embedded PDFs are NOT pixelated and are saved as text in the PDF.  The inverse is true if I use legacy hidden.  Exported PDF's  do not have rasterized modelviews, but printing to a PDF does rasterize the viewports.

Thank you very much for your input. Even if I can't get everything I want, at least now I understand what is going on.

-Joe