Seeking ways to distinguish the rendering of hidden objects and features

Joe Dunfee

 I have an assembly with several solids.  Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any rendering style that will show hidden lines as hidden lines.  I have used the X-Ray stile, but that style shows visible lines with the same lineweight and linetype as visible lines. 

On a few instances where the X-ray view was just not usable because of multiple objects, I have resorted to the following approach.  I would 1st set the view to 2D wireframe. Then, in paperspace I would track over the hidden object or feature, and make those lines the appropriate line style.  Finally, I set the view to be hidden. Of course, this is a dangerous practice, since you have to hunt down anywhere you did this any time the object gets edited.

Is there any way to do this, besides resorting to old-fashioned 2D drafting?

-Joe

Hans De Backer

Sounds like what you are looking for is the Edge Settings of Visual Style 'Hidden':
in the Drawing Explorer, select Visual Style 'Hidden' and set 'Show' to 'Yes' for Occluded Edges.
A range of dashed line types are available for display (these are not  'dwg' line types but rather line types generated directly by the graphics adapter)

As an alternative you may want to give a try to the Viewbase command to generate 'Drawing Views' from your model.
The content of these hiddenline views is regenerated automatically after modifications were applied to the model.

While it is possible to draw additional stuff on top of these views, it is not possible to directly manipulate their content, which is in fact controlled by the ViewUpdate functionality. The occluded lines are placed on dedicated layers, so the visibility, color and linetype of the lines can be controlled through the layer settings.

Hope this helps,
Hans

Joe Dunfee

Thank you very much, Mr. De Backer. I have been hunting for settings like this for a long time.

However, I am not understanding all of the settings available. to me.  When I search for "Visual Styles" in the help menu, the appropriate pages do not explain very much of it.  For example, in the Xray style, I see the "number of lines", but have no idea what that refers to.  When I set "Occluded Edges" to Show, and set the line type to Dashed, the lines don't look any different than if they are set to Solid.  Perhaps that is a function of my video card driver?

You message did, however, lead me to a solution.  By turning on the silhouette edges, it helped a lot.

Any where I can look to find more details about the settings?

-Joe

Joe Dunfee

 Another note.  I was quite concerned about drawing on top of a viewport.  This was because I discovered that with overlapping viewports, one will cover up the one below.  This is different from the way AutoCAD behaved years ago, though I don't know how it behaves nowadays.  

I used to do things like have a view with hidden lines removed, and then create an overlapping viewport with the layers set to only show one object in the assembly, perhaps with its linetype set to Hidden. This way I could show one object inside of an assembly, that would normally not be shown, or would be obscured by a zillion other hidden lines.

Do you know if an object drawn in paper space always shows up, or can it be obscured by a viewport sometimes?

-Joe

Jason Bourhill

Hi Joe,

You might like to take a look at SHADEPLOT settings for your viewport. Default is to plot "As displayed", but you can set to other visual styles for printing such as "Legacy Hidden". This plots using your line weight settings.

See that this is query is similar to an earlier post.
https://forum.bricsys.com/discussion/24081

Paper space objects should show up. In print options you can check "Print paperspace last", should fix this issue.

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts 

tbPropertiesShadePlot.png

Hans De Backer

The Xray visual style has 2 distinguishing properties: all faces are transparent and all edges are visible.
If any edge were occluded, it would use the settings defined for occluded edges, but there are none, they're all visible...
Admittedly it is a bit silly that also for Xray visual style the properties of occluded edges can be set, but at least I hope I could clarify what is confusing.

By the way, have you ever tried BricsCAD Mechanical's assembly modeling?
While it enforces a more strict organization of components which together form an assembly, in return it offers some features that you probably would like, such as
the possibility to assign a different visual style per component: it can be set in the BmBrowser from the right-click menu that pops up for components.
It also allows hide/display per component...

Joe Dunfee

 I was unaware of the visual style options for Mechanical.  I had been frustrated by other issues in Mechanical, that I was never motivated to learn all its features. But, I will consider the visual styles they have something I may investigate in the future.

Thank you very much for your input. You rescued me from a lot of frustration over this issue.

-Joe