Evaluating v20 Mechanical- Gray layer 0 and getting vectors with colors on Viewbase generated views
I am evaluating if I want to upgrade from V14 Platinum, to V20 Mechanical. I currently have a few questions.
Question #1;
I notice that anything on layer 0 that is set as color Bylayer, display as a gray. And print preview also shows those objects as gray. I tried searching the help (via F1, which takes you to the online help file web page) I tried "Layer 0 Gray", and even tried both the U.S. and British spellings of gray,grey, but without success. It seems the search is always an "OR" not an "AND" Boolean. Anyway, is there a way to get layer 0 to be black?
Question #2;
The views created by VIEWBASE are vector, so when they are exported to a PDF, the remain vector art. But, it is done so that all the outlines lines in an assembly go to the same layer, and all the hidden lines go to another one,etc. But, my company uses colors extensively to help distinguish parts from each other.
I have tried setting the view ports to have a shade-mode of hidden, which does preserve the color, but the output is now a raster image, and both can reduce the quality of the output dramatically, as well as causing the PDF file size to swell to the point of being impractical if it is a complex drawing with several pages.
Is there any way to get vector output that has color, and has hidden lines not showing?
-Joe
Comments
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For #1 - Play with Visual Styles and print settings.
For #2 - Drafting viewports created by VIEWBASE have settings in properties palette and VIEWBASE puts everything in different layers that you can control as with any layer - color, line type, show-hide etc.0 -
@CADMebel said:
For #2 - Drafting viewports created by VIEWBASE have settings in properties palette and VIEWBASE puts everything in different layers that you can control as with any layer - color, line type, show-hide etc.I can't find anywhere that I can control if it viewports created by VIEWBASE command has color. I see that they create a set ov 5 layers, one for the outlines, other for the hidden lines, the visible and obscured tangent lines, and for threads, But, multiple objects on various layers do not get their own set of layers from Viewbase. I can set all the outlines to be one color, but again, the original color of the object, or the layer it is on, is completely lost. And there can only be one color for the outlines of all the items in the view.
Am I missing something?
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Joe. As far as I know, and I've used the viewbase quite a lot. You are correct. It basically redraws the model onto a canvas somewhere taking into account only tangent, hidden, and not hidden.
I don't know what products are out there that can do what you want. But probably worth holding off and having a look around. I just recently upgraded to v20 but have had to keep using V18 because of a few issues I'm still working around.
The only way I can think to get coloured 2d component views would be to export each view back to model space and then colour them. But that's probably not practical as a regular practice.
Another trick I've done is to trace over parts and then colour them with solid hatches in paper space.
Unfortunately all of thes methods lose the dynamic update nature of drawing views.0 -
No, VIEWBASE doesn't retain original layers. The same is in AutoCAD though. This is a good candidate for a feature request.
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Flatshot has an option to preserve entity layers.
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