Highlight hidden geometry & flip Dynamic UCS

RoatanBill

1) With no command active, rolling over an object highlights all of its geometry, including hidden geometry. Is there any way to keep that highlight active once a command is started?

2) Is there any way to flip the dynamic UCS to something other than what it defaulted to?

The image shows the hidden point at which I'd like to center a circle in the displayed ZY plane. Once I start the circle command the highlight disappears and I'm left to guess where that hidden point is and use TAB to flip through faces to regain a highlight. By using numerous TAB's I can home in on the point for the center but the dynamic UCS is wrong since Circle will create in the XY plane. I'd like to just keep flipping the UCS till it's to my liking. Any way to do that?

I realize I could just change my viewing angle but that would entail zooming in again on a tiny area in a large drawing and then reacquiring the original view and zoom back in again to start the next command.

What I've been doing, using this example, is to select the lower member and positioning my cursor on the now highlighted point and then terminating the selection using the ESC key and manually entering the CIRCLE command so as not to disturb my mouse position. TAB, TAB, TAB, ... eventually shows the point but the dynamic UCS is wrong and I see no way to change it at that time.

If CIRCLE and the other primitives had the ability to accept which plane to use, that would also help.

Hans De Backer

1) With no command active, rolling over an object highlights all of its geometry, including hidden geometry. Is there any way to keep that highlight active once a command is started?

The only way I know to preserve the pre-selection highlight would be to effectively select the item, but surely that's not what you're after.

In situations like these I often temporarily switch to X-ray Visual Style so all edges remain visible.
If the maze of edges gets too bewildering, you may want to edit the X-ray visual style and increase the Opacity of faces from 50 to 80 or 90%, and if it's still too much of a maze, reduce the transparency depth (the number of subsequent faces you can look through).

2) Is there any way to flip the dynamic UCS to something other than what it defaulted to?

At present there is no way to manipulate the DUCS.
It may help to know that the way a face is 'entered' with the cursor, influences the orientation of the DUCS, e.g. the origin will be located at the nearest vertex to the place where the face was entered.
The X-axis of the dynamic UCS will get aligned with the edge that was crossed to enter the face, and the Z-axis will be normal to the face.

On the screenshot it looks like a face of the blue solid is coplanar with the ZY plane, so you could use that face to align the DUCS with, and then snap to the desired point for the circle center (on condition it is visible, thanks to using a somewhat transparent visual style).

Or, as an alternative, the green solid could be temporarily ISOLATEd, avoiding the need to set a transparent visual style, which would make it easy to set the desired DUCS, and after the circle is created, make everything else visible again using UNISOLATE.

RoatanBill

@Hans De Backer

Thank you for the reply.

What I work on mostly is steel shapes (flat stock, square tubing, angle iron, etc) with dimension ranging from .065" to 3". Those shapes are combined into large structures often 20 feet in dimension. Bewildering is an excellent description of trying to use X-Ray or Wire Frame when focused in on some tiny piece of steel less than an inch long. I had no idea there were options to reduce clutter. I'll check them out.

I understand how DUCS determines it's orientation and in many if not most cases, it does an excellent job. Your description is exactly how I understand its operation. However, in the example I provided, DUCS isn't useful.

Suggestions:

A command like FLIPUCS that can be assigned to a function key and it flip whichever UCS is active, the real one or the temporary DUCS. Within 2 key presses, one has what one needs.

Another function key driven command might highlight the hidden geometry beneath the object under the cursor so that the grips are clearly visible when a command is initiated thereafter. Once the command is exited, the highlight disappears.

Again, thank you for your time.

DFLY

Another thought. I don't know how you work. But If you need highlight an object. You can just change it's colour either directly or by layer. And then change it back afterwards. If you end up with multiple highlighted objects you can just quick select by colour/layer when finished and change them back to your default values.

Knut Hohenberg

Hello RoatanBill,
it is possible to persistently highlight objects - all you have to do is type (redraw(car(entsel))3) and select an entity (unhighlighting would then need (redraw(car(entsel))4), or simply a REGEN). I know you do not want to dive into lisp, but the attached file wraps this into two commands, that you could bind to key combinations via the CUI-command (once the file has been loaded via appload or another mechanism).