alternatives to solprof

[Dadgad]

Thanks Mark

Could you please suggest a way with less steps?

 

ReMark is correct about you are making a lot of extra work for yourself. I use it a lot, and here is how I do it. 1. As you already know SOLPROF only works on 3D SOLIDS, so you need to either bind them in, if they are XREFED into your drawing, or you can use NCOPY which is much quicker. With NCOPY you can leave your XREF as it is, and make a copy of the nested 3D Model. This is much easier and quicker than binding all of the bits in.>>>>> 2. Set your layer to 0. You should make as many copies of the 3D model as you want to use VIEWS on your drawing, and position them by using 3DROTATE command. Essentially setting up your sheet view.>>>>> 3. Go to your layout and double click in your single full sized viewport to activate it. This one viewport should show all of your perspective views, when viewed from whatever UCS you are using. I would suggest WORLD. 4. Run the SOLPROF command as you usually do.>>>> 5. Now you should have 2 SOLPROF generated blocks in model space, representing all lines both visible and hidden of all of the views which you set up.>>>>>>>> 6. There are other ways to do this with layer isolation, but I like to do it this way. Select one of the SOLPROF blocks, lets say the PV prefixed (visible items) one, and drag it a known distance orthogonally to some clear space on in your modelspace, say 5000 units. Then do the same for the remaining block, the PH prefixed one, which represents all of your hidden lines, by a similar distance in a different orthogonal direction, a known distance, let's say 5000. Select both of the SOLPROF blocks and EXPLODE them. Reselect all of those exploded bits and use the OVERKILL command to get rid of a great many duplicated and redundant lines. Select the PV block parts, and using your properties or quickproperties palette change their layer to whichever one is desirable. In my case that would be layer STEEL. I then set their draw order on my DRAW ORDER toolbar to front, so they display in front of the hidden lines, which I will select and move to the PH bits to STEEL HIDDEN layer, and set their DRAW ORDER to Back. 7. Move the solids which you used to generate the SOLPROF views out of the way, and reassemble the solprof lines by moving them back orthogonally to their original positions. 8. Go back to your paperspace layout and leave all of your SOLPROF lines in modelspace. There is no advantage, nor need to do a CHANGESPACE on them, in multiple viewports. If you do it this way there is only one viewport, and lots of saved steps. 9. If I am about to SOLPROF an assembly or a piece with multiple elements I will strip out any uncalled for 3D solid parts before running SOLPROF, in each particular perspective. In this way you can control exactly how much is shown. When I am finished I usually take a look at the result, and weed out any lines which I think are uncalled for, or will make the drawing less clear.

[mvrcad]

cheers Dadgad

[Dadgad]

ReMark is correct about you are making a lot of extra work for yourself. I use it a lot, and here is how I do it. 1. As you already know SOLPROF only works on 3D SOLIDS, so you need to either bind them in, if they are XREFED into your drawing, or you can use NCOPY which is much quicker. With NCOPY you can leave your XREF as it is, and make a copy of the nested 3D Model. This is much easier and quicker than binding all of the bits in.>>>>> 2. Set your layer to 0. You should make as many copies of the 3D model as you want to use VIEWS on your drawing, and position them by using 3DROTATE command. Essentially setting up your sheet view.>>>>> 3. Go to your layout and double click in your single full sized viewport to activate it. This one viewport should show all of your perspective views, when viewed from whatever UCS you are using. I would suggest WORLD. 4. Run the SOLPROF command as you usually do.>>>> 5. Now you should have 2 SOLPROF generated blocks in model space, representing all lines both visible and hidden of all of the views which you set up.>>>>>>>> 6. There are other ways to do this with layer isolation, but I like to do it this way. Select one of the SOLPROF blocks, lets say the PV prefixed (visible items) one, and drag it a known distance orthogonally to some clear space on in your modelspace, say 5000 units. Then do the same for the remaining block, the PH prefixed one, which represents all of your hidden lines, by a similar distance in a different orthogonal direction, a known distance, let's say 5000. Select both of the SOLPROF blocks and EXPLODE them. Reselect all of those exploded bits and use the OVERKILL command to get rid of a great many duplicated and redundant lines. Select the PV block parts, and using your properties or quickproperties palette change their layer to whichever one is desirable. In my case that would be layer STEEL. I then set their draw order on my DRAW ORDER toolbar to front, so they display in front of the hidden lines, which I will select and move to the PH bits to STEEL HIDDEN layer, and set their DRAW ORDER to Back. 7. Move the solids which you used to generate the SOLPROF views out of the way, and reassemble the solprof lines by moving them back orthogonally to their original positions. 8. Go back to your paperspace layout and leave all of your SOLPROF lines in modelspace. There is no advantage, nor need to do a CHANGESPACE on them, in multiple viewports. If you do it this way there is only one viewport, and lots of saved steps. 9. If I am about to SOLPROF an assembly or a piece with multiple elements I will strip out any uncalled for 3D solid parts before running SOLPROF, in each particular perspective. In this way you can control exactly how much is shown. When I am finished I usually take a look at the result, and weed out any lines which I think are uncalled for, or will make the drawing less clear.

 

Of course, once you have done all that, you may choose to use multiple viewports on your layout, which is not a problem, and you can scale them and do everything else you might need to do such as viewport freezing layers, or whatever. But you just do the SOLPROF once, and leave those optimized lines in modelspace once you have them how you want them.

[Dadgad]

cheers Dadgad

 

It is still a lot of steps, but it seems like you already have it pretty much together, aside from copying and moving all those lines around. There is also no need to save it as SOLPROF DELETE .dwg, just work in your drawing withour changing the name. I also always purge my drawings before my final save, and check to make sure that those PV & PH prefixed solprof layers have been purged. If you get into trouble and can't purge them, then you can use the LAYMRG command (using the selection by name option) as a work around, and merge the PV into your visible layer and the PH into your hidden layer. If there was anything on them, then they will be moved to an appropriate layer, and it will delete the layers from which you have merged. They should have been empty anyway, if you followed my system, but sometimes they won't delete, and in this way you don't need to try and locate some tiny little erroneous bit. I hope that helps, and you are welcome.

[mvrcad]

quoting Dadgad

I hope you dont mind me putting in parragraphs, it makes it easier for me to grasp your concepts.

 

1. As you already know SOLPROF only works on 3D SOLIDS, so you need to either bind them in, if they are XREFED into your drawing, or you can use NCOPY which is much quicker. With NCOPY you can leave your XREF as it is, and make a copy of the nested 3D Model. This is much easier and quicker than binding all of the bits in.

2. Set your layer to 0. You should make as many copies of the 3D model as you want to use VIEWS on your drawing, and position them by using 3DROTATE command. Essentially setting up your sheet view.

3. Go to your layout and double click in your single full sized viewport to activate it. This one viewport should show all of your perspective views, when viewed from whatever UCS you are using. I would suggest WORLD.

4. Run the SOLPROF command as you usually do.

5. Now you should have 2 SOLPROF generated blocks in model space, representing all lines both visible and hidden of all of the views which you set up.

6. There are other ways to do this with layer isolation, but I like to do it this way. Select one of the SOLPROF blocks, lets say the PV prefixed (visible items) one, and drag it a known distance orthogonally to some clear space on in your modelspace, say 5000 units. Then do the same for the remaining block, the PH prefixed one, which represents all of your hidden lines, by a similar distance in a different orthogonal direction, a known distance, let's say 5000. Select both of the SOLPROF blocks and EXPLODE them. Reselect all of those exploded bits and use the OVERKILL command to get rid of a great many duplicated and redundant lines. Select the PV block parts, and using your properties or quickproperties palette change their layer to whichever one is desirable. In my case that would be layer STEEL. I then set their draw order on my DRAW ORDER toolbar to front, so they display in front of the hidden lines, which I will select and move to the PH bits to STEEL HIDDEN layer, and set their DRAW ORDER to Back.

7. Move the solids which you used to generate the SOLPROF views out of the way, and reassemble the solprof lines by moving them back orthogonally to their original positions.

8. Go back to your paperspace layout and leave all of your SOLPROF lines in modelspace. There is no advantage, nor need to do a CHANGESPACE on them, in multiple viewports. If you do it this way there is only one viewport, and lots of saved steps.

9. If I am about to SOLPROF an assembly or a piece with multiple elements I will strip out any uncalled for 3D solid parts before running SOLPROF, in each particular perspective. In this way you can control exactly how much is shown. When I am finished I usually take a look at the result, and weed out any lines which I think are uncalled for, or will make the drawing less clear.

 

where i work, the parts that i draw need to be on a coordinate system to fit with other infrastructure.

ie, if i model a hopper, and someone else models a conveyor belt, then when xreffed in to another drawing, these two should line up like in real life.

 

from what i understand of your 1 viewport method, are you saying that you copy around the 3d model in model space and place it at different scales and rotations as needed?

 

do you do this with the actual model or once the model is in the presentation drawing?

 

 

im going to give your steps a try and see how i go.

 

what do you do if you want more than 1 type of shade mode on your drawing? ie, you want a 3d issometric in conceptual style up in the corner, and the rest legacy hidden?

[Dadgad]

The description I gave is how I would do a fabrication drawing, which would be for a single item. That item might actually be an assembly of as many as 30 odd parts, each of which would also need to be broken out, given an Item designation in the drawing, 1 to 3 orthogonal views (depending on the simplicity or complexity of the part) and dimensions. I frequently use more than one viewport if a drawing warrants it. For a relatively simple drawing one viewport will usually suffice. I often add an additional viewport with a 3D view (oriented with 3D orbit to optimally display the item), which is like eye candy, visual style set to display as HIDDEN or REALISTIC.

 

I would not recommend scaling for your viewport views in modelspace, as it is easy to get screwed up later doing your dimensions. That is what viewports are for, just use a viewport or more to display the items at a scale which is appropriate. This too provides you the opportunity to select different visual styles in different viewports to better express your intention.

 

I usually use LEGACY HIDDEN in my 3D oriented viewport (eye candy), could be CONCEPTUAL or XRAY (very cool) if you need it, or any other visual style. The main viewport I usually print as displayed, which is 2D WIREFRAME.

Moving an inserted block or xref around in your modelspace does not affect the original file.

 

I am not entirely clear on what your drawing is meant to portray. Are these erection drawings?

 

If you are able to post one, or part of one, something as an example (strip out anything which is proprietary or of no consequence) then it would help me to understand exactly what you are trying to achieve.

 

I hope this helps you. Whenever you get onto AUTOCAD 2012 you will find this is all a great deal easier, because of the associative drawing incorporated into the VIEWBASE commands.

Even then, you might still want to add another viewport to display a non-standard perspective.