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What's Up With All the Colors & Other Strange Things


Bill Tillman

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I understand that BIM and other methods of doing things are really starting to take off now but as I'm only a hobbyist I can't say that I've been able to keep up adequately. So here's the thing. In the past few months I've been doing some contract work with overseas and domestic firms which submit drawings which are in my opinion, way too much fluff. Sure the 3D views are nice but with all the solid hatching, and colors one cannot clearly see what's going on. So at the risk of sounding dumb as well as limited because I can't really post the drawings due to NDA's, can anyone take a look at these screen shots and tell me what is going on. Are these the way drawings of the future are going to look like?

 

The 3D view is the actual way this thing looked in AutoCAD when I opened it. And the section view which has the gray hatch, well when I deleted the hatch a very nice view of the details which I would expect to see was hidden behind it. How does this stuff actually print on black and white plotters? I printed to PDF and some of this stuff just ends up putting blacked out dark rectangles on the page and ... well I'm not sure what to make of it.

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well Bill not sure what you are trying to get across here. Color is nice, hatch is good for some things but what the hard hat out in the field wants is the facts not fancy.

The fancy you show to the customer. Beside what i am looking at can be done in 2D. I foresee a lot of reply's to your post in the future.

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Bear in mind that often these drawings are created by other drawing packages, where hatching works differently. The first thing I do when working with new projects is store a copy of the original file, then in a working drawing remove all hatching, actually I move it off to one side, because in many cases the layer names (or pattern names) of hatches can be far more descriptive than the geometry that bounds them. And when all the walls are on layer "0" then selecting all the hatches on layer "concrete" and using hatchgenerateboundary gets you a lot of information very quickly.

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I printed to PDF and some of this stuff just ends up putting blacked out dark rectangles on the page and ... well I'm not sure what to make of it.

 

My guess is, those blanked-out rectangles are proxy objects. If you don't have Revit, AutoCAD won't recognize all the entities that Revit generates, and it may mishandle the entities it thinks it recognizes. In my experience with Revit, admittedly limited, I got exported .dwg files, not .rvt files. Your fileage may vary.

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CyberAngel, those are exactly my thoughts. These were prepared for a project which uses BIM and I don't have access to those versions of AutoCAD right now.

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From the look of it, these were exported to AutoCAD from Revit. Here's the thing: in Revit, "hatches" don't actually exists from a modeling perspective. It's known as "Surface Patterns" and you can set it to a solid fill. This is very nice for showing differentiation in black lined drawings. For instance, in your first screenshot, this would print on a black lined PDF as grayscale for the solid hatch that fills the structural member. It will plot from Revit as screened and it can be very clean looking, since these "solid hatches" are automatically control by Revit.

 

If you're in fact looking at DWG exports, then the conversion process translates these as 2D Solid Hatches in AutoCAD which is what's throwing you off probably. Hope this helps.

 

-TZ

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