Community Outcry For v6: Detail Layer State Overhaul

Over the past few weeks I’ve been in charge of overhauling my office’s model organization system, and we were planning to move into using worksessions to keep everything up to date across a large project. I work for a Yacht Design company, and one of our boats can easily have over 100 drawings. Worksessions seemed like an obvious answer, and everything was going according to plan until I hit a tiny (yet monumental) stumbling block…

The plan was to have “Source Drawings” containing all of our annotations, layouts, and detail views, and part files containing all of our actual surfaces and part groups, so that they could be referenced simultaneously around the office and would update in almost-real-time. I discovered that on a layout, the detail on/off settings for individual layers would not be preserved when the file was saved, closed, and re-opened. This punched a gaping hole through our plan to re-organize our system, as we rely heavily on being able to turn layers on and off in detail views to show and hide certain geometry in certain views (without using HideInDetail). Upon investigating, I found out that “layer states” is a relative term not applying to the entire model, but to three separate groups of states:

  1. Model Layer States
  2. Layout Layer States
  3. Detail Layer States

When creating a saved layer state in the layer state manager, it returns different values for each parameter under every layer based on whether you’re in model space, layout space, or an active detail. You can see this yourself by opening a layer state in Notepad and checking the binary syntax to see how Rhino exports the layer states differently. For example, below is the layer state information for the same layer (I changed the name to make it clearer which is which) saved by the layer state manager, first saved in Model Space, then updated in Detail Space. The layer is turned off in Detail Space. In the syntax, the third number from the end is the combined detail/layout on/off indicator. As you can see, the information saved is different even though I didn’t change a thing in the on/off settings.

Layer1=MODEL SPACE;0;1;0;-1;0;0.00;1;0;1;0;0;0.00
Layer1=DETAIL SPACE;0;1;0;-1;0;0.00;1;0;0;0;0;0.00

This is a horrendously over-complicated system which I can only assume is an oversight. Each layer should have unique indicators for print width, print color, and on/off as a minimum for model space, layout space, and detail space, not one set to rule both layout and detail space. Ideally, the above example would look like this:

Layer1=MODEL SPACE;0;1;0;-1;0;0.00;1;0;0;0;0;0.00;1;0;0;0.00
Layer1=DETAIL SPACE;0;1;0;-1;0;0.00;1;0;0;0;0;0.00;1;0;0;0.00

Each layer would need to have an additional four indicators for each detail (and layout?) that exists within the file.

Please see below at least three other articles about this same issue…

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