How to layouts?

Rhino
1

Hello,

I’ve been strugling with layouts. Is there some comprehensive guide / how-to?

My issues/ headaches are (roughly in order):

  • Annotation

    • Display scale is one of the most confusing things I’ve ever encountered. I want some text to appear in model scale (i.e. engravings) and some to scale to a given text size on drawing. But layout scaling option is global - can it be made style specific?

    • Can this scaling be applied to geometry? This would be good for grid line marks.

    • image

    • Display of detail name, scale, parent view, what page the parent/child is on (dynamical reference)?
      I.e. parent view on page X has a section with a note saying see page Y, section view on page Y has a not saying see page X.

  • Layer visibility management

    • Is there a way to invoke layer state for a detail / whole layout page?
    • Can this be made associative, i.e. change to layer state apply to all affected details?
    • Is there some “visibility state” to govern what objects are displayed?

  • Named views (i.e. made from clipping planes)

    • Associative as above?
    • I know RH8 can create associative 2D from clipping plane, but this takes too long / crashes for complicated models. Can it be cropped to a desired area before 2D section calculation?

  • Standard display of features

    • Section planes viewed “on edge” - with user specified graphics (linetype, mark, mark on one/both ends, …)
    • image

  • Schedules

  • Display styles

    • Display styles are exceedingly useful to differentiate between original / modyfied structures, scopes of different contractors, highlight of important features, …
    • My workflow relies heavily on blocks, and there is no way to impose a display style on block. It has to be exploded.

  • Layout template management

    • You can copy a layout from another file, but it is very clunky. And it coppies layers and block definitions not present of the coppied layout as well?
    • Is there “create layout from teplate” option?

  • Grasshopper tools

    • Drafthorse has been a godsend. But it can only do basic stuff. Disabling/enabling layer/object visibility per layer (see above for layer states) is quite cumbersome to manage and takes a long time for large definitions.
    • How to achieved views projected from parents?

General questions
Are dimension lines supposed to be in layout space or in model space?
Can annotation “stick” to a detail - when detail is moved (as a whole, or activated and the view is shifted), annotation moves in layout too?
Are there grasshopper tools to draw in layout space? Can model space objects (i.e. dimensions) be “projected” to layout space of a given detail?

Thank you in advance for any help

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2

Hi Vojtech_Liska,

A lot of staff is out at the end of summer so will have to answer these over the next few days, Mary will jump in a well.

A big picture that may help is that Drafting wise Rhino is more like Autocad, than say Revit. Where Revit has a relational database to make these connections Rhino/Autocad does not. That said, a lot of these ‘smart’ features can be implemented with Grasshopper/Scripting.

Rhino is used in many ways, being less systematic allows for more customization in this regard.

More later…

3

Hi @Vojtech_Liska,
All great questions that I will answer your questions in a detailed reply soon.
Layouts have been in Rhino since version 4 and they keep getting better every release.

The Forum has also been around a long time and is a searchable archive of questions and topics.

Many of these questions have been answered before.
See here:

I am not sure if you have seen these, but they may help until we can get to the rest of your questions.

Thanks,
Mary Ann Fugier

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