Lineweights and PrintDisplay - Tips and Tricks?

I’ve almost gotten the result I’m looking for. I’m using the vaSectionView and 3 separate styles (sounds arduous but it’s actually easy) to get a section looking about how I want it to. My only hurdle now is getting the lineweights to display as I want. I’ve dug in and done some research already but it seems like every setting I play with doesn’t really produce much of a result. My viewports display my lineweights close to how I want them to look. My 2D sections however seem stuck with the default ‘hairline’ line weight. I’m hoping to be able to adjust my lineweights both within the working drawing file itself and eventually my print output.

My perspective view’s lineweights are very close to what I’m hoping to achieve (I’d call this ‘good enough’ if my 2D section’s lineweights matched this):
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These are my vaSectionViews. I simply overlap 3 different styles used for a single section. And then use the “BringToFront” / “SendToBack” commands as needed. This allows me to have shading AND a hatch pattern. And the 3rd will allows me to manipulate the cut lines once I figure out how to adjust the line weights (obviously open to better suggestions):

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Hi @keithscadservices,

If you are assigning the lineweight in the section attributes, it is line print width. This is not visible in the section view but you will see it if you print it.

Hi Alfonso and thanks for your reply. I’ve made a bit of progress. I’m still trying to figure out which settings take precedence as you’ll see below. I already know one way to fix that issue (all colors to black) which leads me into a feature request: More versatile lineweight displays.

I’m able to get very close to my desired result using a combination of two display modes and a 2D vaSectionView (which allows me to snap dimensions where I want them). Drawback is very big output files and slow printing (whether that means too big that remains to be seen):

Note that I (think) I’ve figured out how to manipulate the titles. I kind of like it better than Revit. In fact I’m already close to achieving a better result compared to nicely polished Revit Sections.

Below I’ve generated this section using only vaSectionViews. The only real ‘fuss’ was manipulating the draw order of the sections (and dimensions). Shouldn’t be a problem once I get my workflow down:

At first I wasn’t so sure about the vaSectionViews but now I think they’re pretty awesome. I really like having everything in model space. After reading through a lot of the posts it appears a lot of people don’t realize that the 2D views are (well can be if the option is clicked) live. Another advantage is that I am able to snap my dimensions to the cut surface of a sloping slab. You cannot do this in Revit (okay… you can but the workarounds aren’t the greatest).

Much of the remaining issues are ‘beginner’ issues I need to sort out, as well as developing a workflow that suites my needs. Lineweight displays that approximate the printed lineweights would be invaluable. I haven’t had much success with the PrintDisplay command as of yet. I believe there is an additional variable that scales how the lineweights are displayed somehow?

Hi @keithscadservices,

You should be able to display lineweights in your viewport running the PrintDisplay command and setting its state to On. Which problem are you having with it?

Which two display modes are you using? Why do you need them?

Could you describe with some more detail which issues did you have with color hierarchy?

Turns out I needed to “update” the section. I thought I had updated it but I guess not.

I miss-typed. I am using two “Detail Views” (coming from ACAD I keep trying to call them viewports - but they are kind of different). One detail view has my custom display mode which is a modified version of the “Arctic” display mode. The other detail view has a vaSectionView. ‘Overlapping’ the detail views gives me the benefits of the display mode, but also the ‘object snapping’ ability of the vaSectionView.

Note that this is by no means a debilitating issue (quite easy to work around), but just posting in case this isn’t the intended behavior.

Here is my vaSectionView:

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And this is my Section View Properties:

The blue lines are coming from the layer’s color setting. It’s overriding my Section View properties (as well as other settings). Printing (and PrintDisplay) looks just fine. I can work with this, just posting to make sure this is intended behavior or if the section view properties are supposed to override the layer’s color. I would think the later to be the intent? The layer color seems to override a lot of settings to stay that color.

One thing that is harder to work around is the plan views. My plan view styles don’t seem to be recognizing any of the settings of my plan view styles; they just take on the object properties. Based on my settings this should look more like my plan views:

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I’ve messed around with the object settings just to see what was driving the appearance of the plan view.

Hi @keithscadservices,

In VisualARQ, section attributes should be specified by object instance or by style. Per-user request, we added the ability to override section hatch attribute by section-view style, and we planned to add support to override the other section attributes and copy the same feature to plan views in future VisualARQ updates.

I’ve checked our product roadmap, and this feature is planned for VisualARQ 2.12, which is the next VisualARQ version we’ll publish. There is no planned release date, but my estimation is in a couple of months.

Regards,

Enric

Thanks Enric! To be honest I didn’t expect sections themselves to have so many options; it was a nice surprise when I realized I could basically have Revit level flexibility (perhaps even better in some ways) once one figures out how they work. As-is I’m already able to get pretty good results with plans, but only if I do a Raster export to PDF (meaning large file sizes among other things). I have a few easy workarounds I can employ prior to 2.1 being released.

Hi @keithscadservices take a look a this video, where you can see a trick to print to vector output plans with lighting: 2D Vector Drawing with lighting in Rhino - YouTube
You basically need to combine 2 details views, one in Hidden display mode, and the other detail with any fancy display mode.