As I told you I feel the section drawing on the modeling space make a messy working environment.
This may fit the needs of Architect but does not the Product designer.
For PD it would be much better to have the tech drawings separate from the modeling space like it happens in most of the Mcad out there where the drafting environment is completely different from the modeling one.
This is a sample of a simple object where the object is small enough to fit a normal paper (this is smaller than A4) that shows how messy could it be to have both one close to the other.
I’ve also tried to do drawings using the detailed views but it remain a very long and tedious work to create good drawings. The Technical viewport style is far from perfection and it’s hard to add “illustrative” things on top of it. The result PDF file is mostly raster with a less quality.
It may not fit Architectural plans where you need to work on huge measures but when the object can fit the page (A0 or more) why not to allow the Section Drawing to be placed directly on the Layout page? As additional bonus the drawing could be updated only when the drawing is activated.
I hope this can start a new discussion on this topic, I’m available also for a online meeting to discuss it in deep.
To keep things in perspective, we are way beyond the point where we are looking for new features to put into Rhino 9.
We are currently working on combining IsolateToViewport in the Clipping Drawing workflow. When that is done, you would typically run the ClippingDrawing command from an active detail on a layout and the output would only be visible in that detail.
I had hoped to get that more automated for Rhino 9 but this is something that will need incremental developement.
That is a very small subset og models to develop a new feature for…
-wim
Bigger models could be brought to the layout if the dimensions could be setup by the object they are being attached to, so if the section was scaled down 4 times to fit the paper, the dimension could read that and scale the value down.
However, I feel that having the section be visible only on the detail view can be a solution, I use that myself turning layers on and off to make the drawings using the detail view as much as possible. The only downside is that, if I rearrange something in a new layer for some reason I have to go detail by detail to turn that layer on where I want it.
If you somehow get the sectiondrawings to work like that in a more automated way, I think it would make it a bit easier than it is now, and we could improve from that.
This would also be a great tool for architects. I’m really struggling to manage my workspace. Programs like Archicad, Revit, and Vectorworks already offer their own solutions to this problem. I believe there are many more use cases for separating different workspaces within one file — for example, creating isolated section drawings or excluding blocks from the main 3D model…
At the moment, I try to work with the layer state manager to include or exclude different drawings etc., but this is sometimes a bit messy and doesn’t work well when I need to create new layers. And feel like a workaround.
