Have you come across the situation where in you need to go to different drawing and sheet models to turn off levels over and over again? Or have you been repeatedly turning the display of references on and off to customize the view? Wouldn’t it better if you do that by fewer clicks or single click?
We want to emphasize the idea of not worrying about display/hide stuff when you are in design model. You would prefer to do this in drawing and sheet models.
Users have been following several workflows for drawing composition. One of the work flows is to attach the design model in the drawing model, place annotations and customize the levels display using levels display dialog. You might end up creating several drawing models which you want to place on a printable sheet.
For example, you can have a final sheet with several drawing models attached. This final sheet can contain one drawing model showing the roof of the house and others showing each floor. What if you want to see only the roof and not the individual floors? Probably you will go ahead and turn off the reference display for each floor.
Can we do this just by a single click? Yes, you can use levels for that. You group the elements based on its display features and keep them on one level. For example, you place the wiring of the house one level, so you can change the color of entire wiring just by changing the color of that level.
Same feature can be used for references. You can place a reference on a level. This gives you an opportunity to group the references on a level based on some common display features. You can see the above picture showing the reference settings of an attachment. Note the highlighted Level drop-down. If you expand this drop-down, a list of levels coming from the active dgn file is populated. You can choose the level when you create a new dgn attachment. With this you can use the “Global Display” and “Global Freeze” on level to control the display of all the references placed on that level.
While you are into levels, you have been controlling the element display order using levels priority. The elements placed on high priority level appear in the front, since they are drawn last as compared to the elements placed on lower priority levels.
You can also have some master model elements overlapping with reference elements. You can place reference also on levels with different priorities. We recommend using “Update Sequence” for this. Please see the Update Sequence blog for further reference. You can certainly use the level’s priority to control the display of elements for simpler cases. In case you end up using both, the levels priority system overrides the update sequence system.
More blogs to come up, so be there...