Back Clipping Volume Symbology Obscuring Cut Plane Symbology in PDF

Anyone have any insight into why a PDF of my sheet has the back clipping volume dashed symbology obscuring the thicker solid cut plane symbology? (as well as generally looking like crap)

PDF:

vs.

MicroStation:

MS CONNECT v15

Print Organizer

Out-of-the-box workspace, styles, etc.

Parents
  • Possible having the DGN files and model to plot would help.

    Mike Longstreet
    Vermont Agency of Transportation
    Civil Engineering Technical Support
    VTCAD Help

  • Thanks Mike. Here's a small dataset that can reproduce the issue.

    PDF2046.test.dgn

  • I think most of your questions can be answered by the fact that I've really never done much with dynamic views and clip volumes before. Any oddities are just me feeling around in the dark trying to get something that looks how I would like it. Just frustrating that the view in MicroStation looks exactly like I want it (however misguided the methods that got it there) and the PDF has so many issues.

    Yes, back plane on was intentional, but only because the cut plane was obscuring hidden line geometry behind it. The Front and Back terminology took a little getting used to as from their default symbology I would have thought them reversed.

    My main goal was to have a detail view for each board showing the cuts / holes that needed to be made, while providing the context of nearby elements to orient my brain around the 2D details. That's why it was positioned in the middle of the solid slab. So not just to see the cylinders at the bottom, but to show them differently than the screws and walls behind them (or in front of them in my weird attempt to get it to display how I wanted). Ultimately I think it was the cut plane obscuring front clip geometry which sent me on the wrong path here it seems.

    I will try your settings and see what I can come up with. Thank you for the suggestions. I'll take any best practice guidance I can get. 

  • I think most of your questions can be answered by the fact that I've really never done much with dynamic views and clip volumes before. Any oddities are just me feeling around in the dark trying to get something that looks how I would like it. Just frustrating that the view in MicroStation looks exactly like I want it (however misguided the methods that got it there) and the PDF has so many issues.

    No worries there, we all gotta start somewhere and its a learning process and even when you think you've got the hang of it, MicroStation can still do things that frustrate.

    Yes, back plane on was intentional, but only because the cut plane was obscuring hidden line geometry behind it. The Front and Back terminology took a little getting used to as from their default symbology I would have thought them reversed.

    It makes sense that the Cut plane blocks the Front Plane however I am noticing a strange result with your model when I test different display style Render Modes for Front and Back planes and for some reason, the left side panel is rendered with the Front  Plane display style in the foreground and the right Panel has the Cut Plane display style in the foreground. Very weird indeed.

    There are some options to overcome this but it involves extra steps and might not be permitted if you have specific CAD standards to follow:

    Option 1
    One method that can be employed is to create a Saved view for the Cut/Front and Back Planes (the latter only if required). Each of these views would only have a single plane active. The idea is that you set the appearance that you want for each view, created a saved view as mentioned before then on your Sheet you position each view on top of each other and use Update Sequence in the Reference Manager to control the display order of the files. I've never had to do this but it will work and this workflow is sometimes required in Revit which offer far less options for Drawing Composition and has certain restrictions with views.

    Option 2
    Another alternative (and one that I have used before) requires a specific workflow. When I'm doing 3D work like this I will have:

    • 1 file for the 3D Model consisting of a single 3D Design Model. In here I model all my geometry and nothing else.
    • 1 file in which I reference the above file into and the only thing I do here is create my Clip Volumes and saved views. I refer to this as a composition model whereas Bentley advocate using a Drawing Model. I don't use Drawing Models as they are simply Design Models with a different background colour and really a pointless addition to the software.
    • 1 file which contains a (typically but not always, as in this special case!) empty design model and more importantly a Sheet Model where the final saved views are attached.

    An example of one of my composition models:

    In this I have a lot of Clip volumes (see right viewport) and also a matching number of Saved Views.

    Then in my Drawing file, I open the Design model and reference in each saved view aligned each view adjacent to each other and in the Reference Manager, I changed the Visible edge settings to Cached. The reason for this is that if there are edges in the view which do not appear correctly, you can use 'Copy\Hide Cached Element' which allows you to edit the edges as you would normal to geometry. You'll need to read the help file on it but its quite powerful and allows me to turn basic 3D views ( i.e. Plans, Elevation or Section) into a detailed Plan, Elevation or Section that would have historically be done as purely 2D.

    e.g. from this:

    to this:

    Once I've finished editing and each view looks as I want, I then make further saved views of each view and reference each of these new saved views into the sheet model and add my annotations, like so:

    I know it might seem like a lot of work but its quite simple once you get into it. Feel free to ask any questions regardless of whatever approach you decide to take.

    Answer Verified By: MD 

  • Tried playing around with the positioning and display styles of the clip volumes using your workflow, but I couldn't get those hidden cylinders to show up without putting the cut plane through them or showing the back plane. The cut plane obscures the forward plane and prevents the cylinders from showing up. Any use of the back plane to depict this information results in it obscuring the thicker cut plane lines in favor of the dashed linestyle.

    I finally had some luck by duplicating existing references in the sheet model and changing the display style of one to be cut / back clip volume and the other to be cut / forward then stacking them such that it displayed appropriately on screen. The resulting PDF's finally looked like the view! I had tried with a single clip volume display style active (back) but it didn't seem to work without having the cut active as well for whatever reason.

    Thanks for the information and ideas!

  • Hi MD,

    I'm glad you got a working solution, sounds very much like the 1st option I described. The good thing about that method is you can be 100% sure it works due to being able to control which reference attachment is drawn 1st and so on.

    However... I was curious to see if I could get your model working with a single clip volume after yesterday's initial test gave me weird results.

    I noticed that most (but not all) of the geometry types in your DGN file are not SmartSolids but Extended Elements. This was unexpected and I have no idea how you created them, but I was able to convert those back to the expected smartsolid elements.

    One thing I had forgot to mention yesterday is where your dowels/cylinders are located, I would recommend you perform a boolean subtract operation on the end and base panels so that they have holes cut within. Its useful if you ever have to do exploded views of individual components but good practice regardless. This is what I mean, the dowels are coloured red for clarity (btw you can right-click on each clip and use 'Open Image in a new window' to view at full size)

    What I then did was create a clip volume where I think it should be positioned:

    Next I created 2No. unique display styles for the front plane and cut plane instead of using the default styles, and apply them to the clip volume (I have purposely coloured them so its easy to see what each one does):

    Personally (feel free to disagree), this is how I think the section view should look; the Cut Plane edges (blue) are slightly thicker, everything beyond that has a visible edge is solid but thinner than the cut lines and anything hidden is thin and dashed. Don't worry about the blue rectangle in the distance, its because the top plane of the clip volume is cutting it. Either toggle its clipping to off, or leave it and just Clip boundary your view when you reference it on a sheet to make it not visible.

    I've attached the DGN so you can review the display styles and see if its working as you would like.

    MD Display Styles.dgn

  • Thanks for the detailed responses and breakdown of everything.

    Yeah, I had just quickly extruded some 2D shapes and revolved a linestring for some of those fasteners vs. solids modeling for my quick demo file.

    I started performing the boolean difference initially, but was fighting which keep / hide options to use to preserve my fasteners, etc.. It got pretty tedious pretty quick and didn't believe it necessary or worth the additional effort for this particular project. It may have been a different story if I could have ran the tool using entire levels in one operation or something. 

    I cannot disagree - that look at the end is what I'm after. I missed this setting (or expected it to be on by default) on the forward clip volume display style:

    I was also able to find some applicable training content via CONNECT Advisor as well, which helped. Searching Bentley LEARN directly was a bust.

    I now have a much better understanding how all this is coming together - Thank you again for all your assistance!

Reply
  • Thanks for the detailed responses and breakdown of everything.

    Yeah, I had just quickly extruded some 2D shapes and revolved a linestring for some of those fasteners vs. solids modeling for my quick demo file.

    I started performing the boolean difference initially, but was fighting which keep / hide options to use to preserve my fasteners, etc.. It got pretty tedious pretty quick and didn't believe it necessary or worth the additional effort for this particular project. It may have been a different story if I could have ran the tool using entire levels in one operation or something. 

    I cannot disagree - that look at the end is what I'm after. I missed this setting (or expected it to be on by default) on the forward clip volume display style:

    I was also able to find some applicable training content via CONNECT Advisor as well, which helped. Searching Bentley LEARN directly was a bust.

    I now have a much better understanding how all this is coming together - Thank you again for all your assistance!

Children
No Data