Clip Regions/White outs

[WYSIWYG-BIM]

How do you handle this situation... There has been a common complaint from the powers that be (who are used to what we do in Autocad) of having too many lines showing in elevation view. For instance, with a 3D model, an elevation view you will see the portions of wall/roof which are not in the immediate plane which is desired to be shown.

Currently we solve this by using white-outs (white filled region) so that we can see only what we want to see. It is really time consuming drawing filled regions to mask this out and making sure the viewport is cut small enough to just see that view. This is also a situation where the filled region is not connected to anything in particular so if anything moves, the white-out needs to also be adjusted.

We've of course adjusted out clip depth to be as shallow as possible. See attahced example. The area around this curtainwall really shows that wall attached to it going out at an angle (see floor plan) but in order not to see it in elevation we've white it out. We are creating our elevation views suing the standard elevation command.

Thanks for your help.

[Scott Womack]

We create a special view template for "curtainwall" views. We also created a shared parameter that gets applied to all walls, but is only provided a value for curtainwalls. Then the view template has a filter that turns off all non-curtainwall wallss in those elevations automatically. It also turns off floors, doors, etc. (We choose to handle the doors in the door schedule for hardware reasons). This has the advantage that a custom wall tag gets applied to the curtainwalls that reads this tag. We then name the elevation with the curtainwall type in it on the sheets.

[rjcrowther]

As a general theme, I leave the background elements there but make them halftone.

My preference is to show they are there but take the focus off them.

When I want a specific part of an elevation, I use a masking region. I usually draw a big box with invisible lines and then draw another box inside that forms a view window. The inside box can be something other then a box that conforms to the precise shape you want. Doing this avoids the perfectly sized viewport and generally works.

My main application of this is in interior (room) elevations. Here the outside box is from invisible lines and the inside box from a 0.5mm pen which designates the interior surface of walls, floor, ceiling.

Maybe there might be something here for you.