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View Full Version : 2018 Blocks, Zero Layer, and Xreffing



CCarleton
2017-10-24, 06:54 PM
Our company has started transitioning over to 2018. We have noticed a problem with Blocks on the zero layer in xrefs and setting the xref color. Wondering if anyone has any experience in this.

There's a lot of xreffing going on between departments, specifically between the survey topos produced and the engineer departments that design off them. In the case of Aviation they put (almost) everything on color 8. They xref the topos and change the xref vp color to color 8 and everything is hunkydory. However, 2018 is causing a problem with blocks on the zero layer when xreffed. If a block is on the zero layer and xreffed we don't seem to be able to change the color of the xref layer. If you go into the xref, bedit the block, and change it to any layer, you have control of setting the xref layer again in the main drawing.

This problem is also persisting with survey figures. We had to set our figure style to byblock to get it to switch over to color 8, otherwise it stayed white. I think the byblock method will work fine without causing problems (knock on wood), but in the case of blocks if we start setting layers inside the block this would cause problems, especially when you have proposed, existing, demo setups. You'd have to run multiple blocks otherwise you run into freezing/isolation issues.

It feels like a bug to me based on wanting to have blocks on the zero layer as a general rule of thumb. Has anyone else experienced this and/or have any information about it?

Thanks,
Connor


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Side-note: Right as I was about to post the above the CAD Tech from Aviation called me and told me he thinks he has a bad install because another person in their department isn't having this problem. Going to have to check with other people on 2018 and see what they say, but still curious if anyone knows anything about this.

Thanks

Tom Beauford
2017-10-25, 02:16 PM
Try setting the XREFOVERRIDE (System Variable) (https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/AutoCAD-Core/files/GUID-131E3BBB-A28A-40BC-BDC5-A4486C1E2DBE-htm.html) to 1.

I generally set all properties in a block to byblock. No matter what version of AutoCAD you can set the properties to whatever you want.
We show proposed and existing using the same blocks and simply shade the existing layers.

This explains it pretty well: https://www.cad-notes.com/layer-0-bylayer-and-byblock/

CCarleton
2017-10-25, 08:04 PM
The solution seems to have worked for him and he's not having problems. I'm going to try out Byblock on them as well and see if that fixes the problem altogether.

And which, thanks for the suggestion on Byblock, I haven't ever dabbled with it and now that I played a bit with it I see why it's useful. Our survey figures have been set to Bylayer instead so as soon as I played and realized what it did I went to our figures and changed the linetype to be Byblock. Now you can grab a survey figure and just change the linetype. I, no joke, whispered to myself "That's beautiful..." when I tried it out. For utilities we've been being stupid by exploding down survey figures into polylines to change them over to sizes and accuracy level.

Thanks again

Tom Beauford
2017-10-25, 08:24 PM
You're welcome!

I've found help here as many times as I've been able to dish it out.

Byblock works great for point blocks and survey figures, but surface components need to be bylayer to control them as the surface is just one object.