viewport in modelspace ?

[Serhan_BAKIR]

Hi there,
is there a way to create viewports in modelspace as it can be done in paperspace? Basically I need to reference some parts of the modelspace again inside the modelspace.. Like xref but this one will be internal... Is it possible ?

[tedg]

Hi there,
is there a way to create viewports in modelspace as it can be done in paperspace? Basically I need to reference some parts of the modelspace again inside the modelspace.. Like xref but this one will be internal... Is it possible ?
No, there isn't a way to create a viewport in model space.
I think to do what you want to do you have a few options:

For ease of editing the geometry in several places.

1. Make your geometry an xref and bring it in and copy it in model space.
2. Make your geometry a block so you can copy it in model space.

Or

3. Simply copy the geometry in model space (but I'm thinking you want to avoid that).

BTW: if you have an xref or block already you can copy it and xclip it if you just need to see a piece of it.

[Serhan_BAKIR]

- I don't want seperate files so I can not xref, and if I try to attach the main file:
"Possible circular reference to current drawing" error occurs naturally.
- Creating and using blocks is not a convinient way for what I do.

sadly paperspace is so slow and fragile that I cannot work with many viewports (~10) in that space.

It would be nice if clipping and internal-referencing were possibble inside the modelspace..

[tedg]

- I don't want seperate files so I can not xref, and if I try to attach the main file:
"Possible circular reference to current drawing" error occurs naturally.
- Creating and using blocks is not a convinient way for what I do.

sadly paperspace is so slow and fragile that I cannot work with many viewports (~10) in that space.

It would be nice if clipping and internal-referencing were possibble inside the modelspace..

Well I don't what to tell you, I think you're out of luck on this.
As far as the circular reference thing, we use "overlay" instead of "attach" to avoid these issues.

Anyway you could post a sample dwg with some notation of what you're trying to do?
Maybe someone can come up with an idea you could live with.

[Serhan_BAKIR]

ok I've uploaded a sample file;
it can be seen that some details are "routinely drawn" one under the other, and will continue like 1,2,3...n these details than will be gathered to form a sheet as in first layout. Working with layouts are trouble especially if one have many viewports in it. I want to configure and manage the sheet in the modelspace as it can be done in paperspace. By this way if I alter the "source" details the sheet will be updated.

[dzatto]

So what problems are you having doing it like the drawing you posted? You mentioned PS was slow and fragile. Could you explain that further, especially the fragile part?

Your drawing seems to work fine for me. It does take a second to load all the vports, and zooming while a vport is active has a tiny bit of lag. That can be taken care of by being in PS before panning and zooming. What other problems are you having?

[irneb]

The only "internal referencing" I can think of would be to make a block of the duplicated portion. You could still XClip it as you would with an XRef. It's just slightly diffent when modifying - as you'd have to use RefEdit or BEdit.

[misterbee180]

I have also ran into a similar question that may also be what you are looking into trying to solve.

If it is the same problem than I'm glad I found this and hopefully we can find a solution, if not then I would like to ask everyone to disreguard this post as it might distract from the original quesion.

I have created a fire excape plan for a building that has multiple floors and as it stands right now, each floor has a sperate autocad file. In each file consists of the x-ref'd floor design in model space, as well as a full sized map of the area the building is around. In the paper space I have my custom layout(all lines and plines) with a space for the viewport of the specific floor's plans as well as another space for the viewport of the area map. Also with this custom layout is writing for things like rules for fire excape and other things.

My building has 9 different floors which means 9 different files. This ultimately means that any time I want to change the position of some text that I have in the paper space, I have to go to each file individually and position the text in it's correct spot so all the floor plans match.

Today I recognized that this is a lot of work to have to change every file every time I want to make one change, major or minor. So then I decided that the smart thing to do would be to create an x-ref file of the entire custom layout so that when ever I needed to change anything it would change the layout on all 9 files with 1/9th the effort. Smart Idea I thought.

So I created a layout file and moved the typical layout into the model space so that I could x-ref it to any file I needed. It worked, but unfortunatly there was one problem. Originally i had those viewports that were on the custom layout, viewing both the floor plan for the particual floor as well as the picture of the area the building was in. Now, however, because I moved it from paper to model space the viewports no longer worked. So I said fine to the idea that the floor viewport didn't work because each floor would have had a different picture for that anyway. However, the picture of the area the building was in was common for each of the 9 layouts.

So this is where the idea of viewport in a modelspace came to me, thus my assumption that this would cover the same problem.

I realized that I could just place a second x-ref'd drawing in the modelspace and have a viewport for that on every drawing, but then I thought well if I needed to change the scale, for instance, of that area drawing, I would be stuck going drawing to drawing changing the scale of the viewport. Thus defeating the purpose of creating this file.

So what I want to do is figure out a way to have that viewport in that x-ref'd file so that I can change that viewport in that x-ref'd file and then update the file to all the floors so that it would be easy to make any changes I would ever need to that drawing.

I figure I'd give this reason as to why someone would want this feature so that people could understand where the need for a viewport in the model space might be useful.

Any suggestions. Thanks.

[jaberwok]

Simply put - this is (largely) why paperspace was introduced.
Blasto, the real question is "why do you have such problems with paperspace?"
Lack of RAM? Slow processor? Inadequate graphics card?

[smooth shoes]

Simply put - this is (largely) why paperspace was introduced.
Blasto, the real question is "why do you have such problems with paperspace?"
Lack of RAM? Slow processor? Inadequate graphics card?

*simplicity is a sign of genius*

I didn't have a problem opening up the drawing or switching spaces. Sounds like a computer issue, I'm sorry to say.

[Serhan_BAKIR]

I'm bringing up this old question because I found the particular reason why my paperspaces were so "fragile" and wanted to share it.

a sample drawing file, call it 5mb in size.
when opened, acad allocates 150mb memory for it.
when swicthed to a layout it allocates +450mb,
switching to second layout +450 and so forth..
my pc has 3gb of ram and after switching 4th layout fatal error occures and I'm kicked out.

So I found the answer in options->system->layout regen options->cache last layout
this option prevents caching of all layouts so memory errors do not occur anymore..

but anyway having viewports in modelspace is still a cool thing to wish for.. because working in paperspace is a bit slower than modelspace and doesn't feel that comfortable :)

[irneb]

There might be something "wrong" with the drawing. I've got several files open (each about 2 to 7 MB in size). Each of these files have several xrefs attached (xrefs ranging from 200k to 5M), and each of them also have 1 to 10 layout tabs.

Running Vanilla 2008, on XP(sp3) 32bit with 2 GB RAM, Pentuim Core2 6600 (2.4GHz), Quadro FX550 Graphics. Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+PgUp/Down swaps really quickly indeed with my physical RAM usage hovering between 1.2GB and 1.5GB. I've tried turning off the caching as you explain. All this does for me is ensure that a regen happens every time I switch a layout - RAM use is not affected much (now hovers 900MB to 1.3GB).

What version are you running? Are you sure you've got the latest updates? With the RAM scenario you're describing you shouldn't have a problem: A PC generally only starts slowing down after you're using more than half the available RAM. Might also be that the CPU is insufficient, or more probably your Graphics Card.

Lastly, are you using a lot of annotative objects, hatching, dynamic blocks, TTF fonts, etc. These all have a slight detrimental impact in performance and / or use up extra RAM.