Thursday 13 October 2016

Drawing Hidden Lines

In the drawing have you ever needed to show components buried down below?



I didn’t have a lot of time this week for blogging but I forced myself to wake up early today and write a couple of words on this trick I use quite a lot. Will try and keep it simple for now and will do a follow-up next week on layers and how to leverage them to your advantage.

                A lot of the times I find myself in need to indicate components that are not visible unless you change the view to hidden lines. That can be daunting for untrained eye to look at and it will clutter the drawing so I tend to avoid it if I can.
               
For example take a look at the vessel in the image bellow. Turning the view to hidden lines would have made a mess out of it with no way to identify what’s what. Showing just the legs in hidden lines makes a huge difference.

Hidden lines accentuate design.
To show a component you need to find it in the browser, right click, and choose "Hidden Lines".

Enabling hidden lines

As soon as you set hidden lines on you get a message saying "Dependent vies styles will become independent”.

Changing the view message

Sometimes the “Hidden Lines” menu will be grayed out and that is because your view has linked design view representation. For that you need to edit your view and tick the “Associative” box off as bellow.

Associative off on view properties

A new option is needed here besides “show hidden lines” and that should be simply “show” which will turn the model visible (in dotted lines because it is underneath in the background) without its internal geometry. I need to indicate the component in outline, not the whole geometry but that’s for a latter post.

Next new feature?
   
Take a look at the drawing below. The drain header is visible and I only need the outline body; normally we show all runs in hidden lines but this is just a sales proposal and I couldn't be bothered. This shows just enough info, eliminating clutter and accentuating design.

Way better, isn't it?

Later,
ADS


photo credit: Max Garçia Metallica (license)

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