Showing posts with label window. Show all posts
Showing posts with label window. Show all posts

Monday, 1 February 2016

Window Selection in Parts

Don’t you just hate that there is no window selection for part environment? If you need to select more than one item at a time you need to hunt and pick instead of making a window selection.

The other day I have received a 3D building from our client so we can finalize the plant layout. I import that into a single part multiple-body environment for sake of simplicity and because I don’t want to manage, vault, multiple files.

                Revit export, the model has about 750 bodies and in some cases, in parts like this, the bodies are grouped in a sequential order so you can select multiple (with SHIFT) and take off Visibility. I usually select around 50 at a time and do a SHIFT selection in the browser and turn off several at a time.
~750 bodies.
                This particular model had way too many bodies (walls, doors, windows) and the ones for my plant room were all over in the structure tree making it ready difficult to do a browser selection.

                Thought to go clever and fudge an ilogic code I had around to rename browser nodes. As long as you keep selecting bodies the code will turn them off. This worked out pretty good but it quickly turned into a “sharp shooter” point and click game and I looked for a better solution. I was a real pain to select  small bodies (door handle for example) and large ones (sectional walls) at same time.

Point and click but way too slow.
                Here is the code if you ever need it:

Dim comp As Object
Try
    While True
        comp = ThisApplication.CommandManager.Pick(
            SelectionFilterEnum. kPartBodyFilter,
            "Select a component")
        comp.Visible = False

    End While
Catch ' do nothing if error

End Try

                And here is the better solution.

                Create a new Design View Representation because the Default is locked and you can’t change it.

                Place the part in an assembly and change selection filter to Bodies.
Change your filter selection first.
Activate the unlocked design view representation for that part.
Activate the correct Design View Representation.
 Now you can do window selections and turn visibility off for several at once. When you do that remember to choose Modify Design View Representation because you want to change the part as well.
               
Window selection speeds things up.
                And that’s it, simple trick, but it saved a lot of time.

Later,

ADS.


photo credit: Snail climbs window pane (license)

Thursday, 24 July 2014

Quick Properties and Shift Deselect

Short posts today on a couple of issues I had with Autocad.
                First tip is disabling the Quick Properties Window. If every time you select an object on Autocad you get a pop-up properties window then you’ve enabled the quick properties display option. What’s worse is that it doesn’t have a name or title so you can’t really tell what you've activated.

                You can type QPMODE and change it to 0.


                Or you can click on the customisation menu on the right down corner, add Quick Properties to the expanded menu and then click on the new icon to turn it on/off.


Here’s the help page description.

Type:
Integer
Saved in:
Registry
Initial value:
1
Sets the on or off state of Quick Properties palette.
0
Turns off the display of the Quick Properties palette for all objects. When turned back on by clicking Quick Properties on the status bar, QPMODE is set to 1
1
Turns on the display of the Quick Properties palette for all objects
2
Turns on the display of Quick Properties palette only for objects that are defined in the Customize User Interface (CUI) Editor to display properties
Note When this system variable is set to a negative number, the feature is turned off but the value is retained.

                Second tip regards the wrong behaviour of shift to deselect objects. It seems Raster Design has an option to “Shift+Left Click to Image select”. The shift hijack can be turned off by typing IOPTIONS and deselecting the “Shift+Left Click to Image select” in the User Preferences tab.




                ADS

Wednesday, 9 July 2014

Autocad Object Slection

A while ago I posted a blog on the autocad selection tools and now I am returning a bigger list of options for Select command. Greg Battin has put a list together and I’ve decided to share it here.

“Options when selecting objects
When you are asked to “Select Objects: ” you have options.
before selecting objects when prompted to do so, (even in the above command) choose one of these options:
Window/Last/Crossing/BOX/ALL/Fence/WPolygon/CPolygon/Group/Add/Remove/
Multiple/Previous/Undo/AUto/SIngle/SUbobject/Object
§  W for Window
§  L for Last
§  C for Crossing
§  BOX
§  ALL
§  F for Fence
§  WP for WPolygon (Window Polygon
§  CP for CPolygon (Crossing Polygon)
§  G for Group
§  A for Add
§  R for Remove
§  M for Multiple
§  P for Previous
§  U for Undo
§  AU for AUto
§  SI for SIngle
§  SU for SUbobject


§  O for Object”

Thank you Greg,

ADS