Until now, Materials and Appearance have been separated from the rest of the settings. For instance, you could navigate to the Cladding page of Roof Coverings, and choose a cladding type and dimensions. But to set the material and pens for the cladding, you would have to navigate first to the Materials page, then to the Appearance page.
All settings pertaining to a given component of the object can now be accessed on a single page of the interface.
To achieve this logical grouping, two new interface controls have been introduced:
1. Component Property Control
At the top right of the page is a control to show either Model, Materials or Appearance. Click either button to display the settings that control that property of the component.
Navigating between different components leaves the current property in effect. This means that it is just as quick to set the materials for all components.
2. Component Part Control
The second new interface control is a drop-down list at the top left of the dialog. This allows you to access settings for sub-components or component parts.
For instance, the Wall Covering has a page named Coverings, on which the following component parts may be edited:
· Cladding
· External Corner Trims
· Internal Corner Trims
· Butt-End Trims
· Cladding Change Trims
2 Comments
11th May 2012
Have to say on the most part this is great but fails in others. Example is setting up the roof coverings takes twice as long as the interface is not as friendly or descriptive as the pervious method, especially setting up pen sets for the various types of elements for plan view; home view, storey up or down.
21st May 2012
To ensure that pens and fills don’t change on loading the updated library into an existing project, we had to provide a comprehensive set of attributes for each component. This makes the dialog for existing Roof Coverings look somewhat unwieldy.
If you model a new roof covering, you’ll see that the interface is a lot simpler. Rather than using zero pens to hide components of the roof covering, a separate Display Options page now provides checkbox control for which components to show/hide.
You can also simplify the dialog for existing roof coverings. Go to the Display Options > 3D and Section page and set the Use Same Pens for 3D and Plan View checkbox to On. If you do this, one set of pens and fills will apply to all stories. Then you can use the checkboxes to determine which appears in the home story, or stories above and below.
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