topic Re: greyscale a module? in Documentation

greyscale a module?

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:18:31 GMT

does anyone know if you can make an entire module appear in greyscale (or one pen) without altering the source file?

Re: greyscale a module?

__archiben — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:30:59 GMT

for element contour pens, define a penset that only has black/greyscale pens in it.

for the actual surface hatching you have two choices: use the 'internal engine' in 'hidden line' mode, or - what you don't want to do i presume - redefine all of your materials to display in monotone . . .

HTH
~/archiben

Re: greyscale a module?

__archiben — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:40:29 GMT

actually, i just had another idea which you could use - but at your own risk:

depending on the extent to which you rely on the 'internal engine' for presentation work: you could set up all of the materials 'vectorial hatching' to have solid fills and a pen override of varying shades of white/grey/black.

that will effectively put a solid surface colour over any internal engine view that has 'vectorial hatching' turned on. it will scupper any other presentation work that makes use of vectorial hatching though . . .

~/archiben

Re: greyscale a module?

__archiben — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:45:39 GMT

uh oh! i think i may have misunderstood for the second time this afternoon!

you want a single module within another, bigger model file to show as white, right? like a foam-board model placed in context?

in which case i think you may be right out of luck without re-defining all of the materials. you could devise some clever tricks using attribute manager and material attribute GUIDs, but quite honestly that would require the kind of heavy maintenance that would make just swapping out materials seem easy. if you need to do it lots, you could save all of the various element selections by using the Palettes>Selections tool and grouping them all by material . . . ?

did any of that make sense, or am i shooting too high?
~/archiben

Re: greyscale a module?

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:54:48 GMT

It makes sense....but yeah - shooting too high.

I was just thinking about documentation in 2D

We are using the architectural design module in the documentation of hydraulic services - hence the need to grey out the building and make the pipework diagrams 'punchier'.

Another option that I thought of was to use drawings in PDF (2D) which can be greyed out (I think?) or Xref? but there is a couple of instances where we need to cut a section/elevation to show how pipes trace around certain structural elements....as I see it its one or the other

Re: greyscale a module?

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:59:22 GMT

You want something like the " Enable object's pens" option in objects settings, which you would DISable in order to set the pen for the whole object. Correct? Not sure there is one.

But if you create a pen set where all pens are grey except for your specific Hydraulic Services pens this will achieve what you want.

Re: greyscale a module?

__archiben — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:06:59 GMT

s2art gave me an idea...

what you could do is save the entire building model as a library part *.GSM file rather than use a module.

it's not quite as automatic, but is pretty streamline compared to the other options:

once placed in your target file, do as s2art suggests but with the materials setting - un-check "Use Objects Settings" and instead assign a material to the whole thing that makes use of the solid fill vectorial hatching method i described above.

the drawbacks to this are that it isn't quite automatic, but publishing a new updated GSM file from the original model is quite easy once you have a specific view defined for it. secondly - you loose any glass transparency.

any good?
~/archiben

Re: greyscale a module?

Erika Epstein — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:15:55 GMT

Use the ease and power of a custom pen set.
Create a printing pen set which will be applied to the drawing in the layout:
- The Hydraulic pens will be what ever pen color and width you want.

- Similarly the pens for the remaining parts of the building can be set to gray or screened and what ever width you want so they will be lighter.

The pens used for the hydraulic system should not be used anything else for that view.

Re: greyscale a module?

Ignacio Azpiazu — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:52:04 GMT

Check out archiben's drawings in this thread
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=10423&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=20

If you are OK with working with whatever you have in modelspace, then all you need is two pen sets for your drawings -- and no need to mess around with the module.

That's assuming that the architectural guys are using pens that you need for your piping. Otherwise it is just a single pen set as Erika said.