Is there a way to show structural lines only?? HELP!

[Anonymous]

Hello all,

My firm primarily does residential stick frame buildings. We send out our drawings to structural engineers who use AutoCAD. Here's the problem.

We are having issues when we publish a drawing. We want to show just the stud lines in the wall composite. Currently, we use the Model View options to make the walls solid (the engineers hate all the lines/fills that come in our composite walls as they explode when changing to a DWG). This makes a solid wall that shows no indication of where the studs are, as there are many components to our composite walls. I've added the skin separator lines but again it includes a bunch of lines the engineers have to clean up before they draft it.

Here's my question. Is there a way to have just the studs shown without changing the wall type?

[Anonymous]

There is not a truly clean solution yet (it is a long standing wish though) but in the meantime you can get close by tweaking the DWG translator. The trick is to put the separator lines on a separate layer (see illustration) this way the consultants can hide or purge the other wall layers and be left with the stud outlines. Some firms I know do this themselves in AutoCAD so they don't have to count on their consultants' expertise etc.

For this to work properly it is best to restrict your composites to three layers (or two in the case of furring walls) consisting of one for the core structure and one for each of the skin assemblies.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Matthew I will give that a try... seems a little tricky for my feeble mind but I will try!

[Anonymous]

Yes, it is a bit of a kludgy workaround. Many of us are hoping for a better way.

[Anonymous]

Matthew,

I am trying to do this and ran into a couple problems...

Do you put the stud lines on one layer and the other separator lines on another layer? How do you do that? I only see an option to put all the separator lines on a specific layer, not break it down into multiple layers.