Marked Distant Area Default Pen

[Anonymous]

Hi, just wondering what determines (or how do I change) the default pen for marked distant areas. Ie if I simply turn on the marked distant area within a elevation or section, with no overides to uncut contours, no shadows on, no vectorial hatching, etc it shows as a different pen. In a project I am working on it is a pen 22 (found after exploding the elements). However if I open a new Archicad with default template its a different pen. See attached screen shot for clarification on this.

[Barry Kelly]

Tick the box for "Uniform Pen for Uncut Contours" and you can change the pen colour there.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Yeah thanks I get that.... My question was if you leave it 'unticked' what determines the colour/pen?

[Barry Kelly]

cornishms wrote:
Yeah thanks I get that.... My question was if you leave it 'unticked' what determines the colour/pen?

It seems to just automatically be finding a lighter shade of the un-cut pen colour.
If you change the un-cut pen colour of the wall the marked distance pen seems to automatically find a random pen that is a slightly lighter shade.
And if it can't find one it stays the same colour - it won't choose white.

Experiment by setting up multiple walls all with different pen colours for the un-cut pen and then explode them as you did before.
You should find they will all be lighter shades of the original - if you have those colour pens in your palette too.

i.e. black to grey, dark blue to light blue.
If you don't have lighter shades I think it just finds a pen that is similar but lighter i.e. red will become orange if you don't have a pink

Barry.

[Anonymous]

hmmm interesting. Thanks for your reply mate.

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure that it is specifically using a lighter pen. When I first noticed that it did this I tried to use it to my advantage and created a pen set with slightly darkened versions of all my pens to use for thinner lines in the marked distant area. This way my vectorial hatches could be proportionally thinner as well as the lines. (using "uniform pen" for "marked distant area" overwrites the hatch with the same pen as the object pen)

My understanding of it at the time was that it chose the pen 1 notch down in the grid so I changed the whole second row of pens to match the top row but be slightly darker and thinner.
It worked beautifully for months, Pen 1 would be overridden to pen 21 in the distant area, etc.
But suddenly this week the program started automatically choosing a different pen. Pen 1 now becomes Pen 41. The odd thing is, It started doing that in all my projects, at the same time. So while this leads me to believe that there is in fact some order to this madness, It also leads me to believe that I will never truly be in control of it. That is why I came here looking for answers. Does anyone know how to control this random selection?
I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help.

[Erwin Edel]

We used to have some of those 'other' pens set up as very light (pen weight) black pens to use marked distant area. Pen 2 (our default outline pen) becomes / became pen 222 I think.

The last project I used it on seemed to by default 'grey out' the distant area a bit, but by now we are extensively using Graphic Overrides to show elevations in colour or black and white etc, so this might also have an effect on things (showing the Elevation as own surface colour non-shaded).

There is order to the madness and voodoo, but honestly it could be a lot better.

One default pen works half the time and as said apparantly you can get a greyed out look too somehow.

I've accepted long ago that there will not be true '2D CAD' control over everything you see as a trade-off to having every change to the model update properly across all drawings.