Plumbing drawings

[Anonymous]

I am drafting 2d plumbing line over my model. Is there anyway to make the background model show at half tone so the plumbing lines stand out on the drawing?

Jeff

[Bill]

The way I do it is two have two drawings in the layout sheet. The background drawing can be your floor plan, with a penset set to all grays. Then, over that, add another drawing with just the plumbing info, with its own penset that has the pens used for the plumbing info set to black.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your response. That works great.

Jeff
Archicad 15

[vfrontiers]

This is great technique...

COMMENT: If you Drag a Copy of the placed FLOOR PLAN on your layout and simply LINK TO DRAWING and choose your plumbing overlay, lining up the drawings is automatic. Just be sure you move them both together.

Having an ALIGNMENT hotspot is also advised. I used to have a layer named CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE for aligning.

Also, be careful about saved plan rotations...

SOAPBOX:
Just wish we didn't have to do it... I'd still like to see PEN OVERRIDE on LAYER COMINATIONS (similar to the wireframe button)... Here I could set up a PLUMBING COMBO that GREYS pens for all layers except my plumbing...

[Anonymous]

You don't even have to duplicate or overlay views. Just have unique pens for Plumbing elements, and in one pen set change all other pens apart from these to print grey. I do this with one pen set that gets used for Plumbing, Electrical and even Framing "overlay" plans where you want walls etc. in the background.

[Anonymous]

s2art wrote:
You don't even have to duplicate or overlay views. Just have unique pens for Plumbing elements, and in one pen set change all other pens apart from these to print grey. I do this with one pen set that gets used for Plumbing, Electrical and even Framing "overlay" plans where you want walls etc. in the background.

I have done this as well. It works well but does require a bit more discipline/attention to detail. This is why I recommend the overlay method to most of my clients. Some do prefer the pen set method though.

[Anonymous]

You can also create pen-sets for sepia, red, blue, dark and light gray and whatever color you fancy. That gives you the ability to generate any view with uniform color, to overlay whenever needed. For instance, a light gray floor plan with a red ceiling plan. It is a very flexible way of producing personalized layouts. To ensure alignment just drop a hotspot in all views, on the ArchiCAD default layer: never hidden, never plotted.

[JaredBanks]

Pen sets with unique pens is the way to go. No need to double up views on layouts. I did a series of blog posts on this a few months ago.

http://www.shoegnome.com/tag/pen-sets/