Surface Fills - Why no background option?

[Liamthanks]

Can anyone advise why there is no option for the cover fill of a surface to have both a foreground AND a background option like a normal fill does? Is there a workaround for this at all? 

My specific situation is a tiled splashback where I'd like to have a solid fill for all tiling, however an alternative surface to have the same solid background colour but with a foreground fill over it to indicate a different finish/material. Right now I have to manually put a 2D fill over the top to do this, but it seems like such an obvious feature to have this as part of the surface options? Am I missing some obvious setting somewhere? 

Operating system used: Windows

[Barry Kelly]

With surfaces you will only see the foreground (hatch pattern) of the fill and not the background.

This way in the basic 3D engine you see the surface colour you have set for that particular surface and in Hardware Acceleration engine (OpenGL), you will see the texture image if you have one.

The surface colour or texture is your background.

For the hatch you will only see the foreground lines and you can choose to use the element's uncut pen colour or you can set a specific colour.

So in your case you would have to set up 2 surface materials, one with a cover fill and one without.

Repeat for each different colour/texture that you need.

Barry.

[Liamthanks]

Hey Barry,

I'm not phased about the 3D view, my query relates towards the internal elevations. 

[Barry Kelly]

Elevation views are just special 3D views.

In the elevation settings you can choose to show the surface colours, textures or you can override to use a particular pen colour for all surfaces (that doesn't help if you want to see individual surface colours).

You can also choose to show the 'surface - cover fill foreground', but again that is global for all surfaces - not what you want.

If you have your elevations set to show surface colour (or surface texture - I don't recommend that as it causes problems printing PDFs), and 'surface - cover fill foreground' is on, they will show the surface colours and hatching as you have set up for each surface material.

For each colour surface you want you will need 2 different surfaces, one with a hatch pattern and one without.

And in 3D (basic engine) they look just the same.

Barry.

[Liamthanks]

My internal elevations are set to "Uniform Pen - Color Fill, Non-Shaded" and also have the the "Surface - Cover Fill Foreground" option selected as I don't want the surface colours from any other element to come through as I want to keep the plans in black, white and grey. 

The example below shows the glass splashback displaying with no background colour, so the splashback to the left has used a standard solid fill from the surface and I have manually had to draw a 2d hatch over it. 

[Barry Kelly]

Sorry. I was assuming you wanted to see different coloured surfaces.

As you have the uncut fills set to override with a 'null' pen, you will not see the colour of any of the surfaces.

You can see the foreground hatch pattern associated with the surface (the diagonal lines in your surfaces).

The 50% hatch on the right will have to be added with a separate fill.

All I can suggest as a workaround is to set up the glass splashback surface with a percentage fill rather than the 'stonework stressed' fill (diagonal lines).

You can create multiple splashback surfaces, 20%, 40%, 60%, etc.

You can set different colour hatch pens as well.

But they won't have much of an impact if you are going for the greyscale look and you end up printing in greyscale.

You will then have different shades of grey (or what ever pen colour you choose) for the different surfaces, but you won't have the diagonal lines unless you add a separate fill again.

Barry.