Hide user mesh contour lines ArchiCAD 20

[Paul King]

I am looking for a way to hide mesh user contour lines in elevations views, while showing them in plan views - preferably without fudges involving masking fills etc.

Is there a way in ArchiCAD 20 to do this with some arcane combination of graphic overrides and layers?

[Erwin Edel]

You can try adding a rule to change the line / marker / text pen to a white pen for Meshes, see if that does the trick.

Terrain around here in NL is rather flat, so I'm not very experienced with sloping meshes

[Paul King]

Erwin wrote:
You can try adding a rule to change the line / marker / text pen to a white pen for Meshes, see if that does the trick.

Terrain around here in NL is rather flat, so I'm not very experienced with sloping meshes

Thanks Erwin. That was what I tried playing with before giving up - though have never really tried view overrides before, so may be getting it wrong.

I can make ALL mesh lines white, which makes the ground line and other cut lines disappear as well, but cannot select only the contour lines to become white.

Even with all white lines, shadows cast on the ground are broken up with white lines now instead - which is just as undesirable.

That particular issue I can sort-of overcome by overriding with a very sparsely dotted linetype - but again not without messing up the desired cut lines of the mesh.

I was able to get meshes cut by elevation markers to display solid white below the ground line - which was a nice discovery - but so far nothing that impacts the display of user contour linework of meshes only.

[Erwin Edel]

Just had a quick look, what I suggested changes all the contour lines to white. Without actually having 2 meshes, I don't think there is a way to do what you would like.

[Anonymous]

This will be a useful thing to hide the uncut walls in a underground level when viewing a section. But if you use the site colour when the mesh match the sectioned wall then it hides the line of the wall. Unless there is an override that push the white line back when come across a colour line.

[Erwin Edel]

You can use display order in sections, if that helps (bring forward, send to back etc) with lines overlapping in 'wrong' order.

If you don't mind having some extra sections or elevations for 'special' display, I've actually setup two elevations for a project with a basement level at the moment.

First elevation shows the building until terrain (again, our part of NL is flat so that is just one straight line!), I achieve this by limiting the vertical range from terrain (-100) to 'more than enough to show the building' (50000).

Second elevation is only for the basement which I want to show as a dashed contour. This one is limited from 'bottom of basement' (-4000 or something like that) to terrain (-100 again). For this second elevation I have made a special layer combination (only showing the structure of the basement and a graphic override rule that makes all the lines dashed. I can also now have shadows for the building and just plain simple contours for the basement.

Place both views on a layout and you have a combined view.

It takes a few minutes to set up, but after that it is just updating automatically like everything else in the plan.

I do just model the terrain with a thin slab though, so not as complicated as a mesh.

[Anonymous]

That work in a flat plot but if you have a sloped plot it is hard to adjust that workaround. By other hand if you have to lines overlapping and one of the two is white, never mind you change the order always the white line hide the black one.

[Erwin Edel]

With sloped plot, you could maybe manually change the placed view on layout (change the contour of the placed drawing to follow terrain contour). Not the best automatic solution, but might get the presentation you are after?

[Paul King]

If I understand what you are proposing correctly (clipping the lower edge of placed drawing to follow the cut ground line?), that would only work if the terrain was a tilted plane (or other linear extrusion with consistent cross section profile ) that was cut parallel to the slope.

If that rare situation was the case, then we wouldn't have the problem of terrain contour lines being visible beyond the cut plane anyway.

[Sam Parish]

This is probably a really late reply but we were just having the same problem and found this thread. We managed to solve it, ish by making a copy of the mesh and putting it on a separate layer specifically for elevations, then converting this to a morph with hidden edges.

This shows up correctly in elevation, the main downside is that you need to remember to make a copy of your mesh and convert it to a morph whenever you change the mesh.

Not too bad if the design is pretty set and you're tidying up the drawings but not ideal if you are going to be changing the mesh regularly.