Tip: 'Background Only' cover fills with pen sets in 10

[James Murray]

There is no 'Background Only' display option for cover fills. There should be.

Some wrote:
While it is efficient to show material fills directly on 3D polygons, cover fills are equally valuable for their masking ability. With a lot of display order manipulation, you can output a complicated roof plan consisting entirely of actual roofs. Cool.

If the roofs have a cover fill pattern, it's not practical to show the roofs themselves in other plans, such as site or framing plans. Too much clutter. But you can't turn the fill pattern off while keeping the masking function..

You can work around this using the new pen sets in 10.

0. The cover fills need an opaque background, of course. I assume it's white.

1. Choose a dedicated pen for the cover fill patterns. In your 'normal' pen sets, this pen should be visible, and the patterns show.

2. Create an (nearly) identical pen set where the pattern pen is white.

3. Assign the pen set to the drawing where you want the cover fills to be background only.

(Where the developer doesn't grant a wish, sometimes they enable a workaround.)

Pen sets are an exciting development in 10. They can give you graphical flexibility with less copying and re-drawing. I think standards will trend toward more dedicated pens, as pen sets offer the ability to tweak the appearance of 'classes' of elements in certain contexts.

[Anonymous]

James wrote:
Pen sets are an exciting development in 10. They can give you graphical flexibility with less copying and re-drawing. I think standards will trend toward more dedicated pens, as pen sets offer the ability to tweak the appearance of 'classes' of elements in certain contexts.

Yes indeed!