Welcome to the next installation in the Documenting 3D Models series. (Click here for Part 6, in case you’ve forgotten what it was.)
When we left off, we’d just created a section view of our 3D model. It looked something like this:
Let’s see what we can do to customize these views. On the Layout tab, you’ll notice the “Styles and Standards” panel.
It has two pull-downs, one for section view styles and one for detail view styles. (It also has a panel launcher—the arrow in the bottom right corner—but that’s a topic for another day.)
Clicking the icon next to the section view style name brings up the Section View Style Manager:
Choosing New or Modify brings up another dialog where you can set the appearance and content of the section line and label. You’ll notice it has a bit in common with dimension styles, so if you’re used to working with those, this should be easy.
Let’s start with the first tab, Identifier and Arrows.
Most of this is pretty straightforward, like text style/color/height and symbol shape/size/extension. But there are also a few nifty features that are unique to this kind of labeling.
First, you can choose characters to exclude in the automatic labeling. For instance, many companies don’t use “I” (“eye”) in their labels, because it looks too much like “1”. (See?) Same thing for “O” and “0”. So you can just skip them.
You can also choose to place identifiers at every bend of the section (if it has them), and to use continuous labeling—which would make the section above A-D, with B and C being applied to the interior bends.
The other section in this dialog has to do with the placement of the identifier. You have all kinds of choices for this:
Lastly, you can choose whether the arrows point away from the cutting plane (the default) or towards it.
In the next post, we’ll cover the rest of the tabs in this dialog.
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