Documenting 3D Models: Part 8

Last time, we’d just started to talk about the Section View Style Manager for documenting 3D models. Let’s finish it off today.

We have three tabs left to discuss (remember we already covered “Identifer and Arrows”), the first of which is Cutting Plane.

As you may guess, this tab deals with the lines connecting the arrows at the ends of the section.

By default, “cutting plane lines” are selected, which means that a continuous line is drawn from start to finish. You can choose the color, linetype, and lineweight, but that’s it.

Your other option is to use “end and bend” lines, which are discrete segments that only appear at the start and end, and at any changes of direction if there are any. For these, you can still choose color, linetype, and lineweight, but you also have to set how long each segment should be, and whether the end segments should run past the arrows.

You’ll probably want to choose one style or the other for your sections—both won’t do you a lot of good.

The next tab is for the View Label.

This tab is really neat, because besides the standard appearance properties (style, color, height, etc.) you also get to control the content of the view label.

I hope all of you realized right away that the gray backgrounds in the image above indicate fields—intelligent text that references drawing or object properties. There’s actually an entire category of fields dedicated to Model Documentation, which let you automatically display a section’s scale, start identifier, end identifier, and type.

All four of these are included in the default label contents, along with some static text: a dash between the start & end identifiers, a paragraph break (\P), and the word SCALE.

Of course, you can add your own fields to this if you like, or change the formatting as needed, such as controlling the capitalization of labels and the display configuration of the scale.

Last but not least is the Hatch tab.

By default, cut items are hatched in section views. These hatch objects aren’t actually part of the section, though—they’re regular old hatches that can be modified as needed after they’re created.

So although you can only define one set of properties for default section hatches, you can always change them later to reflect different materials. You could turn it off entirely, but I think it’d be handy to see what was cut in a section, even if you needed to adjust the pattern later.