Lines Plan Over Crowding

[John Owles]

Following my previous post on the subject of the Lines Plan output in DS (posted in the wrong section) and I note that you might take a look at this problem, may I make a further plea to Mission Control for the output of the Lines Plans to be tidied up a wee bit more.

Having design a hull, I then use the Lines Plan in TourboCad, including the vital grid, to generate components for the building jig. There are three main areas where this relatively simple task is made quite tricky.

1. As previously noted, the vertical shift is not enough to separate appendages from the area below and leads to overlapping.

2. Depending upon which layout is chosen, horizontally adjacent grids overlap each other.

3. There is a mix of line types within the output. Splines are fine as these curves can be easily selected. However, exploded polylines, especially those that are on top of each other – such as square section keel lines etc – are very difficult to isolate and make this part of the process very difficult and time consuming. Selecting a line can, under some circumstances, result in a choice of a couple of splines and ten or more line segments! I realise that modern society decrees that we must have more choice but this is a tad overwhelming.

Not being a programmer, I have no idea how possible it would be to deal with the last item but if these areas could be addressed it would raise DS from a superb piece of software to a thing of wonder and amazement.

Thank you in anticipation.

[giorgio zuppin]

Sorry Mr.J, it’s all fine but I got rid of unwanted stuff simply by layers management.
Working in autodesk actually, no problems.
Maybe something I’m not aware?
Bye, Jurgen.

[giorgio zuppin]

All right… “simply” maybe NOT so appropriate. Polilynes et al. need a huge time spent in choose and make visible/ or not.
But ref. lines, grid, intersections came all in own layers so…
Bye, Jurgen.

[John Owles]

Quite correct Jurgen, switching layers does help to a certain extent. However, if you want to extract a copy of the grid and the body plan, for example, there can be a lot of picking – especially if there are a lot of stations. Polylines can be a real pain, particularly if there are a number of the little blighters sitting on top of each other. The example that I am working does not have too many intersections but……..

All is possible but this is just an observation to, perhaps, make life a little easier.

JayOh

[giorgio zuppin]

If you need to isolate and correct some of them, Polylines ARE a real pain, but life’s not easy: we could be small rodents wandering through saurians legs although.
As partial reward I can say other CAD offer no better treatment, at last layers assignement in DS linesplan .DXF is plain and even:
in other cases it’s not so easy.

[Author]

Posts