Drafting: Partial Shading and Render Sets

[CNSZU]

Hello,

I have an assembly consisting of a two components: component A is a big cube, and component B has two smaller cubes. The goal is to create a partially shaded drawing with the appearance like the modeling application (see attached image). The way the drafting application displays partial shading it's very difficult to see the inside cubes clearly.

As you can see, there is a difference in the way the modeling and drafting applications display "Partial Shading". In Modeling, the inner two cubes are drawn with lines, in Drafting the lines on the inner two cubes are missing. It seems to me the only way you can display the lines in Drafting is to create render sets. If anyone knows something better, please let me know.

Anyway, I've found that to create render sets is prohibitively cumbersome.

Question: In the "Define Render Sets" dialog box, is there a way to select ALL solids in all components in the assembly? It seems you can only select solids one by one. In this example, there are only two solids (the inner cubes), so it's not too much trouble. If you have hundreds of solids, it will take too long time to select all the solids, thereby making the render sets method useless.

Please come with suggestions.



NX8 i7-3770K@4.3Ghz 16GB Quadro2000

 

[JohnRBaker]

Create your Partially Shaded view WITHOUT using 'Hidden Lines' and then manually remove the unwanted lines using the 'Erase Object' option using...

Edit -> View -> View Dependent Edit...

...as I did in the view below:

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[CNSZU]

Yes, that's a solution. However if you are going to create a drawing sheet with a some drawings of a medium sized assembly, you are going to spend the rest of your life.


NX8 i7-3770K@4.3Ghz 16GB Quadro2000

 

[JohnRBaker]

Just like back in the old days, before automated hidden-line removel (scroll down to the second set of images)...

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=237

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[CNSZU]

Very interesting! Makes me very happy I'm alive today and not then...poor guys.

To go off on a tangent, maybe this answers some of my concerns about drafting in NX in general. For example the issue of the horrendous time it takes to simply update a drawing of a medium complex surface model made with splines and how it seemingly struggles to cope with silhouette curves and hidden lines, which are often drawn inaccurately, that is not an issue with other 3D cad packages. It could simply be that NX is an old program with code that was made 30 years ago. I've always wondered why drafting views can't update immediately, with the same speed as in the Modeling application. When you rotate a model in Modeling, there is no lag at all, the whole view updates instantly (due to graphics card). For example, in the Modeling application you can display a 6-view layout, and all 6 views would appear instantly. Creating the same views in Drafting would take 10 minutes! It makes no sense. Of course, setting the "interference curves" to none in the hidden lines view style, will greatly increase the speed, at the cost of making the drawing look unattractive, but again, this is not even an issue with other CAD packages. So I'm very confused about this whole NX drafting thing.



NX8 i7-3770K@4.3Ghz 16GB Quadro2000

 

[JohnRBaker]

It could simply be that NX is an old program with code that was made 30 years ago.

Nothing could be further from the truth...

A hidden-line view in modeling is done using the graphics display card and firmware while in Drafting you have to actually compute and create curves which must be added to the Drawing views. And they must be created in such as way that when a change or update is performed that things like dimensions and labels are properly updated as well, again something that is NOT needed in modeling since things like silhouettes are not referenced by anything in modeling. They are there only to make a pretty picture, something which is not acceptable in Drafting. Drawing views need to show the model exactly as it is since for many people the drawing becomes their 'data record'.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.