Micro Positioning a Drawing in a Viewport 1

[zdas04]

I'm working on developing an animation of a compressor piston moving in a cylinder. I drew the basic drawing and then used the "Array" command to duplicate it 60 times. Then I moved the piston to its position for each of the 60 time steps. This all worked well. Now I'm trying to get the drawings into Photoshop to create the animation.

It is pretty easy to create 60 layouts and then use the Adobe PDF generator to stick them all into a .pdf file. Problem comes when I take that into Photoshop. If every drawing is not perfectly aligned on its viewport then the compressor cylinder jumps all over the place in the animation and looks crummy.

To try to address this I put reference lines on all my layouts and am trying to move a corner of the drawing to match the reference lines. Problem is that while AutoCad will snap from Paper space to model space it doesn't seem to go the other way. I tried eyeballing the model over the reference lines, but this is pretty crude and doesn't do a great job even scrolled way in.

The other problem with this is that I keep running into jerky movements (i.e., I can either get the drawing 1/8" to the right of the reference or 3/16" to the left. I haven't been able to move the drawing to someplace between these points.

Anyone have any idea how to specifically position a model within paper space?

David

 

[PMR06]

From paperspace, move the viewport by first selecting a snap point in the model space and clicking it to some point in paper space.

I don't know if that made sense, but basically without being in model space, you can still snap to model space points. Pick one point in model space that doesn't move and always snap to it from paperspace.

 

[ProDraftsman]

Create one viewport. Set it up the way you need to and copy and paste the viewport or the whole layout. As far as if you want to switch something from model space to paper space use the command 'chspace' this will also work with from paper space to model. You might also consider locking the viewports once you get them set up.

 

[zdas04]

PRM06,
When I move a viewport it moves the drawing the same amount (i.e. the distance from the edge of the drawing to the edge of the viewport doesn't change), I'm trying to precisely place the drawing within the viewport and the viewport within the page.

ProDraftsman,
Thanks for trying, but I really don't want to switch the drawings from model space to paper space (I will if there is no other way, but I don't like having drawing content in paper space--BTW, AutoCad 2006 doesn't recognize "chspace"). I've copied the layout with the viewport on it 60 times and now I'm trying to pan model space in the layouts to put each of the 60 time steps into precisely the same location within their own viewport on their own Layout.

David

 

[PMR06]

The viewport location should not matter, unless its border is part of your final drawing. IMO, that is not good practice though.

As I described before, you can move the viewport so that model space is correctly lined up with respect to paperspace borders. Then you can stretch the viewport borders so that they are "correct".

Or you can just turn the viewport layer off.

Or you can just make the viewport layer no-plot so that they are still visible, but don't plot. (That's how all of my drawings are.)

 

[zdas04]

I got it. That is really clever. All I have to do is make the boundary of the viewport part of a layer that I can turn off prior to plotting (just like I'm doing with the reference lines). Thanks.

David

 

[zdas04]

Just as a follow-up, PMR06's approach worked perfectly to properly position the drawings on the pages. I just wish the conversion from .pdf into PhotoShop had been that clean. For some reason the converter is unable to not mess with the pages (there is an option for that, but it doesn't do anything). The animation jumped and jiggled all over the place so I had to go in and shift every drawing. The end result is pretty solid, but still jiggles some. I've uploaded it in case anyone is interested.

David

 

[PMR06]

Glad my viewport trick worked, but that's too bad Adobe was causing a headachee. The animation turned out pretty cool still.