(nx5) permanently disable plane translucency?

[morans]

Hello, I was curious to see if this was possible. My team and I are constantly having to turn it off with each newly loaded part which I tend to hear a lot of complaints about. If I save it, close the part and then reopen... the plane translucency comes right back.

How can I disable this permanently?

thanks in advance
Steve

 

[JohnRBaker]

Not sure why you and your people don't like the appearance of Datum Planes, but if you really want to globally disable it, go to...

File -> Utilities -> Customer Defaults -> Gateway -> Visualization -> Performance(tab)

...and toggle ON 'Disable Plane Translucency', and hit OK and restart your NX session.

Now I would recommend that you remember how to turn this back ON since I suspect that eventually someone will ask for it back. After all, we added this behavior for a reason and I can count on 2 fingers the number of people who have asked me how to disable it. You make #3, and it's been over 2 years since NX 5.0 was released.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

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

 

[morans]

thanks a lot John. Works perfect.

I think most of the complaints, in our office at least, come from 1. not being the way it used to (many people don't like change... especially long time users of a particular software suite) and 2. if you're using many many datum planes in a part, it's tough to see through them with translucency turned on.


We're still getting used to a lot of the new/different features in NX5. We only upgraded a few months ago from NX3 (when our main customer upgraded) so it's been pretty slow going. Most of us have been using UG since version 15 (or older in some cases) and as they say, old habits die hard. They're happy as clams now though, thanks again.

-Steve

 

[JohnRBaker]

If you are a big user of Datum Planes, you may wish to look at something new which we added which will help you 'manage' them better (or for that matter, ANY class of objects). The next time you have a lot of Datum being displayed and perhaps they are getting a bit overpowering (with or without translucency set) go to...

Edit -> Show and Hide -> Show and Hide... (you can also select Ctrl+W)

...and a simple dialog will appear:

This dialog will show a list of object 'classes' (but only if an object of that type is actually in the current model) and a set of + - buttons which when selected will either immediately Hide(-) or Show(+) all objects of that type or 'class'. This can be very handy for removing from the display large amount of common data, such as a bunch of overpowering Datum Planes. Of course, if you only wish to turn a couple object back on, just select...

Edit -> Show and Hide -> Show...

...and select the objects you wish to to be displayed once more.

Note that of course the 'Show and Hide' as well as the 'Show' icons can also be found on the 'Utility' toolbar for quicker access.

Anyway, I think you will find that the 'Show and Hide' function can be a very powerful tool when working with a complex model with lots of different types of object in use.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

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

 

[morans]

thanks for the tip, john. I'll pass that around. I can see that coming in handy in the future.

Actually, since you're answering questions and what not. Why did ya's change the name from Blank/UnBlank to Hide/Show? Not that it matters much (I use the keyboard shortcuts), but I was just curious as to what spurred the name change.

I work with 3dsmax at home, and it uses "hide" and "show" opposed to the traditional "blank" and "unblank" you'd typically find in CAD software. I've heard a few people complain about it, but just told them to use keyboard shortcuts instead (or setup icons for them). I guess that I just found it odd that it had changed.

thanks again for all the help
Steve

 

[JohnRBaker]

If you look around, you will notice that in addition to Blank/Unblank, several names have changed over the last couple of releases, such as 'Hollow' is now 'Shell', and 'Taper' is now 'Draft'. Some of this was done to make the terms used on NX more consistent with other systems, which was the case with Hollow/Shell. Or it was felt that it was better to use terms which were used in the world of engineering, which is why we changed Taper, which was felt to be a mathematical concept, to Draft, which is more in line with what tool designers and manufacturing engineers called it.

However, when it came to Blank and Unblank, it was something totally different. It had more to do with how we designed NX to work when using a language other than English.

In case you've never thought about it, what happens is that as NX is running and a dialog is displayed, the system will, on the fly, replace every piece of text in the dialog using a scheme that matches the current text string with a matching text string found in the specified foreign language look-up table, which contains corresponding but translated text for EVERY text string found in any NX dialog or menu. Now if you think that this will slow NX down, well even those of you who are running the 'English' version of NX, the translation is taking place as you use NX since the user interface was actually coded in ALL CAPS and so this 'read & replace' mechanism, just as if it were translating say English to German, is 'translating' UPPERCASE ENGLISH to Mixed Case English (which is how we detect if there is no match yet defined for a new text string in NX since when running the software, usually in early integration phases, you will see occasionally see UPPERCASE TEXT in a menu or dialog).

Anyway, getting back to Blank and Unblank, the problem is that we have to actually research, decided on and enter all of the properly translated text strings and match them up with each text string we expect to find in NX. And as anyone who speaks multiple languages can tell you, often there is no one-to-one translation and so we have to be very careful that we use English words which will be unambiguous when looking for a foreign equivalent, but it helps IF the English word is ACTUALLY AN ENGLISH WORD!

Now we didn't have a lot of problems with Blank (although most of the Romance languages tend to think that this means White instead of being unseen or invisible) but it was Unblank that really messed us up. You see, there is NO word 'Unblank' in the English language!!!

If you don't believe me, try writing 'unblank' in MS Word. Or grab you Webster's and look it up. It's just ain't there. So if it's NOT in the standard English dictionary, why would we expect to find it one of the English-to-French or -German or -Spanish dictionaries?

This is just another example of how in English we have NO problem adding an 'un' as the prefix to a word and accepting the idea that it now mean the opposite, just like we all know what 'Uncola' means. So we had to find a replacement for 'Unblank' and a good alternative was 'Show', which then made 'Hide' the obvious choice to replace 'Blank'.

Anyway, I know that was a long reply, but I think it's useful for people to understand, and perhaps better appreciate, some of the issues which we (or any software vendor) has to live with when trying to make their products as easy to use as possible by the largest number of people as possible.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

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

 

[morans]

thanks a lot for taking the time it explain it. That makes perfect sense. Next time someone asks, I'll pass that bit of information along... as you said, it makes ya appreciate the work that went into creating UG a little more.