Monday, February 7, 2011

Structural Connection Families - Hidden Lines

Working more and more with 3D connections, something that has always been a little odd to me is that Structural Connection families dont behave how you would expect

A very common but simple connection detail is highlighted below, a simple cleat plate connection (cleat highlighted in red)

3D view of face hosted cleat plate, with family set to "Structural Connection"
 If we then cut a section or take a callout at the far face of the connection at the connection location, we dont see the cleat plate. It doesnt matter how we configure the view settings, the cleat plate will not show. Ideally the cleat plate would show automatically following the functionality of all other "Structural" elements when set to a view discipline of structural
Section or callout taken at connection location


 So the next approach I try is to set my discipline to "Co-ordination" which allows me to use "Show Hidden lines"

But with the family set to "Structural Connections" I cannot actually select the cleat plate family, it is simply not able to be used with "Show hidden lines"

If I then edit my cleat plate family, and set the family category to "Generic Model" show hidden lines will work
Example of hidden lines displaying when set to "Generic Model"
 This workflow is something that I have used without stopping to ask why it doesnt work as "Structural Connection" but recently I submitted it to Autodesk support, I am likely not the first, hopefully we can see a fix in the near future

2 comments:

  1. This problem has been hanging around for as long as I can remember.

    I have also reported it to Autodesk.

    Maybe it will be fixed by the 2015 release :-)

    Glenn

    http://revitst.blogspot.com

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  2. This was really helpful, thank you!! You've solved my problem. Hopefully this is resolved for 2015, like Glenn says.

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