The View Controls
Design in both Two and Three Dimensions!
These are your main controls
With the controls in this banner, you can do a lot:
- Choose a view of your design
- Show or hide dimensions
- Show or hide hidden dimensions
- Show or hide the coarse grid
- Show or hide the resolution grid
- Show or hide the print margin
- Control the visibility and location of the origin crosshairs
- Center the outermost group, around the origin
- Switch to and from the Cutting Diagram
- Speed up redraw performance for drawings that contain many objects
You can also find these choices in the Design Views menu.
Choosing a view
Design Intuition creates all the views of a drawing as soon as you open the design and keeps them all up to date, no matter which one you happen to be working on. Currently, there are nine views from which to pick:
- 2D -- Front
- Right
- Top (or Plan)
- Left
- Back
- Bottom
- 3D -- all the above view buttons work
- Materials List
- Details
Views 1, 8 and 9 have a Cutting Diagram mode, which means that their content changes when the checkbox labeled Cutting Diagram changes between checked and unchecked.
Several views at once
Open more than one view and watch this happen. How? Hold the Alt key down when you choose a view to open a new window of that view.
Printing
When you want to print a view, switch to that view and click the Print icon or click on the File menu and select Print...
The Origin Crosshairs
Both the 2D and 3D views provide optional crosshairs going through the origin. They are visible when Origin Crosshairs is checked.
Change their intersection point by holding down the spacebar key and click-dragging the mouse. To recenter the origin (the point at which the crosshairs intersect), click the Center Origin button. If you find that the origin point has moved off the visible area, click the Center Origin button to center them.
You can change the color of the origin crosshairs in the Colors Inspector.
You might want to set the crosshairs to a particular spot in the drawing and draw everything relative to that point. If you do so, the ordinal positions of all objects -- in all three dimensions -- will be relative to the point you set.
Using X-Ray Vision to See Through Objects
Sometimes when you're creating a complex three-dimensional drawing, you might want to align an interior object with an exterior one. How do you do so if you can't see the interior object? Easy -- use the X-Ray Vision slider in the Views tool bar to adjust the document's opacity. You can make the document be completely opaque (you can't see through objects), clear (all objects become mere wireframes), or anywhere between the two extremes. This slider is marked "opaque" on the left and "clear" on the right.
X-Ray Vision does not affect the grid's visibility.
Object Drawing Performance
Design Intuition provides a lot of information about your drawing, immediately updating it as you edit. This can be a disadvantage when you have a large number of objects in a drawing. So, you can improve overall editing peformance, by clicking the Go Fast radio button in the Views toolbar. In Go Fast mode, information values everywhere don't update until after you release the mouse.
Another way to speed editing is to turn off Object Snapping and Grid Snapping.
