I've noticed it before, and have been working around it for a while, but I think it's time for a shift in the way wyg handles draw orders in the CAD views. I totally understand the need for having a tiered list of draw orders based on the different elements of the drawing, but there should also be SOME way of drawing based on spatial order. For example, if I use risers to build out my stage elements, wyg handles it fine, but since the library staircase is a different type of element (object), it's drawn in front of EVERYTHING else no matter what else is there, no matter what view. This includes the mannequins of my band, which makes it VERY difficult to show a CAD drawing to an artist or other member of the creative team. Is there a workaround to have the draw order based on the XYZ position in the cad view types, or is there some other feature that can be added to allow the user to define the draw order in a more granular way?
In some cases 'Send to the Back' or 'Bring to the front' works (right click on the object), in other cases (that I do not really understand) this option is greyed out.
I'm also finding in some instances that doesn't really do anything at all. Like I said, there needs to be some kind of easy way to implement a spatial draw order, since wyg knows the xyz locations of every object already
Thank you all. I will look into all this by the end of June, with the outlook to make necessary improvements here in WYSIWYG 2024. At the moment, there is no way to base draw order on objects' location; it should certainly be possible to implement this (and it does seem to make sense) but atm, I cannot speak to what such implementation would involve, how much time it might take, etc.; I will discuss this with Soft. Dev. though, once my investigation is complete. As described in Help, the Send to Back / Bring to Front commands work "within" each category of items listed in Document Options > Draw Defaults > Draw Order -- and not "across" categories. Iow, if I place a fixture directly above another such that one is hung from the lower chord of a box truss and the other is side-hung from the upper chord, they would appear in Plan view like in the (top pane in the) following screenshot: If, for whatever reason, I wanted the green fixture to appear below the red fixture (again, in Plan view) I would select the green fixture and Send to Back. However, if I wanted the truss piece to appear above the fixtures, selecting it and clicking Bring to Front would do nothing, because in Document Options > Draw Defaults > Draw Order, Hang Structures currently appear beneath Fixtures. Thus, only if I had another piece if the same type of truss hanging directly under this one, could I choose one or the other and Send to Back / Bring to Front. This is how WYSIWYG works today and yes, there is room for improvement here. One solution may be location-based Draw Order, as Zakk suggested above, while another may be to simply allow Send to Back / Bring to Front to work "across" object categories -- and there may even be something else that makes sense which I haven't considered yet. Again, I will work through this and come back in a few weeks with more information... but if you guys have any further suggestions or ideas to share on this topic, please don't hesitate to reply on here (or email me if you wish) but I think an open discussion here would be to everyone's advantage. Thanks again, Dany
My issued comes up when you have objects like a band on stage and lights on the floor behind them. switching from front view to top view requires you to change the objects from send to front or send to back for each view to make it look right. When you have a design with hundreds of lights at various depths and then you also have multiple revision after revision this becomes a TON of work for each different view.
Here's an example of what I'm specifically referring to. My design in sketch mode looks like this: In CAD view, this is as close as I can get to a representation: Obviously, that's not what the real-world look would be, but it's not REALLY close enough to show to the members of my creative team and management to convey what I'm trying to do, ESPECIALLY when printing CAD plots.
