We have an area that is being dramatically replatted, for the third time in several areas. We are required to do an "As Platted" vs. "As Replatted" overview page.
All the core linework is in our base drawing. I *thought* I could create an "As Platted" DWG (with an XREF to our base drawing), and display/freeze layers in that drawing appropriately to show the "As Platted" conditions. Then create an "As Replatted" DWG (also with an XREF to the base drawing), and freeze/display layers in that drawing to appropriately show the "As Replatted" conditions. Then I had planned to XREF both the "As Platted" and "As Replatted" drawings into yet another drawing, where I could show them side-by-side on one layout.
However, it doesn't work. I went to a lot of trouble to get all the layer settings correct in both the "As Platted" and "As Replatted" DWGs, but as soon as I try to XREF them into another DWG, all the layer settings get reset to whatever I have set in my base drawing.
I suppose I could bind the base drawing into both the "As Platted" and "As Replatted" DWG, but I really hate to do that, since things might still change before we're done. I suppose another option would be to reduce the "As Platted" and "As Replatted" drawings to DWF, and use DWF underlays. That might be better, because if something changes, I can just recreate the DWF files.
Anyone else have any better ideas?
I'd never realized before that Autocad doesn't honor layer settings correctly when there are multiple levels of nested XREFs involved. Kind of caught me by surprise.
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Solved by Sinc. Go to Solution.
@Sinc wrote:
I'd never realized before that Autocad doesn't honor layer settings correctly when there are multiple levels of nested XREFs involved. Kind of caught me by surprise.
I'm almost positive it used to work like this, because I'm also pretty sure that I've used your exact procedure in the distant past. I run into the same issues during plan production. I have all the layers in my base drawing set how I want, but then I have to go into each new sheet and reset them. A real PITA.
Well, the DWF underlay route seems to be a no-go. It looks great on-screen, exactly the way I want it, but when I print it, all lines in the DWF get reset to the same lineweight. Both DWFs have every line at exactly the same lineweight.
HAH! PDF Underlay works, and gets the results I need, without needing to bind my drawings. That still gives me the flexibility I think I may need for up-coming revisions, and then all I have to do is recreate the PDFs as revisions happen (I hope).
So much for the vaunted DWF format...
Isn't VISITANT in charge of that?
Nested xrefs can be convoluted for sure. Have you tried renaming the base xref in the xref manager to like "base01" then attaching the next plat? Perhaps seeing the same xref name is confusing it
Joe Bouza
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I thoght for sure that would work - I've used it in the past but no go
Joe Bouza
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seems like you'll have to vplayer the sheet file?
Joe Bouza
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This is a pretty convoluted area, and I have no interest in redoing a whole bunch of work via VPLAYER settings. The PDF underlay is working just fine, so I'm going to let it go at that. Otherwise, I'd spend another several hours redoing all the layer settings I already did.
Things like this get really frustrating... I wish Autodesk would stop pushing out these yearly releases, and concentrate on getting at least ONE version working well. It seems every release breaks as many things as it fixes.
Hmm that's interesting. I think I would have tried attaching the drawings thru task pane in the Planning and Analysis workspace. I honestly don't know if that would work since I haven't tried but it should. If you make changes to any of the attached drawings you should see that changes. In the display manager you can change the coloring and linetypes with queries. Just a thought.
Tony
CAD Manager
www.tonyscivil3dworld.blogspot.com
I would suspect VISRETAIN as well, but how does it work with nested xrefs? I've never tried liking A->B->C to see if the "intermediate" settings in B affect how A appears in C....
Sinc:
I suppose that taking a layer snapshot that you can subsequently import into another drawing gets screwed up because of the xref naming convention.
Glad you found a way to make it work, but still doesn't seem like the best solution 😞
Yes... The basic problem is that I have a base drawing, call it A. A is referenced into B1 and B2. Then I try referencing both B1 and B2 into C. Since both B1 and B2 reference A, it seems to be causing problems. In drawing C, everything that comes from A takes on the layer settings from A, ignoring what I did in B1 and B2.
As Jeff said, I *think* this used to work. Not sure why it seems to be failing for me in C3D 2012. The PDF underlay solution is the only one I've been able to come up with that works.
I haven't studied this post in detail so forgive me if it's already been covered.
From my experience VISERETAIN is a global variable, meaning that if you set VISRETAIN to zero in any host drawing, the display of all source drawings will be controled by the source drawings. So if you change the color, linetype of freeze/thaw state in source drawing A, those changes will be reflected in the host drawing C.
Now if you ref A into B and A+B into C, you will not get the layer states from Ref A as it appears in ref B. You will get the layer states as shown in source A. It is a limitation of Autocad. This is one of those cases where Microstation has an advantage.
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