Wipeout Woes

[Anonymous]

In Civil 3D 2007 - SP3 I'm creating a template containing blocks that have wipeouts in them. I'm turning the blocks into point styles and running into wierdness.

Bottom line is, when I let Civil 3D place these blocks via point creation, it is kind of a crap-shoot as far as whether or not their draw order is above or below existing polylines. In some cases the wipeout in the block sneaks to the front and wipesout more than it is supposed to!

Is there a slick way to force C3D to honor the wipeout's draw order in the block definition, while forcing the block itself to be in front on point placement?

Your input and/or sympathy is much appreciated.

[Anonymous]

What I do is go into the block editor, copy everything BUT the wipeout from
0,0 to 0,0 then erase previous. This means that the newest objects are on
top of the wipeout regardless of the draworder.

Doesn't work all the time, but most always.

Matt

[Anonymous]

When you click on one point and bring it to the front, the whole point group is brought to the front. It is therefore gernerallty quite easy to bring all the points to the front by selecting only one point of each point group.

[Sinc]

That's not the issue.

The problem is that the draw order of objects in block definitions is not honored when new instances of the block are inserted in a drawing. Instead, the new instances of the block will contain linework arranged in the order it was originally created. This is a bug in the program, and is particularly noticeable when you put wipeouts inside of block definitions.

It's annoying, but it can be worked-around as stated - by creating the linework in your block definition, then creating the wipeout, then copying all the linework in the definition and deleting the original linework. In effect, you draw the wipeout first. This causes all blocks created from the block definition to have the wipeout behind the other linework in the block.

[Anonymous]

Matt's suggestion has been extremely helpful. So far it seems to be working well! Redefining all the blocks will be tedious, but once its done they are going straight to a template.

Thanks!

Wipeouts are weird beasts. Have you ever noticed that they appear as raster images when you go to properties? No wonder they are quirky.

[Anonymous]

Sorry, I am just using a simple wipout (circle) as a point symbol, with no further linework inside that block. So I just need to get my points above the other linework to visually trim the linework back to the circle. This idea won't work in Louisa's case obviously.