AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

In Section View the material region is filled with a solid hatch, this obscurs other objects such as the bounding surfaces and labelling.

• For some reason the material hatch is always on top in the display order
• Manually forcing it to the back in the display order is possible. This is not a reasonable solution due to the time involved and repetition.
• Transparency allows the objects beneath to be visible but their tooltips are not functioning due to the overlap. The same would apply to using something other than a solid hatch.

The primary concerns are:

• Visibility of all objects
• Selectibility of objects
• Tooltip functionality

Does anyone know of a viable solution to this? Thanks.

G

[#2]

Using a hatch pattern other than solid will make it easier to pick objects below.

[#3]

If you're having trouble selecting the solid fill you can use quick properties to select the material area and the use draw order.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the replies. I wanted to confirm there was nothing simple we were overlooking. Using a hatch pattern is a partial solution and transparency is a help and in a pinch you can manually adjust the display order.

The best solution would be for Autodesk to look at drawing the material hatch at the back of the display order in the first place.

[#5]

Another option that we use is to edit the material section shape style so that it does not display the border lines.  This means that the corridor links and surface linework is not being hidden behind those edges.

[#6]

That's a good suggestion I hadn't thought of. This is one of those moments when you say, "Duh."

[#7]

Thanks Steve, that is a great tip.

I found that you may still need to pick a hatch material other than solid with a wide spacing to have a good chance at getting the section tooltip or picking the section easily without using cycling.

The downside to the hatch is that for small areas you may not see a pattern.

We found you can also select all materials at the first stations, select similar, and send to back but that is only 100% effective if you have all materials available at the first station which is unlikely in our case.

Might be able to develop a macro that selects all materials in the current view and sends to back.

- transparency (performance hit?)

- sparse hatch pattern (not good for small areas)

- turn off border (not always effective?)

- select similar, send to back (not 100% effective, too many materials, a lot of manual work)

- macro?

[#8]

The Quick Select dialog allows you to select all of the Material Sections in the drawing.  If you can do it that way then I would expect that you can do it with a macro or some other programming.

Greg - if you're building a tool to push material sections to the back then you could easily expand on that to set up the whole drawing with a default display order.  All labels and text to the front, all hatches to the back, all design objects in front of existing features etc.