topic How to have only specific points of a bloc "visible" to autocad in AutoCAD Forum

How to have only specific points of a bloc "visible" to autocad

kruno_dokic — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 16:57:09 GMT

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry if there was already a thread made with this question, but I either can't find it, or I am not searching for the right one.

So, what I would like to do is the following (see picture for clarification).

Let's say I have a tile (white) and I want to cover a floor with it.

But there needs to be a space between said tiles so that you can put some other material between them.

The easiest way that I can see is that I just add a second square (green) around it.

But the preblem then becomes that I need to zoom in close in order to pick a point on the green square and not on the tile.

So is there a way to "hide" the tile so that I can't snap to it, but for it to still be visible while drawing.

The block I am using is a lot more complicated with more points and shapes inside, but it boiles down to the same thing.

Now while writing this question an idea came to mind that solved my problem partially.

I could use 2 layers in the block so that I hide the white part while drawing, and then hide the green part while publishing.

While that is a solution, I would like to be able to see the white part while drawing.

Re: How to have only specific points of a bloc "visible" to autocad

paullimapa — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 18:13:46 GMT

What I would do is draw ARCS on each corner and place those on a NONPLOT layer.

Now I can osnap to the center of the ARC to get the corner points of the GREEN without having to Zoom close

Re: How to have only specific points of a bloc "visible" to autocad

Kent1Cooper — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 18:42:30 GMT

@paullimapa wrote:

What I would do is draw ARCS on each corner ....

... or just draw POINTs in the corners, and use NODe Osnap. Depending on your PLOTting and PDMODE settings, you could not even need to bother with their being on a non-plotting Layer.

But all that depends on certain assumptions. @kruno_dokic, might you sometimes want to Osnap to [for example] the MIDpoints of edges, or would it always be to the corners? Would you have ENDpoint or INTersection among your running Osnap modes, and not want to be required to either reset the modes without those, or explicitly call for CENter or NODe, every time you want to pick on those corners? I imagine there are other possible circumstances with other complications.

[I was going to talk about the fact that things on the DEFPOINTS Layer are visible but cannot be selected or Osnapped to when Layer 0 is off or frozen, but in quick trial I find that's not true when those things are nested in Blocks.]

Re: How to have only specific points of a bloc "visible" to autocad

kruno_dokic — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 21:49:08 GMT

Yes, basically I want the bloc to act as if only the green part exists. So midpoints, intersections and the rest work only with the green part, and the inner acts "invisible" to other objects.

I should mention I use autocad LT.