Better way to make shadow appear behind a table?

[morganism3]

Is there a way to make a shadow automatically appear behind a new table? I go through the trouble of building a square of semi-transparent solid hatch just to put behind the tables to appear like a shadow for that neat "floating" look. There must be a faster way.

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

not sure to understand what your question has to do with Map 3D.

So please upload a drawing to make it more clear and we can see what you have.

If you mean that when you create a 3D-table then you are missing a shadow to be displayed? Then let us know:

• which lights do you have defined
• what material is assigned to the table
• what object do you have as floor (or whereever you need the shadow to be visible)
• what visual style or render settings you have set as active ones.

- alfred -

[morganism3]

I will provide a screenshot when I'm back at work.

It doesn't have anything in particular to do with Map 3D, that's just the program I'm using.

If I can paint a picture with words until I can get you a screen capture… I'm not really talking about lighting sources or rendering or any of the more complicated functions that we think about when we think about shadows. It's much simpler than that.

I have a large map. There's some tables of basic information that we paste on there for the clients to better understand our presentation. For the sake of visibility for the viewers, we like to add little details to the tables, like a thicker border, or make the table a brighter color, or whatever. We've decided the best appearance for making these tables more visible to the user, is to place a shadow, where it looks kind of like they're floating over the map.

On simple programs like Word there's an option for some text objects and other things to have a little pre-made shadow appear behind them. That's all we want. To have CAD automatically place a shadow to make a table stand out better against the background image.

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

thank you for clarification.

And the answer is sorry no, text or table objects do not have a built in funtion for shadowing text or shadowing table borders.

Manually I would copy the text or table give that copy to another layer with another color (= shadow color).

In case you can use any api within AutoCAD you might be able to add that functionality, but it does not exist out-of-the-box.

- alfred -

[morganism3]

Thank you. And if anyone is following this to learn themselves about making these shadows, I like building a solid hatch in the same size as the table, placing behind it, I work in solid black and adjust the level of transparency, and most important, make sure the plot settings have the box for transparency checked.

Sincerely,

Morgan Hart

Sent from my iPhone

[parkr4st]

examples of possiblities with excel spreadsheet cell format & inserted in Map3d 2015.

Dave

[morganism3]

That's a great idea, but it wouldn't provide the little bit of white space around the shadows' coreners to give the table a "floating" look. If I could split cells in Excel I could accomplish that by highlighting only 1/2 cell in the lower left corner, but I can't. Even so, though, is there a way to set some cell spaces in Excel as slightly transparent, that would carry over when you made it into an AutoCAD entity?