Ground Plane Offset Resetting

[owenbbuck]

This is a minor issue but for all of my assembly files the ground plane will not stay in place.

In the Design workspace the ground plane is always floating below my model when set to Adaptive in: Display Settings > Ground Plane Offset. When I manually set the offset to where I want, the shadows and everything look correct until I switch to a different tab. Saving has no effect, it will stay where I want until I open another model or part in a new tab.

It's minor but very annoying! Does anyone know is there is a fix or is this a bug?

Thanks!

Owen

[TrippyLighting]

I cannot say that I was aware of that setting. I personally disable all these on-screen gimmicks so I have no idea where some virtual ground plane is.

Having said that,  it sounds like a bug to me! @Phil.E 

[Phil.E · Accepted solution]

There are a few things going on here. 

First, the "as-design" behavior. Which is this: Any object sets the "floor" value. So if you have a body, sketch, or canvas that hangs out below the model that you wish to render, it moves the floor down. 

How to avoid this? Turn off visibility of all objects that go below the model prior to entering Render environment.

As for the complaint, yes it appears the floor setting in the Design space will be affected by changing tabs/workspaces and it probably should not be.

I'm not sure whether this floor setting is intended to drive Render workspace results, however. There is a ground plane control in Rendering that has always been available and intended for this. 

There is room for improvement here too. It's not obvious, but look at the command prompt boxed in yellow in the image above. The plane position will snap to model geometry, but there is no highlight or preview other than the command prompt to indicate it's going to snap to something you are clicking under the mouse.

So we have 1 bug and 2 improvements:

1. Ground plane should not reset when changing tabs/workspace (bug, minor) (FUS-120242)

2. Improve: allow users to turn off visibility of objects in render space and make an effect on the scene "floor" (rather than having to do it in another workspace prior to rendering) (FUS-120243)

3. Improve: give visual feedback that render scene changes are snapping to actual points/faces/etc. (FUS-120244)

[owenbbuck]

Thank you for the explanation! I suspected sketches and things were the reason for the ground plane being too low. I should explain as well the reason I wanted a nice ground plane in the design workspace is because I'm modeling a car body and how the car looks in reference to the ground can help determine body lines and proportions.

Thanks again!

[Phil.E]

Great reason. Sorry for the trouble with it. It should be persistent, as you expect. I put that into the bug report along with a link to this post so everyone involved can see your feedback/reasoning.