I an trying to setup my plans, elevs, etc using consistent colour to denote materials… just flat colours… eg concrete [light green]…
Often this is also with shadows turned on to give a sense of depth on the plan / elevation.
The problem I am having is even the smallest changes of time, date view angle , brightness all affect the shade of colour displayed so it it vertually impossible to use colour as reference.
I considered not using shadows [not desirable] but even then colour changes with the angle of view to the coloured plane…[ and yes I have sun shading turned off]… se sample below
You get shading with it off but the “light source” is the camera. That’s why the colors change as you orbit. The lightest faces will be those the camera is most square to. In this case you want the light source fixed, thus using the fixed sun instead of the moving camera.
Also, try this. Put the light slider full left and adjust the dark slider to control how bright or dark all the colors appear.
It works as you say, thanks but now the time/date sliders affect colour with subtle changes - I have never really needed the “sun for shading” toggle before but I was hopiing it would just turn off all colour shading and result in flat predictable colours… ? Maybe I will have to learn ruby to create a simple button that sets parameters sun settings consistently …
Just pick a setting for the dark slider that you can use all the time. Once you sort of the settings you like, create a custom template with those shadow settings.
I was just going to let this go but perhaps I need to explain the background.
Many years ago I customised ACADLT [ V12] using diesel to avoid having to reduce our software costs and enable us to put more CAD in front of everyones nose [this is 1992].
So ended up with 2-3x more CAD stations infront of our staff… for very little lost in CAD capability…
Remember the 80/20 rule, most staff never got beyond 20% use of the software anyway…
One benifit was having simple a menu buttons that either setup or imposed variables to make all our documents consistent, eg Text, Dimensions, Variable settings etc… etc . Even more importantly… it adjusted existing drawings received from other consultants to be the same as our office standards… I call the command “SUPER PURGE” and it was the first button you hit when using a drawing from another office… or fixing a rogue employees drawing…
Yes we also had Templates and yes staff were instructed to use them – but they didn’t.
Ever dealt with a dwg with fillet radius set to = 0.001mm ?
So “SUPER PURGE” firstly deleted all redundant information, but then went thru the file and set variables to be what our architects office used… eg in Autocad, fillet=0, snap=100, thickness = 0, Z = 0, textstyle= etc,etc [about 40 in all told].
The essence of this is it reset an existing file, not set up a new one.
So regarding consistent colour - I will take on your helpful suggestions and teach myself ruby to embed them in code so I just have a simple menu button to enforce our standards by script…
