Monday, January 23, 2012

Color Fill Legends Mixing with Stairs and Railings

David Light wrote a post about getting stairs to display better when color fill legends are involved. Then Brian Mackey wrote a post to offer another solution. David's approach involves using a solid fill and matching color to "blend" the color fill and the solid fill colors. Brian's involves using the new "Ghost Surfaces" feature.

To offer my two cents I wrote a comment to David's post after reading his. I mentioned what happens when we use the "Transparent" option for categories in Visibility/Graphics or using Override Graphics in View feature > By Element.

This is what you see on screen (using the "Transparent" option to "Override Graphics in View > By Element")(uh oh):


And this is what you get when you print (oh? okay):


Intrigued because I didn't bother to try the approach Brian suggested, I tried it. Using the "Ghost Surfaces" option to "Override Graphics in View > By Element" you see this on screen (looking good):


This is what you get when you print (oh, not so good):


Tag...you guys are "it"! :)

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Steve, when you printed did you use Raster or Vector? Raster is sometimes more predictable when dealing with this kinda weird stuff.

Steve said...

Used vector, raster does appear to print the view without any masking.

Unknown said...

Raster printing seems to be less problematic sometimes:
Printing crashes Revit with high resolution images

Joe Stott said...

LOL, I must admit I was going to post on David's post with the comment about making stairs transparent as an alternative because this is what we usually do to overcome the problem...But, i tested it and noticed the results were as per your post and thought i must have been wrong. (i didnt do a test print) I'm sure that making stairs transparent didn't used to create funny screen graphics?

Alex Gore said...

When will revit make a plugin that can read your mind? This would solve most problems.

Anonymous said...

In the Properties palette for the View settings. Go to the Graphics category & you'll see "Color Scheme Location" parameter. Change it from Background to Foreground.

Anonymous said...

Great foreground worked for the actual stair, but not the UP /DN label. Is there a way to force this text label to not mask?