Outside the Lines
Technical Marketing Manager Todd Hunter provides his colorful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Impression, remote controlled helicopters, Triumph motorcycles, and everything in between. Read his blog and chances are you’ll learn more about treble, bass and oil filter maintenance.
Latest Post
- posted 07/25/07 by Todd Hunter More About Blocks - Substituting DWG Blocks
- Impression understands CAD blocks from DWG files and displays them the way they looked in the last saved view in your DWG. Currently, Impression only understands the graphic value of the block. This means that attributes or nested layers are not supported. Blocks will be on the layer they were inserted on in the DWG. DWG blocks are listed in the In Use section of the Blocks Palette.
Block Substitution
One of the most powerful tools Impression has is the ability to leverage the DWG blocks by using their repetitive nature to quickly stylize multiple blocks with one command. Impression Block Substitution allows you to quickly replace all blocks of the same name with a different, stylized block. This is especially useful when there are a large number of objects that need to be stylized like shrubs and trees and other natural objects. It allows you to keep the block detail level low in the DWG file because the blocks are now really just placeholders that will be substituted with rendered blocks in Impression.
Do It
The easiest way to substitute blocks is to go to a library of styled blocks and drag the icon of the styled block from the Blocks palette and drop it onto one of the blocks that you want to substitute. Make sure to pay attention to the cursor. It should have a small curved arrow icon attached to it. That arrow cursor lets you know you are going to create a substitution. If you get a plus sign icon on the cursor, you are not “grabbing” the DWG block for substitution and instead you will only insert a single styled block.
After releasing the mouse you will get a Substitution dialog box.
The left pane shows the original DWG block and the right pane shows the styled block that will substitute it. By default the Scale to fit bounding box control is checked. This means that regardless of the size or scale of the original block, the substituted block will be the same size. This insures that styled block will print at the correct size. At this point if you click OK, all of the blocks from the DWG that have the same name as the one you chose to substitute will now appear as styled blocks.