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Continuing my deep dive into all that is DataCAD 3D one thing that would be very helpful is to be able to 'Save Image' for the selected Shape that is in Construction Plane, or in the 'FLAT'.

Being able to model constructs then get that shape in the 'FLAT' to create fabrication drawings & dimensions would be very beneficial. There may be already a macro somewhere to do this but seeing that you can do a hidden line view then save image it looks like all the 'tools' are there to do it, but do it for the isolated / selected shape or even all the shapes that are in the same construction plane.

This example is a roof model showing CTRL+right-click menu which could be a good place to add 'Save Shape Image'.

Hi Joseph,

If you really need this and there is no other way to do it, you could easily write a DCAL macro to create a 'flat' representation of any polyline as the polyvert definitions are always in a flat 2d plane (with the rotation out of the flat being accomplished by a modelling matrix in the entity definition).
Unfortunately not so simple for other 3D shapes such as polygons, but if you wanted a starting point you could look at the GetModMat procedure in my Shadow macro which pretty much does what you want (the shadow.dcs source file is available from bitbucket).

Regards,
David H.

Thanks David I'll check it out!

I think you can use Selection Sets to limit the entities to perform the HLR on, but yeah, it would be nice if we could use the Clipboard Select method like we can for the O2C viewer to limit what gets processed.

joshhuggins wrote:I think you can use Selection Sets to limit the entities to perform the HLR on, but yeah, it would be nice if we could use the Clipboard Select method like we can for the O2C viewer to limit what gets processed.

Thank you for that Josh, yes using Selection Sets works to get the viewed shape!

I'm having a blast finally getting into DataCAD 3D!

You should be able to [Ctrl] + Right-click on the entity and select Get Construction Plane. This will bring the entity 'flat' to the screen. Then you can perform a Save Image from there.