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Finally got my first plan done using smart entities. Now I am trying to create elevations based on my exterior smart walls. Once I figured out how to do a 3D clip cube I was able to isolate the exterior walls and do a hide in a parallel view. The hide ended up taking 4 minutes to finish because all of the 2D entities in my 2D/3D symbols that were outside the clip cube ended up showing along the floor line. Any ideas what I may have done wrong. This is one of the major reasons I delved into smart entities so I didn't have to create elevations from scratch. Thanks
Dan

All I do is go to the 3d menu, 3D Views, Elevation, pick one (front, Right, Left, Back) zoom out, Exit, Hide, Begin with Save Image, Crop Image and All on. Under Options I have Join, Delete Dbl, Ignore Color and Backface all selected.
Don't use a 3d Clip Cube.
I only have on the Exterior Layers on. Interior walls, openings, etc are on there own layers and turned off.
Hope this helps some.

Thanks for the reply Roger. We have all our walls on one layer. I guess we may have to change that. I thought we were supposed to be able to do it the way I described but now I'm not sure. None of the 3D stuff showed just the 2D. Is anyone else doing their elevations this way? Thank you
Dan

With the interior items on other layers turned off, the hide process does not have to look at those items and makes the hide process quicker.
If your smart entities all have the correct z-base/heights, one should be able to follow my process to get elevations.
Maybe the settings on the 3d cube need to be modified so you can see the elevations.

Thanks Roger. I didn't quite explain what I did correctly. I have a plan with smart entities and 2D/3D symbols. I used the 3D clip cube to isolate the exterior wall and not include the symbols so as to speed up the hide. The problem is that the hide is still seeing just the 2D layers in my symbols and not the 3D layers even though the symbols are outside the clip cube. The symbols are unexploded. I was wondering why it is hiding parts of symbols outside the clip cube. The rest of the elevation looked fine. I wasn't sure if this was a bug that has been addressed or not. I will have to look into 3D clip cubes again and see what I am doing wrong. Thanks again for your help.
Dan

So this morning I tried putting exterior walls on separate layer from interior walls like Roger does and now my interior walls won't clean to the exterior walls. My z heights are the same (using z by layer) and have checked all other settings but can't get them to clean. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Thanks.

Dan

That is the one issue with having smart walls on different layers, is that you need to manually do the "T" intersection command on the the walls.

That is unacceptable. This is supposed to streamline the process but now I guess I will need another workaround to get this to work. This is becoming very frustrating. The AEC modeler is looking better every day now. Thanks once again Roger.
Dan