Does anyone have any tricks for exploding dynamic ACAD blocks so that you don’t end up with every component of the block as shown on the right below?
Thanks in advance.
These are a pain!
The only kind of trick is to use the block editor introduced in 5.32. You can do an invert selection and delete all of the hidden lines but outside of that there is no quick way to do this.
I find this is a common issue with lighting, like you are showing, signs, and pavement markings.
I find the same Pat. Signs, pavement markings/symbols and light stands are the biggest offenders. Fortunately, we don’t typically layout signs and pmarkings so I leave them as blocks just as visual references for the field techs. The current workaround is to simply create a circle and overlay the base so the field techs have something to click and layout. Fortunately, the insertion point is usually the center of the base so it’s pretty straight forward to place and copy the circles.
I tried the “New Edit Block” screen but it would come up empty and I haven’t had the time to really dig in and figure out how it works/what I’m doing wrong. Probably as simple as not having a layer turned on or something.
Hope this helps:
For future consideration, I think a dialog that showed all of the blocks in the project with names, a count of the entities within the block, and a preview of the block could help with these. You could sort by block entities from highest to lowest and use the preview screen to sanity check. Anything that looks off, you could quickly go into the block editor. Maye there is a way to cross reference visible data to non visible data. This is a similar concept to what Civil3d has.
1 Like
BEAUTIFUL PAT!! Great and inspiring work.
Your trick worked like a charm and should be published as the workflow until/if a command is implemented.
I don’t know what I was doing wrong previously but the block was indeed there in the NEW BLOCK EDIT screen when correctly selected.
Anyway, couple comments about my particular situation:
The block had several nested blocks. So my first attempt I drilled down to a second NEW BLOCK EDIT screen from within the first. When I did the Inverse Select, all of the entities for the project were selected so that was obviously wrong. So I retreated to the first level NEW BLOCK EDIT screen and waa-laa the Inverse Select result was as expected and all of the hidden block configurations were selected (although not visible). Then, back out on the Plan View screen it was necessary to explode the blocks twice to end up with selectable entities.
Thanks again for your exemplary help. I am going to cross link your post over on my Trimble post as I’m sure others will have/ have had the same issue.
So to further the above, the reason I was originally unsuccessful in using the NEW BLOCK EDITOR view was because I selected the block while I had the blocks layer isolated. Thus, Layer 0 was off and as we all know there is a pretty good chance that blocks brought in from ACAD somehow lie to us and they are actually on Layer 0… even though you put them where you put them and the properties say the same. 