The Help system is Web-based. You’ll be opening HTML files. As long as you’re connected to the Internet, they’ll be from Autodesk’s Web site. The new system takes a little getting used to.
Wow, fail. Epic fail. I guess everyone in the world has internet 24/7, huh? Jackoffs.
Secondary Grip Editing
Polylines have grips at the midpoints of their segments, called secondary grips. You can use them to convert the segment to an arc (or to a line if it’s an arc), stretch it, or add a vertex. You can do the same with the traditional grips, now called primary grips.
Awesome! I noticed the secondary grip on hatches since the last release, when the added grips to hatches, and was impressed. I actually used that pretty awesome with unassociative hatches, and found it to be an excellent tool. I could see myself using this often... the only other previous route was to PEDIT > Edit Vertex > Insert... which is a PITA often times, especially if you don't know which 'direction' the points go, in order, before adding a vertex. This will cut down on a lot of time for me, when editting plines.
New Transparency Property
Objects can now be transparent and you can set the transparency percentage. Transparency is an object property just like color and linetype, so you can create layers with transparency. You’ll probably want to use transparency for fills and gradients; it doesn’t do much for the outlines of objects. Here you see some trees at 60% transparency, showing the outline of the house through them.
This has been asked for a long time now. I can see myself using this, but am unsure where... it's something I didn't know whether it would come along, so I didn't put much thought into how I'd use it, if I had it. I do know it's a popular request, and am glad to see it put in.
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I'm -way- behind in getting up to speed with their new improvements to mesh and surface creation/editting, because it mainly isn't a tool that applies to structural design much... we use standard shapes, and thus don't need organic modeling concepts or on-the-fly editting of such. Everything for us is a standard extrusion, pretty much, so editting the cross section polyline will update the shape... on the rare case we use it...
...however they seem to have really come through with a powerful tool that has just become quite bulky in it's possibilities.
I'm pretty impressed with the update. Some good tools that will make me, and others in my office, pretty happy. Eager to give this beast a twirl.
