Exactly what I wanted to point out, it is at least fast enough to be usablewandererfan wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 3:30 pm I have played a bit in TD with making a view of a 2D object without going through the HLR and it is very fast.
Not quite... In this post of yorik there are examples of three houses https://yorik.uncreated.net/?blog/2018-437 , download House 1 (casa_pala.FCStd), open it, select the "Vistas geradas" group and make its content visible. Now lets take a closer look for example at the sections "Corte trans visto" and "Corte trans cortado". If you select one of them and look in to the Data tab, you can see several properties to control what is visible, play a bit with the "Projection Mode" and "Hidden Lines" properties. And because they are fast you can even do such trick as is shown in this model, make several 2D shapes of the same view and set different properties for each of them, then place them all on top of each other ("Corte trans visto" and "Corte trans cortado" in this example). To push this even a bit further, select one of them (for example "Corte trans visto") and make a copy ctrl-c (when asked if you want to copy dependencies chose no) and paste ctrl-v, it should make a copy on the same place. Select your copy, make sure "Projection Mode" is set to Solid and set "Hidden Line" to true, now change to View tab and change the "Draw Style" of this copy to Dashed, select "Corte trans visto" and "Corte trans cortado" and change their "Line Width" to 3... One can see that there is quite a lot of room to play around and get different drawings out of this. For a floor plan for example one could make another view and flip it up and get also the ceiling plan... And all of it is quite fast and linked back to the model.wandererfan wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 3:30 pm I don't know much about the insides of Arch, but it looks like ArchSection might be using Something like BRepAlgo_Section to get the section line. This only returns the cut face outline and not the solid behind the cut so it is much faster.
We could make a "fast section" function that only draws the cut face if that is useful.
So, if we can place this now in a TD drawing and if it stays about as fast as it is, then we would already have something quite useful and if then we would be able to also use the new TD appearance tool to clean up the drawing even a bit more (architects are picky as f*ck ) then things would get really interesting...
However, even when this is quite fast, in architecture projects you can quickly have several dozen, very often even several hundreds of such views/drawings, so you would still not want to have them all refresh at the same time all the time. But I guess it should be possible to get this for example to refresh only for those that are placed in an opened TD drawing and maybe even only when they open and then manually.
But, when one has so many drawings, one needs to be able to manage them somehow, and this is where my second suggestion, to be able to have many documents inside the same FCStd file. It is possible to manage it in a similar way how yorik has it in this house example, that is to have them in a grupe and hide it when you don't need it, but it would IMO be much better if we would be able to place this out of the main model view space. This would also be useful not just for such generated 2D drawings of the model but for example one could also import some standard 2D details from dwg files and have them saved in the project but away from the main model...
This could actually also be linked to separate files... But I am talking here about to have may different documents in the same FCStd file, think of revit drafting view or legends, while all the other views are basically just different 3d views of the same model, this are sort of as separate, individual documents inside the same project file...
... So, this would be the second strategy, creating 2D shapes and preferably be able to have them saved not in the same space as the main model. There is however still quite a lot of refreshing going on in this, and anyone that ever used archicad will know that, specially if they also sometimes use revit where there is very little refreshing going on and the trick is that they simply don't do full 2D drawings of everything but use custom 3d views for most of it and do just minimal 2D work on top of it...
Both of this however have their pluses and minuses and it is why, at least in the long term, I would like to see them both in FreeCAD and then it is up to the user to use what s/he prefers.