Flickering Update Again

Further to my previous post regarding renaming AecCore.crx, it has been suggested that this could break other things. A slightly “better” patch would be to copy the AecCore.crx from the 2013 install and place it into the 2014 folder. This does work and no visible breakage yet!

Our CAD support people have suggested that this patch is a reasonable temporary solution though they say if an update from AutoDesk arrives then you will need to revert back to the 2014 version of the AecCore.crx file before installing the update.

Also the CAD support people looking at this flickering issue with AutoDesk at the moment and I will let you know the outcome of that.

Secure Load

If you, like me, use LISPS you will find that a new very useful feature has been added to AutoCAD 2014. They have introduced Secure Loading of executables, which in principle is a good thing.

However if you like me are struggling to get the Trusted Locations to work, you can go back to the “legacy” behaviour (load everything anyway) by going to settings –> system –> executable file settings and turning off this feature.

Secure Load
Secure Load

Flickering Update

As previously mentioned we updated the drivers to the latest ATI drivers for the Firepro and that seemed to stop the flickering. It however came back today. A restart of AutoCAD stopped it from flickering which is better than before as it was all the time.

On this forum post it has been suggested that network file access might be the issue. However its early days in troubleshooting!

AutoCAD LT Flickering

We have a rolling subscription in the office and one of the guys wanted to be the “guinea pig” for the new version of AutoCAD LT, 2014.

Install went OK but the status bar at the bottom of the screen kept flickering, with “unrecognised” coming and going.

Unrecognised

We already had the certified driver installed and tired turning off hardware acceleration to no avail.

However so far this seems to have been solved with upgrading to the latest driver for the ATI Firepro V4900.

Hope this helps someone.

Frames

One of my colleagues was asking, why can I not turn the frame off around this imported image? IMAGEFRAME was not turning the frame off. It turns out that the drag-and-dropped image was actually a PDF, and therefore the frame is controlled by PDFFRAME, so its worth noting the imported image type in order to control things like this.

However, it should be noted that all “frame” commands (IMAGEFRAME, PDFFRAME etc. can now be controlled by one single command FRAME. This appears to be valid from version 2012 onwards.

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Excerpt from help, AutoCAD 2013 (c) AutoDesk.

Changing the setting for FRAME changes the IMAGEFRAME, DWFFRAME, PDFFRAME, DGNFRAME, XCLIPFRAME, POINTCLOUDCLIPFRAME, and WIPEOUTFRAME settings to the same setting as the new FRAME setting.

0 – The frame is not visible and it is not plotted. (The frame temporarily reappears during selection preview or object selection.)

1 – Displays and plots the frame.

2 – Displays but does not plot the frame.

3 – The settings vary for all objects with frames in the current drawing: images, underlays, clipped xrefs, clipped point clouds, and wipeout objects do not all have the same frame settings.

UCS World

I received a set of drawings today from a colleague, whilst this is not unusual, the drawings all had differing UCS settings, which was unusual, most of my colleagues do not touch the UCS.

Usually I reset the UCS to world and carry on. I like my modelspace to to be set to world so when I copy and paste the rotation stays the same to the screen. I tend to then rotate the UCS in viewports as and when required.

This time, typing UCS, W to reset to world UCS left me with this, a wonky UCS.

Wonky UCS
Wonky UCS

The UCS is wonky, or Y is not up the page. The square in the UCS indicates it is set to WORLD, so I was confused.

The problem was not that the view was set to the UCS but the UCS was (kind of) set to the view. I will explain. (See bottom of post for a quick explanation).

If you type VIEWTWIST, it should be set to 0 for the UCS to be the way I wanted it. I found it was set to 270!

wonkyucs02

Now I have run into another problem, the VIEWTWIST variable is readonly!

So lastly I found that typing PLAN and setting to WORLD reset everything to how I wanted.

wonkyucs03

Interestingly this problem seems to be similar to the one a while back with rotating the view in AutoCAD LT.

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For a quick method of the above, if the UCS is not in the default position and it is set to world, then the view has been rotated. To rotate the view back, type PLAN, then WORLD. Or click on the arrows above viewcube in full AutoCAD.

Rotate from Viewcube
Rotate from Viewcube

Not the Point

One of my colleagues had put a point in a block to stop it from “growing in size”. Whilst this is an ingenious work-around, it is easier to control the size of points if you don’t want them to be massive when zoomed out in a drawing.

If you type DDPTYPE into the command line you will get this dialogue box.

DDPTYPE Dialog
DDPTYPE Dialog

The circle with a cross is my usual selection for style, the point size can be relative to the screen, where 5% is usually about right, or for my colleague’s requirements, absolute. This is in the base units for the drawing, e.g. MM or INCHES.

Note that you can set POINTS to be tiny dots and therefore nearly impossible to see and these do not scale at all. This is useful as sometimes a drawing can be full of points that are “invisible”.