Fundamentals of Blocks
May 3, 2024
Presented by: Jaymz Wooden
Blocks are a fundamental component of CAD, allowing you the simplicity of placing complex objects as a single entity. In the Land F/X world, blocks play a crucial role in your ability to customize the software to match your existing or desired standards. Take a tour of the streamlined process for proper block creation and management brought to you by Land F/X. We’ll cover the dos and and don’ts of creating and saving blocks, and demonstrate how our numerous block library locations work with different parts of the software.
Questions from the webinar
Click on a question from one of the live viewers to see the answer below.
Our LandF/X folder is on a server, and we have a couple of possibly duplicate folders i.e. 03-site furnishings and 05--site furnishings. How do we "merge" or eliminate the duplicated folders?
All our folders and files are downloaded on demand, as Jaymz is showing. If you have custom blocks saved into these locations, it will be up to you to make sure things are backed up before removing or merging anything.
I suggest doing a backup of things as is, then simply delete all folders. This will then allow the system to re-download the proper folder structure as we have it set up. If there were custom blocks, you could then retrieve things as needed and place them back into the folder.
What is the differences between place this type of block and Plants under the F/X Planting feature? it seems the process works similar?
difference is functionality and the data tied to things. Placed blocks through our Plan, Elevation, and Generic Plant graphics location is just inserting “dumb” blocks. Placing from a Manager, it would tie additional data to the blocks, making them more “smart”
Are all blocks drawn in imperial scales? Our office drafts in meters to align with civil engineering, so when I insert a plan graphic the scale it comes in at is huge. I've set the scale in LandFX to recognize that I'm drafting at 1:500 or 1:1000 in meters, but the blocks remain massive. Is there a way around this that doesn't involve scaling every block individually?
In the block settings, you just need to set it to be in Meters. From the block selection dialog, simply select the block and click Edit. In the dialog box for setting the scale and rotation settings, you can see the units can be set to Meters.
I hope to see how to implent these blocks under Revit landf/x, when will be such tutorial in recent days?
We are currently in the process of porting our block library to Revit, which we are hoping will be completed this year. Towards the end of the year, or early next year, we will likely release videos showing that workflow.
It's very clunky to make that change for every individual block, and the scaling feature is far from intuitive, even using the manual scaling option. I highly recommend making it possible to change this setting for blocks more generally by changing the scale in the ribbon.
The setting is visible in the Save Block dialog box, and is intended to be set when saving the block. It should even default to Meters if the unis are set as such, so I’m confused as to how this sitation resulted where you have such a large number of blocks set incorrectly. The setting is just in the XML file, so you could also use any Find and Replace in Files capability to update multiple files at once.
When I open the FINDER folder from the C Drive I do not see as many blocks as I see from the FX SIte pull down menu
If you are looking in the backend, you will only see the files and folders for what you have actually clicked into when you are navigating and using within CAD. Once you have placed a block from within CAD, those folders will appear automatically.
We have been manually adding a "mask" to our plant blocks on every project so that ground cover hatches are not showing inside the blocks, also so that our SF in our schedules remains accurate (unlike when you exclude the block from the groundcover) to the size of the planting areas. Would the most efficient solution to this problem be to add the mask to our source blocks?
As long as that mask is just a solid hatch, yes, that would be the best solution.
Can we do this when the block has a wipe out in it?
"It is generally recommend to not have a Wipeout within a block, and instead use a solid hatch. But beyond that, you should be able to have a wipeout in a block."