Augi World - July/August 2008 - (Page 10) AUTODESK IMPRESSION Impress with Style I have been writing in AUGIWorld about Autodesk® Impression for a few issues, covering the product in a general sense. Now I will dive into the details a bit more. Let’s take a look at what I feel is the most important aspect of Impression and its use—styles. own. The styles you create can be saved for later use. Style libraries (preset and custom made) are where you keep and manage your saved styles. Appearance is everything You can differentiate objects in a drawing by changing their appearance. There can be differences in color, fill pattern, pen type (marker, water color, pencil), size, and more. There are six basic categories that control the way objects look. They are stroke, fill, stroked fill, hatched fill, outline stroke, and effect. Each category can be used in any appearance style. These appearance categories provide a lot of control within a style. Stroke Figure 1: Impression drawing of a balloon. There are different styles used in this drawing. Styles in Autodesk Impression work in a similar fashion to styles in other Autodesk programs. For example; AutoCAD® uses text styles, dimension styles, multi-leader styles, table styles, and others to define the appearance and workings of different types of objects. Impression uses appearance styles to control the way objects are displayed, drawn, or appear. These appearance styles can be set to the layer on which the object resides (controlling several objects at one time) or directly to an object itself (overriding the layer settings.) When a file such as DWG or DWF is imported, Impression will “interpret” some of that layer information and apply it to the drawing. This option can be turned off during the import process if the user desires. There are also several preset appearance styles already in Impression. These can be used or you can create your 10 What are styles? One of the most important style settings is the Stroke. The stroke is the line from the original geometry that is imported into Impression. This is why it might be the most important setting in a style. You can set a stroke’s width, color, and transparency along with its endcaps. You can also make the stroke dashed. There are three media settings for a stroke: standard, pencil, and marker. As you would expect, each setting simulates the drawing instruments they are named after. The pencil and marker settings, therefore, look like the stroke of a pencil or marker, respectively. The standard setting is a simple line. Unlike the pencil or marker settings, the simple line has no realistic texture effect. Figure 2: Illustration demonstrating the different appearance settings in a style. w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.augi.com
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