I had mentioned that one of the topics you NEVER want to bring up at AU social events  is UCS vs Dview twist for viewport alignment… BUT this year….. This year we might have made some progress.
As you know, James and Jason are UCS followers, and I am a Dview Twister.
We’ve had a few discussions on this topic over the past few months:
Take Advantage of Twisting Labels
The major objection to dview that I hear from James, Jason and the other UCS folks in this world is that unless you use Named Views and the Layout Express Tools, it is difficult to get the dview twist right- you wind up typing in a lot of angles and having a lot of trial and error.
This year at AU, I saw both Lucy Kuhns and Anthony G. use this method to make a dview twist- and I dare say it is easy as pie.
Click more to learn how they did it.
Find a road you’d like to see differently…
Press the 3D Free Orbit button, and keep your mouse OUTSIDE of the green circle until your mouse pointer looks like the image below.
As long as you stay outside of the green circle, you are strictly rotating the view ABOUT the Z axis. There is no 3D element to the rotation when you stay OUTSIDE of the green circle.
And your view rotates…. and your labels flip as specified in your styles.Â
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Dview here.
As long as you know what you are doing either will work.
Just thought long ago that Dview was more idiot proof.
Dview for me too! I’ve had too many users wonder why Land Desktop didn’t have the correct coordinates when they changed the view…
I’m just really happy that I get mentioned on THE Civil 3D.com. What an honor!
AG
Neat trick, but aren’t you still “eyeballing” it? How can you use dview to rotate to the exact bearing of a line? Maybe I’m missing it since I gave up on DVIEW long ago, but this is rather trivial with the UCS method…
Since I came from the survey world where coordinates are king, UCS is not my choice. I rotate close then before leaving the dview command, I twist the view a second time to an exact rotation (even if it’s 287.45). I do this because I also set my snapangle to the negative of my dview twist angle. So if dview twist is 287.45, then snapang is -287.45. Now if only I could change these settings in the properties palette…
To tell the truth the only place I ever used it was setting the Plan View angle in my Plan and Profile sheets.
Eyeballing was always close enough for me. If not, there was always the HP41 h.m.s.>hr function.
If I need accuracy I…
UCS > OBject > PLAN. UCS > World (No UCSFOLLOW)
If I need eyeball accuracy I 3DORBIT and stay outside of the large green circle (This causes a pinwheel around the center). Seems easier
I use the UCS->Z option, and then snap to two points on the object. I was just wondering if there was a way to do the same thing via dview. This is really a ford v. chevy debate, though, since the end result is the same.
I have a lisp that makes dview work just like ucs > object. It changes my snapang back too. Run the lisp, pick the line and your done.
How about this very quick method guy’s? List and copy the angle of an object, an alignment for example, you wish to display horizontally. At the DVIEW>TWIST prompt, paste the negative value and your TWIST angle will be exact. If you create a view with the same name as the SHEET it will be referenced into, you may use Sheet Set Manager to simply drag the Twisted View into a Sheet Layout.