More options and more control have been added to the masking capabilities in Velocity II. Masking provides control over drawing components by eliminating specific attributes and/or elements from selection. This enables you to work more easily with the elements of the drawing that are not masked.
In Velocity II, Masking has been improved to mask additional drawing elements, and to provide rules-based control over specific elements such as drawing layers, arcs, and circles. In addition, you can now save and reuse masking templates, eliminating, for example, all but one layer of the drawing for manipulation.
The main Mask Selection Settings dialog has been rearranged to better categorize the available elements. Points, lines, poly lines, and arcs are now grouped as various geometries. Other maskable items—surfaces, splines, text, dimensions, vectors, tool paths, and line meshes are grouped separately.
Enhanced Mask Dialog
Selecting the new More button expands the options for the various elements.
More Masking Options
The Arc checkbox lets you define minimum and maximum arc diameters or radii
to mask. The Circle checkbox also offers minimum and maximum diameters or radii.
You can set which type of value you want to enter, diameter or radius, by clicking
the button next to the Arc or Circle checkbox.
Enter radius values when Radius is selected:
Enter diameter values when Diameter is selected:
The line type, arc, and circle settings are interactive with your drawings. To set a minimum or maximum value, you can select the arrow button next to the value. The Mask Selection Settings dialog disappears and an arrow cursor displays over your drawing. Click on the type of object you want to mask. The Mask Selection Settings dialog reappears. For line types, the selected line types from the drawing are checked for masking when you return to the dialog. For arc and circle values, the minimum or maximum diameter of the object you selected in the drawing is transferred to the dialog.
In addition, you can now mask seven different line types, and identify one or more layers in your drawing to mask. The layers field provides masking a single layer, a range of layers, a list of layers, or a combination of the latter two.
A Clear Fields button in the More screen removes any values in the minimum, maximum, or layers fields.
Open and Save icons have been added to let you open and save the settings as templates. User-defined mask settings can now be saved and recalled, making it easy to apply masks to separate drawings.
New Open and Save icons
Before creating a masking template, you can set the path where you want the templates saved in the Paths dialog under System in the Options dialog.
Choose the Save icon in the Mask Selection Settings dialog to save the current settings as a template that can be opened and applied on future drawings. The Save Template dialog displays. The dialog can be resized to display a greater or smaller number of available templates. Enter the name of the template and choose Save.
To open an existing masking template, choose the Open File icon in the Mask Selection Settings dialog. The Open Template dialog displays. Select the template you want to apply and click Open.
Once a template is opened, it is automatically applied to the current drawing. You can adjust the mask settings as needed for your current work without affecting the saved template. Or, you can save your adjustments either modifying the template, or as a new template.
A new option in the Options dialog under System Startup lets you display the advanced Mask Selection Settings on startup of Velocity II.
New Mask Option in System Startup
Whenever the Mask Selection Settings dialog is accessed, all options are displayed automatically instead of having to click the More button each time.