Hi Lou.
You’re right, I did not get back to that. I use that trick to mark the reference faces. That’s much easier to do in the whole from model than in the stick drawings, because you can see where the faces lie in respect to the outside faces, etc. I chose a color that prints noticeably darker on my B&W printer, but not so dark that you can’t see through it. You'll have to experiment with your own printier to find a color that works.
It’s not too bad to paint just one face of a timber. You have to double click on the timber to edit it, then choose the face you want, and then use the bucket tool to paint it. But if you’re going to do the whole model, that method adds up to a lot of clicks. To speed up that process, I wrote a ruby script to help you out. It’s called repaint face, and it should have gotten installed with the rest of the rubies. It’s a tool, so once you’ve selected it, you’ll stay in that mode until you hit the space bar to go back to the select tool.
When you first choose the tool, you’ll need to pick a color, like hot pink. Then just double click on any face that you want to paint – you don’t need to get inside the component first. Of course, if you have multiple instances of the component, you’ll paint that face on all of them! So you’ll want to make unique on all the timbers. I always wait until I’m all done with the model before I make the shop drawings, and I wait until just before I make shop drawings to make the timbers unique and paint the reference faces.
Hope that answers your question. CB.
