Shadow Plane

A shadow plane provides a more advanced way to establish relative size and orientation in a 3D space. The grid of the shadow plane will adjust dynamically to display the extents of the visible objects in the job. It is always oriented parallel to the XY plane of the working frame, but will shift vertically to the lowest (-Z) extent of the lowest object. This provides a ground level grid in the 3D world of the job file.

The properties of a shadow plane control the grid scale and color. The grid can be set to either dynamically adjust to always display a fixed number of squares or can be set to a fixed grid size, using job units. The length and width of each square in the grid is defined by the “actual Grid Size” value.

To help interpret up from down, the shadow plane is colored in solid mode from viewed from above and shown only in wire frame mode when viewed from below. A new job will add a shadow plane automatically, although this can be turned off in the User Options > Display tab. It behaves like any other object in the tree in that it can be moved between collections and has properties, but only one can exist at any time in a job file. If it has been deleted it can be re-added to the job using View> Show Shadow Plane.