Using 3D Blocks for Point Marker Styles

This one has popped up twice on my radar this week, so I figure maybe someone else may be wondering how to do it. What happens when you want to use a multi-view block for a point marker style for visualization purposes? Chances are, you tried this and it didn’t work, so you abandoned those plans. When this popped up a little voice in my head spoke up and reminded me that I’ve seen this one before (that little voice says that a lot…) So I browsed through my IM list and found that Dana Probert was online, and that little voice reminded me that she and I have talked about this before. So I bugged her (we do that often throughout the day) and she refreshed my memory.

She had run into this problem back when she was doing some visualization projects and noticed that it wasn’t working right. I remember a flurry of emails going around with various people (including the development team) regarding this issue. I also remember my eyes glazing over, as they often do after the 50th cc’d email comes through.

Long story short, I don’t know why the following workaround works. No clue. That helps, right? But if you want your mvblocks to show up in 3D when applied to a point style, follow these steps to achieve visualization nirvana:

1. Purge the mvblock out of your drawing. Erase it. Get rid of it. Make the drawing forget that the block ever existed. Got that done? Good, let’s move to step 2.
2. Go create a point style. I’m going to assume if you’re reading this that you know how to create a point style. Go on, do it…
3. When you are selecting the AutoCAD BLOCK symbol for the marker, don’t pick one that exists in your drawing already. Why? Because you followed step 1, right? It’s not there. If it does seem to be there, cancel out of this dialog and go back to step 1 and start over. Oh, and by the way, hang your head as you do, because you didn’t read this entirely… Anyway, when selecting that block symbol, right click inside the area where the blocks are listed to bring up the Browse… option. 
4. Once you select the Browse… option, navigate out to the block that you want to use. In Windows Vista, the stock mvblocks are located at C:\Program Data\Autodesk\C3D 2010\enu\Data\Symbols\Mvblocks. In Windows XP, they are located at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Autodesk\C3D 2010\enu\Data\Symbols\Mvblocks.
5. Finish the point marker style the way you normally would. To test it, you can create a point and assign that point style and compare the results. Here is my point in plan view:

And here it is in 3D view:

I’d love to see some of your renderings – send us some examples of renderings and we’ll judge and post the top three.