Viewing Objects against the Ground

You can visually insert a plane at the ground level of your document, thus enabling you to recognize when your document is viewed the right way up.

Before you begin:
  • When you first access a document, the plane parallel or tangent to the bottom point of your document is considered to be the ground.
  • When Ground is activated, it is applied by default on all 3D windows open in your session.
  • The ground activation is stored in preference files.
Related Topics
Using Standard Views

  1. Open any object with geometrical data.

  2. Select View > Ground.

    The ground plane is displayed in the geometry area:

    The ground is composed of:

    • A circular ground
    • A primary grid
    • A secondary grid
    • A smooth shadow of the current scene. This shadow is fixed and associated to an infinite virtual light source positioned along the normal of the object's bottom view).

    The number of lines in the grids is fixed and does not depend on the zoom or on the size of the current scene.



    Important: The normal of the ground is the normal of the bottom view and it is always positioned under the scene.

  3. Resize the object (e.g. by zooming out).

    The ground is resized accordingly:

    Note: The ground's size depends on the scene's size.

  4. Look the scene from a different viewpoint.

    The ground becomes invisible because the ground is not visible from below:

  5. To hide the ground, select View > Ground again.