2D Model Families and detail views

We regularly hear keeping families basic is the way to go with larger projects. An example would be loose office furniture. From a documentation point of view, you don’t need 3d office furniture and creating a furniture family using model lines in plan should suffice.

What you may not know is that when creating call outs of the floor plan, if you end up using a “detail view” rather than a “floor plan” call out, you won’t be able to see your 2d family in the detail view. On moving the mouse over the missing item, you will notice it ghosting. To solve the problem you will need to change the view dept (far clip offset) to plus 1mm or more from what it is set to.

This is actually correct behaviour. For a detail view to display an item, its “far clip offset” needs to physically cut the item and not just touch it (1mm cut is enough). Floor plan views however behave differently. The far clip just needs to touch an item to see it.

If you are creating 2D model families and don’t want to change the far clip offset draw your model lines on a reference plane 1 mm above the “0 Reference level” in the family.