Kevin McAllister

I have a feeling its geared towards creative pros. Most of the rumour sites point to a new iPad Pro and a new Apple Pencil but those items alone wouldn't merit their own event. Based on some specific rumours I've seen over the last few months (iPad Pro with USB C instead of Lightning, iMacs with updated displays / special display hardware, a standalone display) I feel like there's a chance there might be a blending of worlds. Not in a iOS and MacOS becoming one, but in a complementary way. For example - What if your iPad Pro could plug into your Mac and become a tablet that allowed you to draw using the Apple Pencil as an input device. Or your iPad Pro became the full size equivalent to the MacBook Pro touch bar only for your full size desktop. It could allow for a variety of different inputs for creative professionals doing drawing, video & sound editing, animation etc. or even for user customized interfaces specific to any industry. Or an iMac display (or external display) that allowed you to draw on it using an Apple Pencil. While Apple were looking the other way, there's been a lot of movement in this space. Microsoft Surface (Various), Wacom (Cintiq), Adobe (Ink & Slide) are all examples. There is evidence of a closer relationship with Adobe again so perhaps they're combining to bridge across various product lines. Kevin

I'd be surprised if you couldn't label it with the new Data Tag tool in VW2019. Kevin

I think the question may be more "can we review the information our system is submitting".... though the idea of seeing tool usage metrics would be interesting to some of us 🙂 Kevin

It would be great if the tooltips for the various Import commands also included which versions VW can import. It would be great to mouse over the Sketchup import for example and see that it can import versions 4 through 2017. Instead I had to go into the help and manually search for the information. This would also make it easier for those of us working in multiple versions of Vectorworks since these things change from version to version. Thanks, Kevin

A couple of thoughts come to mind for trying to do this in VW - Consider reducing the ring to a single surface NURBS ring. The extrudes have a lot of extra geometry that will add up when you have thousands of them. If this is strictly for rendering, I would actually consider removing 1/4 to 1/3 of the ring. You'll never see a full ring if someone's wearing it and the gaps will help to sell the illusion. If the stadium is symmetrical use that to your advantage. If you happen to have a stadium model that has seats as symbols, use those as a way to approach getting 3D loci to distribute the rings on. If you have to fake it, I would use a surface array (or a couple of surface arrays) instead. I think it would be fairly simple to randomize the distribution of the rings if you have a set of loci. I would distribute too many and delete some rather than trying to work around every area that may not have any. I'm curious to see if someone tries it. Kevin

Thanks for the info. I was curious because yesterday I did a side by side comparison of editing a Sheet Border (2017) and a Title Block Border (2018/19) because I was trying to describe the slowness I've been seeing. Clearly they are different animals under the surface but I was surprised how quick the Sheet Border dialog opened when double-clicking. I had forgotten since I hadn't working in VW2017 for more than a year. It must be an interesting experience for users who switch interchangeably between versions throughout their day. Kevin

Even knowing that the checkbox existed it took me a while to find it again when BSeigel mentioned it 😊 Thanks for following up! Kevin

Thank you for your feedback. I think you just supported my concern from this thread - When Dashed Hidden Line is used as the Foreground Render mode "display 2d components" is not available as an option in the OIP. This means to create your reply, you had to switch the Background Render mode to Dashed Hidden Line to reveal "display 2d components" and then switch it back to Open GL. @Matt Panzer are you following this? Cheers, Kevin

I have another question about a UI upgrade - would a UI upgrade change how quickly dialogs open (eg. double clicking on a Title Block Border opens the edit dialog)? Is the current UI structure for this single core? Kevin

This all started when custom text fields in Title Block Borders became multi-line instead of single line. This happened during the transition from the old title block to the new title block. I'm not a programmer but there are two interim solutions I can imagine - Force all custom text fields back to single line for Title Block Borders for the time being and place any remaining multiline fields at the top of the Title Block Border edit dialog so its possible to tab through the fields below them. Or add a new field type, so that there's a single line text field and a multi-line text field. Then those of us that don't need multi-line fields can avoid this problem entirely. (Wish listed here - link) @Andy Broomell's post brings to mind an entirely different question - would you file the phantom field as a bug??? I think if I saw that normally I would but the "All Controls" workaround puts us in uncharted territory. Kevin

^ part of the challenge is that I don't think their beta test base is big and varied enough, so many issues aren't discovered until the SP0 release. Different workflows discover different bugs. Without implementing an open beta program (or at least a different beta program) the result may be the same even with a longer release cycle. From other threads it seems like the plan is to change how VW is deployed so that adding features isn't confined to a large release. Kevin

These issues have been getting worse for a few versions now. Here's the wishlist item to fix it - I'm beginning to think it won't get fixed until the screen plane / layer plane system is redesigned entirely... Kevin

I've sent the file via a PM. Thanks for the followup! Kevin

^ Doesn't VW already do this automatically? Maybe I'm missing something here. ^ This would be very useful. Kevin

Your screen shots have the orange border around the drawing window so I assumed you were working in some sort of container.... I bet its the plane issue. Kevin