Kevin McAllister

^ this would be a prime teaser Tuesday topic 🙂 KM

This post by JimW - KM

Look under Window>Palette Options and uncheck "Auto-hide Floating Palettes" if your Resource Manager isn't docked into your workspace. Kevin

If you're working in a 3d view, then render your model in OpenGL (View>Rendering>OpenGL) to have it appear solid. Note that 3d objects always appear transparent in Top/Plan view in VW. You can set VW to do this automatically when you switch into a 3d view if you want. Go to Tools>Options>Vectorworks Preferences on the 3D pane and set "Render mode when changing from Top/Plan to a 3d View" to OpenGL. Kevin

Given that you're using VW2017 (at the least the help link is from VW2017), everything will change when you upgrade to VW2018 or newer. The Sheet Border tool was replace but the Title Block Border tool in VW2018 and the implementation requires that you update your old title blocks. The new tool has gone through significant growing pains and will likely change again in VW2019. Kevin

^ I could see that as being useful and quite powerful. Perhaps the Visibility Tool too... KM

Often the slicers for FDM machines will repair or gloss over issues with the STL model. Those errors tend to show up if you try printing the same model with a higher end printer. I tend to error check everything in case I end up sending files out to be printed. Kevin

I just did some quick testing and walls will export to STL as is. I also tried selecting a group of walls and creating a solid addition. However when I brought them into software to check the integrity of the STL there were a lot of individual shells, some of which weren't closed. It looks like VW doesn't deal very well with walls and converting them to other things. @Jim Wilson in your 3d printing tests, did you work with walls? Kevin

Remember that Screen Plane came first, way before Layer Plane and the evil Screen Aligned Plane. I almost always use Screen Plane and work entirely in 3d. The problem isn't with Screen Plane itself. The problem is with how Screen Plane / Layer Plane was implemented. We should never be placing 2d objects in 3d space, We should be placing 3d objects in 3d space (eg. all the "2d" tools should have the ability to create NURBS curves in 3d like Rhino). The main reasons for using Screen Plane is that its not handicapped like Layer Plane and Screen Aligned Plane. It allows for proper, guaranteed snaps and also forces tools that can misbehave in 3d (Add Surface, Clip Surface, Duplicate Array to name a few) to do what you expect. Regardless if you love or hate it, I doubt its going away since it would break file compatibility all the way back to Minicad. The certainly need to be improvements but its the Layer Plane implementation that needs them, not Screen Plane. Screen Aligned Plane should be removed completely. All of this would require a complete rebuilding of the snap system with allowances for 2d, 3d and 2.5d snapping. Kevin

Hi Ed, In case you're not aware, you can print from the design layers directly. You can easily move the page around using the Move Page tool. Anything you print this way would be in the scale of your design layers so their scale would need to be set accordingly. Kevin

I haven't used the "Fullscreen Preview" option so its not that. It may be my outdated graphics hardware but I've had it happen on occasion with the last few versions, maybe as far back as 2016. I've often wondered why it happens. It looks like VW is redrawing the hidden line overlay with every bucket. Kevin

@Jim Wilson this Q&A was awesome. Thanks to you both for answering my questions. I really like that we get to meet some of the other faces behind VW. The open format is very refreshing! I thought of one more question that's probably related to this weeks teaser. Sometimes when I update Sheet Layer Renderworks viewports there's a thing that happens where instead of getting just the image "buckets" as things render, the whole viewport continuously redraws over and over. Usually its a viewport that also has a Hidden Line foreground element. Will these improvements help that scenario? Thanks again, Kevin

^ This is a cool idea! KM

The snapping has gotten progressively worse, especially within containers nested in other containers. I'm not sure why its deteriorated so much but there's a lot of extra exiting/reentering containers or changing views in my workflow now to try and make it work. Kevin

Yes, I tried a Shell and a Solid Addition too. I'm not entirely sure it renders correctly in Renderworks. Here's a screen shot from my testing. The lower shade has a cap on it so there shouldn't be any light coming through the fins above it. Kevin