Amorphous - Julian

I am not entirely sure about permissions related to 'viewport annotation' in 'project sharing' If we have three people wanting to do different things in a viewport, say: 1 - one is tagging walls, and; 2 - another is dimensioning the plan, and; 3 - another is tagging the doors Can all three people be in the viewport at the same time? If so people can concurrently work in a viewport, then when does a viewport require 'checking out'?

Say you are annotating (in annotations). And then you realise, 'Oh, I need to edit that thing before I annotate further' (be it dimension, etc). Normally, you'd have to exit annotation, click back into the design layer to edit. Once done- click back into sheet layer, and then back into the annotation space to continue where you left off. By the time you're done with all those mouse clicking, entering and exits, you would have already forgotten what you were doing before. Much better if we can 'force select, and edit' right from inside the annotation space, and once editing is done, click 'exit' to re-enter annotation space.

I see, good to know! Hopefully someone at Vectorworks will pick up this suggestion.

@markdd I'm still on 2019 (Waiting for 2020SP3) so haven't used the new/advanced features of Data Visualisation yet. When I posted this I did wonder whether Data Visualisation can do this. Would data visualisation be able to give a one-click solution to toggle between the two display modes?

It would be so good, if, with one shortcut button, we can display ALL lines in the document AS colours. So, regardless of class, we can have: 0,05=RED 0.13=GREEN 0.18=YELLOW etc etc etc (customisable) We should be able to access this on both Sheet Layers and Design Layers, so we can check for lineweights at any time.

Please integrate some functions of this Vectorworks Plugin into it: http://www.vectordepot.com/VM-042/Mouldings Manual.pdf Very important to consider how it looks in TOP/PLAN view. We don't need messy wireframes. We need plan-friendly objects.

Hi Pat, thanks for writing. In our instance, it turned out the issue was leaving the referenced 'Survey' layer (DWG linework) hovering over our 'Proposed GA' layer in the viewport, which contains the wall objects. When we turned off the referenced 'Survey' layer, then the wall tagging worked again without issue.

Yes, missing in the Viewports and also Model space. Otherwise we won't be doing 'copy-and-paste' from a previous version back into here 😆 This is another wall that went missing. Our team member tagged this door (door 20, type G) just a couple of hours ago tonight. After a few rounds of S&C the wall is gone. He's given up and will continue tomorrow.

Another viewport with another wall just disappeared (let me be clear, it is a viewport. We don't change our classes here) As you can see, we tagged a wall here previously. The wall has now disappeared. We are now copying the walls back from a previous version. We are not imagining this. 10:44pm now here and I was intending to issue this drawing set. But we will no longer meet this deadline.

This is taken from a VIEWPORT. All my walls that are masonry are on THE SAME CLASS. No, the classes were not turned off. Here's another screenshot viewport of another viewport I didn't post up. Sure, I didn't know about the 'filters'. But me and my team know something as simple and checking if our classes are turned on before we spend time making a post.

Never used that function before... thanks for pointing it out. I'll let the team know

[UPDATE 2 12/02/2020] Things keep going missing throughout the day. Walls disappearing on one terminal but not the other. Frustrating as hell. We are onto version v336.

@Luka Stefanovic in one of the viewports, the Wall Tag with the above mapping seems to work just fine (we do Data tagging in Annotation Space) However, in anther viewport, the Wall Tag doesn't pick up on walls (does not show highlight in red), but rather wants to tag other non-wall objects. I get the following I'm not sure I completely understand the question, and the available choices. message:

Lately, with all the issues we go through, I can't stop asking myself.... (1) If I didn't run this practice, and haven't already invested/committed so much time and resources into Vectorworks, would I work in an office that uses Vectorworks? (2) Weighing everything up, does Vectorworks aid, or hinder, my work? (3) Is it unrealistic to expect Vectorworks to become a snappy, responsive, efficient & stable program? When may that happen?

[UPDATE 12/03/2020] Something strange happened with one of the terminals today. We noticed some walls disappeared (only on that terminal), and after searching for classes, all classes then disappeared (see video) in the navigation panel. We then tried opening the file again, When we look at the 'classes'. They start disappearing one-by-one (see other video) in the navigation panel. Then, other terminals also had 'all classes disappear' upon refresh (see screen shot) Onto another version. Many hours wasted. Vectorworks class problem.mp4 all classes gone.mp4

Thanks @Julian Carr for helping out on this one. The above formula changed to INT([Component.Thickness]) Will give the desired result

Hi @Luka Stefanovic I'm wondering if there is anything I can add to this formula that will give me the decimal places I need?

Hi Luka. Really appreciate the detailed instructions you provided... worked brilliantly! Except for one thing... I now seem to have too many decimal places 🙂 What should I do if I want it to be rounded off at 0? Thanks.

Thanks for the quick response on this @Frank Brault, but it is simply too much work to do this for every plant we input into the document, especially during design phase when we are exploring different design options. To be Frank, this problem applies to everything from Plants, to Furniture Objects, to Technical Drawings symbols. On another post, we discussed a tool called SmartPaste by @GioPet, which has since been discontinued. I wonder if Giovanni can share with us whether his tool can help with a situation like this too?

[UPDATE 2 10/03/2020] All terminals on v333 suddenly couldn't save to server. The Project File suddenly seems to be locked up for some reasons. No one can save and commit without this error message. Onto version v334 now.

Haha I think I just beat you to asking that question. As above, empty openings. It is very cumbersome.

Hi @CiaMariaPia I'm glad that others are seeing similar problems with current Wall Styles. Hope the engineers at Vectorworks take note. We generate floor plans from this as well. But honestly it gets very messy and cumbersome. Think about how it works around doors and windows. We generally create two empty opening around doors and windows for it to all make sense (one on each side) Problem arises again when we need to move the doors and windows. It is very slow. Very well pointed out. This makes our plan drawings look weird. We'd love to have an approach that balances between 'modelling', 'architectural drawing' and 'rendering'. But this doesn't really exist in VW as it is now. There has been other posts that talks about this. In particular about stone/tile/wall joints, I will link them in later. As for your question about plan appearance, what we do to suppress it is to cover over it in annotation space. Depends at what stage you're talking about. It makes sense at concept stage to just allow for a 50mm finishes zone, which takes care of everything from 'Decorative wall panelling' to 'screed + adhesive + stonework'. We control 'renderworks textures' with 'classes'. So by changing the class of an object we can very quickly change the appearance for the purpose of design exploration. A wall with no build-ups makes more sense at this stage. Later, towards design development, we can then have different wall styles that show the real substrates, material thickness and hatches. IN CONCLUSION Our method is not ideal, it is only to 'work around' the counter-intuitive nature of 'Wall Styles'. Hence, if VW can change how 'Walls' and 'Finishes' works, per post by Tom Klaber and myself, we save ourselves the pain that you pointed out in your three questions.

[UPDATE 10/03/2020] Today we had another PS issue. Onto version v333.

Hi thanks @Luka Stefanovic that is great news! However, I have searched through the IFC list in Data Tags, and cannot find 'IFC set' or 'Component.Thickness' for me to get the core thickness. Would you be able to tell me the exact steps to get to those functions, or give me the callout formula? The best I can get to is: #CD##IfcMaterialSet#.#IfcMaterialSet#.#Components# Much appreciated, thanks! 😁

@E|FA When modelling in Vectorworks now, we prefer walls with only one component (instead of walls with attached component which is a hassle to modify). IE we don't go through the effort of making 'Wall Styles' with a 'core' and different 'finishes component' over them. In a shared project file scenario, wall styles is just trouble. Too many permissions issues everytime we want to modify one style.