P Retondo

Christiaan, you're probably already aware of the workaround - create a user field column, copy all the values from the type column to that column, then edit the cells you want to be outliers, and hide the original column and display your customized column in the schedule. So, in your example, the PIO would still be a casement type but the schedule could display "tilt-turn." Too bad we can't use the formula "= [cell]" in a schedule worksheet . . . or can we somehow? So much of worksheets is a mystery.

We had a similar problem. It was caused by moving a section viewport containing keynotes from one sheetlayer to another. Using Christiann's method we were able to remove the corruption caused. It would be great if VW contained code to self-correct for this kind of thing.

Carl, I sympathize completely, but we're having problems with bringing 2010 projects into 2012! Thankfully, I can only imagine the problems translating v12.5 to 2012 - that's a lot of territory to cover.

Tamsin, thanks!!

This seems pretty basic, but I haven't been able to find any discussion of this issue. We have a building plan that contains a referenced viewport for another building so we can see both in 3d views. The problem we are running into is that all the doors and windows for that referenced building are automatically showing up in our door and window schedules (although they show up, we can't do any editing since the worksheet reports that these objects are in another file). We don't want these objects from another building to be reported in our schedules - has anyone experienced this and have a solution? Seems like a bug to me.

The animation tool, which I use frequently, seems not to have had any real attention for 15 years or more. I note that the progress information is now more stable, and persists throughout a multi-hour process, and that's good, but much more could be done. The following are my suggestions for revamping this tool, which does so much to leverage the value of 3d modeling for clients: 1. Greater speed, speed, speed. From my perspective, it seems that greater efficiency in various algorithms could improve speed greatly. For example, it seems to me that the process begins to drag as the number of frames piles up, and other clues lead me to believe that the entire movie is being periodically saved to the hard drive. Instead, if the frames were individually saved and then assembled at the end of the process, a lot of redundant and time consuming processing could be eliminated. 2. Better management of RAM. The program often stalls and crashes after 100 or 150 frames (even though with 6GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive, I never reach or come close to any hardware limits). I believe these crashes might have to do with memory management and if RAM were cleared of frame batches periodically, and that stuff written to the hard drive for later assembly, things might be more stable. 3. Ability to pause an animation and take it up again from the pause point later!! This would be a tremendous boon. 4. Fix the interrupts so that mouse input is accepted at any point in time, especially for systems where multiple processors / cores are being used, as is true for anyone who is seriously doing this kind of thing. We should not have to wait for some mysterious split second to cancel an animation. 5. Improve the user interface for "along path" animations. It's odd, for example, that the total movie time is set in the initial window, and can't be modified when editing the path. Also, it's not good that the initial speed of movement for the first view point has to be zero. When patching together segments into a movie, that means that when you add a segment, your motion always jerks to a stop and accelerates from zero as you move into the next segment. We should be able to set the initial speed at any reasonable rate. 6. Add the ability to rotate view in the "along path" setup. In other words, I want to be able to move to a point, look around, then move on. That is currently impossible, since if you go from a viewpoint looking one direction to another looking in another direction without translational movement, crazy things happen. 7. Add the ability to capture a realtime walkthrough as an animation path. 8. It drives me crazy that one has to render the initial scene in the desired rendering mode (taking many minutes in most cases), otherwise the movie won't be generated in the desired mode. That is something that we should be able to set as a preference, like in a sheet layer viewport. Also, it drives me doubly crazy that after doing that rendering, and selecting "create animation," the rendering process has to be done again! Wasting yet another set of minutes unnecessarily. 9. When previewing a movie, get the animation setup windows out of the way so we can see the preview. 10. Allow the user to save settings preferences (video codec, frame rate, etc.)

Christiann, sorry, reading too fast, my bad.

A warning about using this preference: referenced DLVP walls do not respect the setting, except in one regard. Components will show up, but you can only snap to the outside edges of walls and endpoints of components. It took us 4 man hours trouble-shooting this problem, and finally discovered that "Hide details" was the culprit, not some kind of corruption or some other setting.

Christiann, I agree there should be a software solution. We have options in a viewport for turning screen and layer plane objects off and on, we should have the same options for any 3d view. What I do is put my 2d objects into a special class, and turn that off for perspective saved views. But, inevitably, either I or someone else slips up on class assignment.

Dave, These PIOs are converted from 2010, but are now in 2012. The door glazing contains TWO extrudes (therefore 4 surfaces), the windows ONE extrude. Hence, the darkened rendering behind the doors, and lighter behind windows (trying to paste in a graphic). You can verify this by converting these objects to groups and looking at the pieces. Hence, the workaround suggested. BTW, if you can see this graphic, you'll also see the messed up transom window glazing. Strangely, this transom window problem only shows up as your viewpoint becomes more oblique. While you're fixing that, how about eliminating one of the door glazing extrudes? Or are those objects doubling as panels? Thanks for the heads-up on the shadows texture option. It did turn out that our legacy texture had shadows turned on, but we don't have the time right now to do the testing to see if that alone was responsible for more than doubling rendering time. Re: other comment, please note that it was the NEW texture that rendered faster, not the old one.

PS: a tip - windows contain a single plane rendered as glazing, doors contain 2, leading to a noticeably different attenuation of light. If you render a glazed door as a panel, assign your glass texture to either exterior or interior panel, and a class that has no texture and zero line weight to the other panel, you can spoof the door object to transmit light the same way a window does. This also leads to significantly improved rendering times. But :-( you can't fix your transom windows or sidelites.

Does anyone have advice on how to handle textures from 2010 and earlier? We just did some testing and found that replacing a glazing texture converted from 2010 with a "native" 2012 glass texture cut our rendering time by about 60%. A reflective metal texture, same issue, especially if it was customized in any way. How can one easily tell if a texture is "native" to 2012? We have a lot of legacy symbols with 3d content, plus we'd like to be able to re-use objects from previous projects that we've invested time into. Is there any way to convert a pre-2012 texture to a similar current texture? Any thoughts about texture substitution a la the font substitution window that pops up when your file contains an absent font?

Hi Katie, still have the top window bar flicker in both 2008 and 12.5.2 with no ipoint.exe process (ever), and obviously no floating data bar issue, since that didn't even exist in VW 12.5.

Christiaan, I've listed this problem as a bug. One of the ideas for dealing with it is to have a preference in the DLVP info palette that allows "ordinary" class settings to override, and to have all layer links translated from earlier versions automatically check this override. Katie, the problem simply stated is that with class visibility controlled by DLVPs, we now have to look in multiple places to control how objects appear in a design layer. This adds one, or possibly numerous, extra steps, and is particularly difficult when a saved view from a version 11 or 12 file is converted to 2008. If that saved view shows a layer that contains layer links, and was dependent on class visibility settings, the visibility of objects in the 2008 version of the file can be very different from what was set up in the original.

Interesting comments by all, especially the research from Dr. Mike M! From a software engineering point of view, there is a very interesting and pragmatic solution - terminology tables. All the key words in VW's user interface have a more correct term in the various markets. So the answer is to have all these key terms represented by variables in the code. This set of variables can be mapped to a series of regionally-based terminology tables, and displayed on screen to the user according to whatever regional preference is selected.

In my experience VW's pdf export converter does not embed fonts. I use PDF995, available on the web, which has an option to embed fonts. I can work around this with my print services by sending them the fonts that I use, which makes it possible to use the VW converter. But I also find that VW pdfs are larger files, and won't reduce using Acrobat's Reduce File Size command. So with the VW conversion yesterday I had a 7.9 MB file from VW pdf that couldn't be reduced, and by contrast a 6.5 MB file from PDF995 that was ultimately reduced to 112 KB.

I find that it takes a long time to install VW these days because of the automated update feature. The install program is contacting an NNA server and downloading updated files.

I am having a few difficulties with XP x64, but I wouldn't describe it as "bombing."

Really, Petri, surely you would agree that Singapore is a civilized country as well.

Sounds like VW is reading one dimension in feet and the other in inches.

kenzo, set your model layer z value to 56.2 m. Then you can work on it with a "datum" of zero relative to the layer, and stack layers and layer linking will show it at the absolute height you desire. It looks as though your model setup should have done that for you, but since the results don't look right, go into the layer and look at the layer z values to check. I do agree strongly with Petri's request for a better system of setting a datum. I've always thought Archicad had the better idea - you can toggle between viewing objects relative to a user-defined z value datum and absolute z value. Islandmon, by now you are probably shaking your head over the silly refusal of EU folks to use a proper decimal point! (Just a joke - wait! Ow! Ooof! Stop!)

Christiaan, I have complained about the ability to set class overrides in DLVPs. This now makes it more complicated to use classes to sort the visibility of objects in design layers. As you point out, this is an inconsistency in light of the philosophy that design layers are for design, sheet layers are for output. I understand the occasional need to have text in a design layer to make notes, etc. But why does it need to be through the vehicle of annotations? You can put the notes right in the layer. The reason for annotation space in a regular Sheet Layer VP is so that you can have VP's with different scales on the sheet and easily control scaling issues by having things "belong" to each VP's annotation space. I would never use a DLVP to bring something into a design layer at a different scale, and I can't imagine the need to do such a thing. I think this is the reasoning behind not having a separate annotation space for the DLVP. I know you're thinking, "well, if it's a type of viewport, WHY NOT have annotations?" I think the answer there is that DLVPs might be based on different technology - my understanding is that they are an adaptation of layer links. Just a guess on my part, maybe Katie could confirm that.

Hi Katie, looks like we have 2 screen flicker threads now! As reported in the other thread, I have two computers, one a laptop, and neither has the ipoint.exe process. Both have nearly identical flickering problems (blue bar at top of window flickers at ~4 cps, number of flickers varies from 0 - 30). One computer (Dell 690) has the NVIDIA Quadro 3450/4000 SDI video card with the driver supplied by Dell tech support (v 9.1.3.6) and a Dell optical mouse with MS driver 5.2.3790.1830. The other (HP ZD8000) has the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 video card with driver v 6.14.10.6483 and both Synaptics touchpad (driver 7.11.14.0) and MS Intellipoint bluetooth mouse with driver v 5.1.2600.0. HTH!

I have flicker on two computers, one of which is a Dell and the other of which is an HP laptop. The latter has an MS Intellipoint bluetooth mouse, but neither shows ipoint.exe as a process. Steve, was your flicker the same as mine (i.e., a ~4 cps flicker of the blue band at the top of your application window)?

James, change the fill attribute of your polyline to "none." Then decompose your polyline and it will become a series of lines and arcs, etc. The reason your fill is so wonky is probably because VW adds a connecting side when you have something like an "S" shaped polyline. That side connects the two ends, crosses over the shape, and causes the fill to be odd. If you decompose the two sides of your road, put lines at the ends to create a completely enclosed space, then select all the objects and compose them, you can then fill successfully.