P Retondo

I'm stumped - how do I paste in an image? When I click on the image icon, I get the same URL prompt we always used to get.

Nicholas, thanks, I'll submit a bug report.

I can't get a texture bed to display a texture. It always displays as a wireframe only: Has anyone had success using the texture bed site modifier?

This would be welcome. For example, the eyedropper tool is set by default not to pick up PIO attributes, and everytime I open VW I have to change this parameter.

I use the tool Mike recommends with a keyboard shortcut. It's in constant use.

Viewports have the ability to scale lineweights. Check the advanced properties and see if the lineweight scale is a value <1. That alone doesn't explain the difference between viewport and design layer, as the attached images demonstrate. The first is from a design layer, the second the same objects in a Viewport with line scale set to 1. The Viewport lines are thinner. I believe this could be a bug, and will submit it.

bc, I agree completely that the previous view history should be controllable and that it should extend back at least 20 or more views. If it is based on the "Saved View" algorithm, why not have a drop down list of 1-20 so that we can just go to the view we think is relevant? The ultimate - a scrollable list with thumbnails of the last 20 or so views.

I can verify this. I think it's a bug.

bc, I believe this is just the nature of the way VW has been structured for years. Zoom percentage is completely independent of which layers and classes are visible. To me this makes perfect sense from the point of view of software design. For many people, including myself and probably in your own work, this is useful in that it allows us to shift between layers and maintain that particular context. I would recommend that if you want to return to a previous view, use the "Previous View" command (<ctrl + ,> in my workspace) that steps you back several times to previous views. In most situations this command is more convenient and faster to use than shifting layers.

Yes!

Don't know what you mean - could you give an example?

I could see having a mode whereby with a double click one could edit a locked object, and then have it return to locked once deselected. That way we could operate more easily, and it might then become a more simple programming matter of defining another meaning for a double-click.

I think this would be problematic to implement. If you edit an object in such a way that its size changes, then the position is going to have to change. Even if you could lock the "origin" of the object, it is still going to change in a way that you might not desire or anticipate. So, after all the engineering is done, we won't have something really usable. Christiaan, I know what you mean about floors! When filled white, they look like innocent open space, but when you drag a marquee they get moved around. I do always lock mine.

Astonishingly, my workspace looks almost identical to Christiaan's, save that I keep the OIP floating and minimized instead of the Resource Browser. And I can't get my snap palette to dock below the tool sets, but if I could I would.

bc, I may be missing something here, but it sounds like you want to do an offset, for which there is an existing command.

Plus, if your lines completely surround a space and even if they aren't joined at the corners, you can create a polygon using the fill (paint bucket) mode of the polygon tool. If your lines include arcs, this tool will actually create a polyline instead of a polygon.

Hal, I can't imagine that being able to enter values for setting a working plane would fit most people's way of working, but I guess it could be done - set (x,y,z) coordinates for the origin and two angles to rotate the x axis, for example. But I have no problem doing basically the same thing graphically by constructing a 3d polyline based on a rectangle, and placing it and rotating it as desired. Then three clicks defines the working plane. The attached images show taking a 3d polygon, translating it to a selected point in space, rotating it from a selected corner "about the y axis" 25 degrees, then rotating it about the z axis 20 degrees. These are all controlled motions using the 3d rotate tool and selecting appropriate viewpoints (i.e., "Front view" for the first rotation and "Top view" for the second). I think it is true that by the nature of axis rotations, these operations result in different orientations if done in a different order. I actually don't do two rotations in practice - I usually have some object I can snap to from which a single rotation gives me the orientation I want.

But keep this wish on the list! Zooming to a particular view to print gives us something out of scale. And not all printer drivers (mine, for example) support printing the current view.

Gideon, I've used the extrude along path tool for many situations with complex 3d paths to model stairs railings and other objects. The Loft Surface tool might be more consistent, I'll give it a try.

Francois, that requires the ability to select every object through the VP "window." This is not the only wishlist item in such a vein, and I wonder where all this desire for the complex manipulation of Viewport graphics is leading us. At a certain point it might get to be too top heavy, both as a user interface and as a possibly unstable software environment. Although I understand the desire, I would have to say frankly that I'd rather see engineering effort go into something like making "live" sections actually work.

I find it's just easier to do the work for them, because more often than not they can't deal with it. I have to maintain a copy of AutoCAD to ensure that the background output is workable, especially as complex objects and symbols get translated into blocks, with a lot of extraneous lines in the case of walls. But then, in our market most structural and other engineers are constantly booked up two to three months in advance, and they can afford to play dumb. But I agree that the suggestion is, perhaps (forgive me!), a bit naive. A viewer .dwg translator is going to be no better than the VW .dwg translator, and won't really solve the problems. Better to have a system such as Mike's in place to make the translation smoother and more intelligible. Better yet to have tractable consultants!

Christiaan, great idea - I think I recall putting it on the wish list in the past. With Viewports it's now a bit easier to print out a piece of a drawing, and I keep a couple of sheet layers formatted for just that purpose. But how much better it would be to have a print dialog box that has an option "by marquee," and would work in a way similar to creating an image file. It would be great if the "Export pdf" tool had a similar capability, so we could just marquee around a bit of the drawing and export a .pdf to email a consultant, etc. It's all about speed and ease of workflow and information transfer.

Mark, duplicate of all your existing lines and change the duplicates' color and class all at one time. Then offset them by "Offset original object mode." That way, all your copies will disappear as they are offset, and the new offset lines will automatically have the attributes you want.

Bruce, this is a minor aside, but when we change our signatures, all of our old posts' signatures are updated. So where a discussion earlier in the year may have involved version 11, if you are now on version 12 the signature on the post can be misleading.

Donald, what you say sounds strange. I am unable to reference a Sheet layer via WGR, and I know that we can't copy and paste Viewports from one file to another and we also can't paste a Viewport into a design layer. Maybe someone from NNA can chip in here, but I don't see how your Viewport can be sourced from another file.