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P Retondo

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Posts posted by P Retondo

  1. Katie, before I try this, I wonder if you have answers to a couple of questions: If I take out a font that is used in my document, what happens to that text? I know it probably defaults to Arial or something, but is it going to be a problem getting the original font assignment back? With hundreds of text blocks using Stylus BT, it could be quite a chore going through and reassigning that font.

    On our system the server is involved in print queueing and provides the driver to workstations. Does this mean that this font experiment has to be done on the server's font set, or the workstation font set, or both? Where does VW and/or the plotter driver get fonts from in this instance?

    More out of curiosity than anything else - how does the fact that a corrupted font exists in the font folder cause a problem if that font is not used in the file? And does anyone at NNA know why this is a problem with version 9 and 10, and was not a problem previously (i.e., can't the programmers do what was done before and fix the problem in the current version)?

    [ 04-23-2003, 01:43 AM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  2. Same problem here with HP 800. Usually, the first print of a series has scrunched text and line weights don't print properly. I just run a plot in fast mode to get the glitch out of the way. Problem occurs with all fonts I use and with all files I print. It doesn't matter whether I have other programs open or whether I wait before doing anything else.

    VWA 10.1

    WinXP

    Server: Win2000

    HP DesignJet 800 on Ethernet, driver v. 5.32

  3. I have a detail with 3 dimensions. Whichever of these three I choose, when I attempt to drag to increase the offset or change the endpoints, the correct dimension is selected and can be modified in the OIP, but when I attempt to change that dimension by dragging, the first dimension created is is moved instead. I cannot modify the other two by dragging. Is this a known bug? Is this an artifact of parametrics (no parametric constraints are showing)? If so, parametrics is not working as it should.

    It gets worse. I added a 4th dimension at right angles. Now the problem has shifted to focus on this dimension. What is worse, I cannot undo an action when this bug asserts.

    Okay - turned off "associate dimensions" in document preferences, and things work properly. This option does not appear to work in a useful way, given the above behavior.

    [ 04-21-2003, 12:57 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  4. Make the protruding edges of the wall an extrusion, and keep the inner part a wall. Only way I know of. Of course, you may get some extraneous lines at the juncture when converting to lines.

    On the polygons - for some reason VW has not gone all the way with NURBS modeling. With a NURBS 3D modeling program, 3D polygons are done away with. Hopefully, full NURBS modeling is in the future for VW. Have you used Rhino? Not designed for architects, but there is a cheap demo version which you can get to check out what NURBS modeling can do. It's faster (much faster) and cleaner.

    [ 04-21-2003, 12:10 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  5. If an item does not show up in the 2D section, it could be because it is not filled. Or it could be a class issue, as described above.

    The extra lines you see are generated when you convert a 3D section to lines. You have to enter the group of lines and delete them. This occurs because the 3D section converts everything to 3D polygons. If you convert a wall to lines, you will not get these extraneous lines (in later versions of VW only). So it is easier to get an exterior elevation, as opposed to an interior elevation. If you can create the interior elevation by removing walls instead of cutting a 3D section, life will be easier.

    Speaking of this problem, NNA, how about a new way of doing a 3D section that actually cuts all objects at the line and does not convert to 3D polys? This would help with the other huge problem having to do with 3D sections - enormous expansion of file size and consequent impact on processing speed.

    [ 04-21-2003, 06:14 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  6. "if you're looking to, say, light the building only from the southeast, you could put the directional light in the model layer rather than the layer it's linked to"

    Kristen, thanks for the suggestion - but I had tried that to no avail. The result on the layer combining 4 views of the building is that 1) you get 4 times the light you want, and 2) all four lights combine to light all views of the model from 4 directions.

  7. Worked pretty well, except for light direction. Both approaches are essentially the same. I set up my four links in top view, then maneuvered them in front view to be a 2x2 layout on the sheet. In top view again, I moved some of the links "back and forth" (up and down the screen in top view) until no shadows were cast by the upper objects on the lower ones. Since the final view is a pure orthogonal elevation, this fore and aft movement had no effect on the size of the objects on the sheet.

    Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be possible to light each view/link separately. This means that we can't get a realistic position for the sun, since all "sides" of the building are lit more or less identically using this technique. There might be ways to finesse this by using a series of spot light sources that decay with distance, diminishing the effect of one link's lights upon another. The problem, though, is that all four links exist in the same 3D and light space.

    This experiment points up some differences between links, as applied by VectorWorks, and AutoCAD's viewports and xrefs. Links, I think, were originally created to allow the assembly of a 3D model on a single layer. This means that they were designed not to be separate "views" of a source object, but to create a coherent single view from an assemblage of objects.

    Viewports and xrefs are essentially 2D tools to allow the assembly of a working drawing from different snapshots of drafted objects. Both viewports and xrefs can be clipped and bounded, where links cannot. Perhaps if VW could come up with a way of isolating/bounding links without compromising the original concept, we could solve this problem with displaying multiple views of an object, and at the same time allow them to be more flexibly used in the 2D context.

    Another approach might be to make my original attempt work - i.e., set up the different views on 4 different layers. The only problem I was having was that each rendered layer created a completely opaque white background, so that only the top layer was visible after all were rendered. This white background effect, by the way, was not present in forms of rendering other than OpenGL or RenderWorks.

    [ 04-19-2003, 10:52 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  8. Has anyone been able to get rendered views of a model, seen from all sides, on a single sheet? I have set up 4 visible layers, inserted a link to the model in each layer, set each layer to a different elevation view - so far so good - but when I render with OpenGL or Renderworks, the rendering seems to create white fill around the building so that only the top layer shows. Am I missing something?

  9. Could NNA please consider whether anything is gained by having tools automatically assign classes, and automatically create new classes, when objects are created? I'm thinking about NURBS curve and surface extraction, whereby an extracted curve is assigned the class "RedCurves" when created. This causes it to shortly disappear from the screen since "RedCurves", as a new class created by the tool, is not visible in any view or sheet previously established by the user. I have to immediately reassign these objects to the "None" class so I can work with them, and frequently have to change the default class to "RedCurves" to see them - then I forget to change the default class back to "None" and wind up with a bunch of invisible objects that I then have to seek out and convert to the appropriate visible class.

    All of this for what? The imagined benefit to a user is definitely not worth the cost. If a user wants NURBS curves placed in a special class, please leave up to the individual! This same comment goes for symbols that assign classes like "Appliance", or whatever. With window and door PIOs, we at least have some control over what classes are assigned to objects.

  10. Thomas, you have obviously given this a lot of thought. But consider this question alone: resizing rectangles in the OIP is a powerful tool, and I gather that those who want rectangles to remain rectangles when rotated want to be able to use the OIP to resize a rotated rectangle. In the OIP is an array of 9 radio buttons that determine which point on a resized object remains fixed. How would the program determine the user's intent in clicking one of those choices when the rectangle is rotated? When does the lower right corner cease to be the lower right corner as the object is rotated beyond 45 degrees towards 90 degrees? These questions might be answered and a solution implemented, but imagine the increased complexity in programming required of NNA and in knowledge required of the user. I can imagine the rectangle becoming a kind of symbol that has to be "entered" to edit it in normalized orthogonal space.

    Re: whether a rectangle is a kind of polygon, true in the geometric sense, but not true from the programming point of view (or so I surmise, since I haven't seen VW source code or any summary of their class structure).

    [ 04-17-2003, 01:15 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  11. Sorry for the misleading info - I think Katie is right, you have Autojoin turned on. To turn it off, select the wall tool. On the mode bar above, the rightmost icon is the wall preferences dialog box. When you open it, you will probably see the autojoin radio button selected. Toggle it off, and see if that helps.

  12. Thomas, AutoCAD treats rectangles in its core code as you describe. As I understand it, VW's code is different, and rectangles are a separate class and therefore do not inherit polygon behaviors. Since it's easy enough to convert a rectangle to a polygon in VW, getting polygon behavior is reasonably convenient. What I think you are neglecting is the fact that, compared to AutoCAD, VW's rectangles are much easier to use -to resize and create. This ease of use flows directly from the different way in which VW has organized their basic class concepts, and asking them to change it to make rectangles a subset of polygons might not be logical.

    To add a rotation attribute to the rectangle's definition might be feasible and useful, but it may cause lots of problems when it comes to converting old files to the new system.

    [ 04-16-2003, 01:38 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  13. Look at the "mode" bar near the top of your screen when you have the 2D selection tool active. On the right is an icon that looks like two tables, one faint. By toggling this icon you can enable/disable the "move connected wall" mode. When it is on, you get the behavior you describe - actually very useful once you get used to it. When it is off, you can drag the walls without affecting connected walls.

  14. BG, I'm not sure this is a bug. You can achieve the same effect by making the unfilled rectangle a group. With "Alt + click" you are then selecting, not the object, but the "container" object, which has extents similar to what the filled rectangle would have.

    In my version, the lasso selection tool has to completely surround an object to select it, so that there is no difference in behavior between selected a filled rectangle, an unfilled rectangle, or a group (or symbol) containing a rectangle.

    VW 10.1

    [ 04-15-2003, 09:40 PM: Message edited by: P Retondo ]

  15. How about an option under the file menu to save a copy of an open document - in order to facilitate creating a backup copy of a file as we work on it (to, hopefully, avoid corrupted file glitches such as the one that cost me a day's work recently). The "save copy as" would differ from "save as" in that the open document would retain its identity as the original "permanent" file, where the copy would be saved to another location as a "temporary" backup. We could even automate this process so that a backup copy would be saved every hour or so.

  16. Thomas is right (almost), as well. It would be theoretically possible to define a rectangle using two vectors, one to represent its diagonal, the other to represent its rotation from the orthogonal orientation. This would obviously double the memory required to store a rectangle, but probably not as much as is required to store the rotated rectangle as a polygon.

  17. Hi Katie, I saved this file hurriedly at the end of the day. I think I shut down VW and clicked on the "Save file" dialog box, which saves it directly to the office server via Ethernet. I probably then closed down Outlook and Windows Explorer, then shut down. I was in too much of a hurry to remember any detail.

    VW 10.1

    WinXP/Server = Win2K

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