P Retondo

Matthew, Donald, I believe the issue here may possibly have to do with the Mac version of 9.0. In my windows versions, 8.5.2 and 9.0 behave the same (as Matthew says), and behave exactly the way Donald wishes (per his description of 8.5.2 Mac). VW 8.5.2 and 9.0.1 PII 333/192 Win 2000

quote: Originally posted by Stereo: The lines become straight when the actual viewpoint and eye are on the same height. If you want to look at an object that is high up like a roof if you stand in front of a house - you just stretch the marquee until you see that object - and do not change the viewpoint. To gather these threads together, the question becomes: How can you reset a perspective so that the viewer height and the "Look Toward Height" are the same, thus making all vertical lines vertical? You can use the Walkthrough Tool to change your view "angle" (i.e., look up or down at the scene, and move viewpoint up or down, using <ctrl + mouse> ), but I know of no process that allows us to reset the viewer height and "Look Toward" parameters. This would be very useful.

quote: Originally posted by SeanFlaherty: Which do you think would aid your drafting more? 1) A single click extend tool (maybe a mode) that extends one line at a time to a selected boundary (a la 8.5). 2) A command that takes all of the selected lines/walls and extends them to a boundary that you click on after picking the command. Sean, thanks for asking a great question! 2) sounds attractive, given that you can zoom out after creating the selection set to find the object you want to extend to. The one problem to be worked out would be if the user selected an illegal object to extend. This could be handled the way some 3D boolean commands are handled, by giving a warning and automatically excluding the illegal objects. Having this tool in no way negates the important advantages of having the new Connect/Combine tool. It would be great to have both capabilities.

Open GL is part of my copy of VW 8.5.2. It works better with v 9. Win 2000 PII 333

The old extend tool is very much missed here. It is particularly useful when working from one side of a drawing to another when the scale of things is such that you have to zoom in to pick objects accurately.

Donald, I'm confused - the Trim Tool (scissors icon) seems to behave as it always did, and requires the user to click on an object before it is trimmed. Are you referring to a different trim tool? I agree enthusiastically with the suggestion on the save prompt. It is nothing short of annoying, but I leave it on because annoyance is better than losing a bunch of time if I get lost in my work and forget to save often enough. VW 9.0.1 Win 2000 [This message has been edited by P Retondo (edited 09-01-2001).]

quote: Originally posted by Robert Nichols: The strategies you suggested for positioning elements with precision disappointed me a bit ... Robert, On the other hand, AutoCAD (don't know about ArchiCAD) doesn't have the "Move" command allowing you to precisely define a relative movement. I'm surprised no one has brought up this one: using any of the handles on an object, position the cursor over the point until you see the "cross" symbol. Click to grab the object and drag (holding down the mouse button) to any location. Screen hints tell you when you have "homed in" on the location you desire. This is functionally the same as your "click - click" vector. PS, NNA: the complaint about moving walls after resizing them is one of my pet peeves, as well. Wouldn't it be easy to set up three buttons, similar to the 9-button array we see in the info palette when resizing other kinds of objects, so that we can fix the part of the wall (center or either side, at the user's option) we want to stay put when changing its thickness? [This message has been edited by P Retondo (edited 08-29-2001).]

quote: Originally posted by Andrew Bell@NNA: Are you working on a Mac? I've been doing a decent-sized project with several solids on a PC, and while solid computation isn't instantaneous, the speed wasn't slow enough to be an issue Andrew: I have solid booleans that take 30 seconds or more to compute in VW 9.0.1 (timed at 8 seconds in VW 8.5.2). If we have to do this kind of thing to get lines showing the interesection of all solids, it's too slow. Consider that you will have to go in and edit all of these complex objects every time you want to change one, and wait each time for the calculation to be completed. Thanks for your participation in this forum! -Pete VW 9.0.1 Win 2000 PII 333 192 MB RAM

If you are an AutoCAD user, one way to think of it is this: layers in VW are used to organize multiple drawings from a single file - something you do with Paperspace in ACAD. Classes are used in order to do what AutoCAD does with layers: to classify and organize the drawing components. In strictly pragmatic terms, since you can save a "sheet" or "view" using both systems, classes augment the ability to refine what you see on the screen. They allow you to exclude from view certain items in a visible layer. Classes "cross" layers, allowing you to craft custom selection routines to modify things en masse that exist on different layers. You can also modify the attributes of things using classes - like if you want to change the lineweights on all your circuit diagram lines, if you happened to assign a class to those things, you can just go into the class menu and edit that class. Again, this is one of the things you do with layers in ACAD. [This message has been edited by P Retondo (edited 08-27-2001).]

Andrew, Good work! Actually, the preference should work the other way around. We hardly ever want the extra lines, and almost always want things to look the way Archken suggests. Go Archken! The lack of lines showing the intersection of solids, as per his earlier suggestion, is a constant problem. It is possible to get them to show up if you perform an actual boolean solid addition - but that doesn't work with walls and roofs (?), and not very convenient with the solid modeling of other kinds of objects - especially now that we have the accurate but slow VW 9.

quote: Originally posted by rcarch: layer links work great for alot of things, but the one thing it cant help is if you have a detail sheet with multiple scales in it. if you use VA like i do, then you have to have lots of detail sheets at different scale, and then spend the time editing the saved sheets to pull up the correct layers. As Carl says, you can set up a sheet with multiple layers at different scales. But, as I read your question, it seems that you are already doing that. Your problem seems to be with having to changing your saved sheets for some reason. I would suggest that you should have a standard detail sheet setup which has one layer for each of your possible detail scales (e.g., layers "Detail 1 1.5", "Detail 1 3", "Detail 1 6", Detail 1 Full", etc.). Then, to add or move details around, you wouldn't have to add a new layer - just create, or cut and paste, the drawing into the layer you already have. I have used a separate layer for all drawing titles, so they can be standardized at one scale, and set up my drawing titles as a symbol, linked to records, for easy editing of text strings. If you are used to ACAD Paperspace, you have to discard your assumptions about the ACAD function of layers and realize that one of the major roles for layers in VW is to set up sheets or views. I think you are pointing to a difficulty with the "Save Sheets" utility, at least in versions up through 8.5.2. When you add or delete a layer, it can play havoc with ALL of your sheet setups. I have learned to make any new layer "invisible" at creation, otherwise it can pop up in sheets you didn't want it to. It seems as though the program could manage changes to layers more thoroughly. [This message has been edited by P Retondo (edited 08-13-2001).]

NNA, I think you should pay for two days of Archken's time to sit down with you and show you, with his own projects as examples, exactly what he is talking about. I don't doubt that it would be difficult to implement even the simplest-sounding aspects, but I am intrigued. With respect to version 9, I have been working with 9.0.1 (Windows) for a few weeks, mainly to do some work to illustrate an academic paper. My feeling is that it is much more stable and bug-free than the comments on the bulletin board would make it seem, although I haven't used many of the production-drawing tools yet. For one thing alone, Archken, you would find it worthwhile: you can assign many more keyboard shortcuts since you now have <Ctrl + shift + >, <Ctrl + Alt + >, and <Ctrl + Alt + shift + > options. Also, the tool palettes dock to the top or side, which makes your workspace much less cluttered. You may use RenderWorks or some other 3rd party rendering program, but the Open GL rendering mode that comes with VW 9 is a great improvement, both in terms of allowing a range of options and much better interpolation. There are a bunch of other small things that I'm not mentioning. BTW, two minor picky points: setting up 4 linked layers to show different views of the model doesn't seem to be too much of a burden! Also, the use of the term "realtime" - I think "automated" is what you're thinking. "Realtime" refers to the ability of a computing system to perform calculations fast enough to keep up with real events, as opposed to it having to spend 20 hours, for example, to create a video that takes 2 minutes to view. VW 9.0.1 Win 2000 PII 333

Like Paper space ... almost. I've discovered that line weights remain constant in the various scales in a linked layer, just as they would if you changed a layer's scale, different from printer scaling. Fortunately, there is an option to scale text. Scaling lineweights is handled adequately, but inconveniently, in AutoCAD. To implement a Drawing Setup utility, scaling lineweights should be automatic, with an option to set the scale factor. It would be part of that dialog box. Any reaction from NNA to these ideas? I've heard lots of AutoCAD devotees say that the lack of Paper space functionality is their major reason for not liking VectorWorks. Their other argument is that they like xrefs.

In response to a comment by DomArch in the General Discussion area, Auto join would function much better if could be toggled by the <Ctrl> key. That would work much faster than having to select and deselect it as a wall creation preference.

DomArch, The behavior you describe sounds like a bug, or possibly corruption of some kind, although I can't imagine what kind of corruption would cause Auto join to spontaneously select a distant wall to join to. In Auto join mode on my platform, you have to move the cursor close to the wall you wish to join to before it becomes highlighted. You might check your snap radius in VW Preferences, in case a number like 500 got entered there - a long shot! You've probably already done it, but I'd reinstall the program, and delete and re-draw the problematic wall(s). Toggling the Auto join function, using the <Ctrl> key for example, would be an excellent feature! VW 9.0.1 Win 2000 PII 333

quote: Originally posted by jodawi: I'll add this to the buglist if it's not there already. Thanks for responding. It is not entirely a bad thing that the entity shows up on the screen under these circumstances. At least you know that the paste was executed! If I may suggest, the way to improve the situation would be to launch a dialog box that says, "You are pasting an object whose class is not visible. Do you wish to make this class active? -> Yes, or Cancel." Automatically activating the class, as you point out, would make the object selectable. Then, we would have the ability to assign a different class to the object, which is often what you end up wanting to do. [This message has been edited by P Retondo (edited 08-05-2001).]

Carl, Check out the General Discussion forum, item titled "trimming with arcs/circles," for a thorough discussion of working around the loss of <Ctrl+T>.

quote: Originally posted by jodawi: In order to see the objects in a group or symbol, they must be in a visible or active class, and the group or symbol itself must be in a visible or active class Jodawi, This is generally true; however, when you paste an object into a saved view context in which its class is invisible, the object does appear on the screen. You just can't select it.

quote: Originally posted by Ronald Prochot: Both layers appear to be occupying the same space Sounds like you haven't set the Z coordinates for each of your layers. I believe in version 7 you can set the Z coordinate globally in the Layer Setup dialog box. But, if I'm not mistaken, after you have created objects you can't use this to change Z coordinates globally. You may have to move everything (using <Ctrl+Alt+M> )

Noidge, Thanks for the suggestion! I find it works great with polygons and circles. The glitch with an arc doesn't seem to me to be much of a problem. This has been a very useful discussion - I wonder if everyone involved agrees that <Ctrl + T> is replaced by the Clip and Intersect Surface tools. It seems to me that we lose a little time in having to select everything to be trimmed, but gain a little control. My one complaint is that NNA apparently didn't understand the usefulness of <Ctrl + T>, and also doesn't understand (doesn't care to explain?) the capability of the Clip/Intersect Surface tools. If you read the manual carefully, they do refer to "objects" rather than "surfaces" when explaining the operation of these tools, but given the circumstances, an explanation of the workaround would have been helpful.

Arthur, Donald, Sorry, I didn't realize that by "Clip Area" you meant "Clip Surface!" I thought you might be referring to the "Trim" (scissors) tool. I never imagined that Clip Surface would do something similar to what <Ctrl + T> used to do, but it does. I find that it works using arcs as the clipping object, but automatically deletes those line segments that fall substantially within the arc "surface;" it also works using lines as the clipping object in a way very similar to the old <Ctrl +T>, with the added advantage that you must select the lines to be clipped - an advantage over <Ctrl +T>, because you can choose what gets clipped (i.e., broken, since automatic deletion does not take place using a line), and what doesn't. Using polygons, it deletes the line segments inside the polygon. So, besides the fact that it may require more keystrokes, "Clip Surface" does not allow us to remove lines OUTSIDE the perimeter of a bounded object, and doesn't substitute for the loss of <Ctrl + T>. To the extent that "Clip Surface" can clip lines and using lines, it would be helpful if the Manual were to point out that objects other than "surfaces" can be modified by this tool. It looks like a really handy way to split a polygon or polyline into two parts along a line at any angle.

Carl, Thanks for answering you own question and sharing the info. I, too, have been puzzled by the operation of the Move Page tool.

Scott, You've probably already figured this out, but I had the same problem. I had saved my custom workspace when I installed v 9.0.1, and several commands now no longer work, Join among them. I was unable to drag the Join command out in Workspace Editor, so I just added it again, and assigned <ctrl+J> as the keyboard command (just click to the right of the word 'Join', and a little window opens - add your letter of choice and opt for one of several different key combinations). Now Join works for me, although I have two 'Join's on my pull-down menu. VW 9.0.1 Win 2000 PII 333 [This message has been edited by P Retondo (edited 08-02-2001).]

With the old trim command <Ctrl+T> we were able to clip a large number of lines at once using a line, arc or polygon. Then you could remove unwanted line segments en masse. This capability was very useful editing hatches and multiple lines representing siding, tile patterns, etc. It was also useful when you wanted to trim a wall at an angle. This has often been the only way to create a Y intersection of walls.