scottmoore

Agreed

Understood. I am of the opinion that it’s better to rely on the manufacturer’s calculations than hope that the data entered into BraceWorks and the resulting calculation is correct. Any reputable audio vendor using major manufacturers equipment will utilize an application that calculates those weights specific to which hole is selected on the bumper, the particular angles of each cabinet and whether or not there is a tilt back bumper underneath. Most riggers and engineering firms would be more apt to look at these numbers I believe. I am just concerned that we open up a potentially huge can of liability worms when we try to make VWX be the end all be all of production work. I love the idea of it and am seriously impressed with your work and attention to detail (as always), but we all need to be careful.

Great work as always guys. Quick question regarding weight calculations and your processes on projects: do you take the BraceWorks calculated weight and compare that to the manufacturers data provided by your audio vendor? To my way of thinking, one would be better served to input the data from the manufacturer than relying on BraceWorks, especially if the arrays are hanging from dedicated hoists and not attached, either by hoist or dead hung, to a truss structure. Just curious.

Not entirely sure how to do some of this with a StreamDeck, however, this is a great usage for saved views. When you save a “saved view” it doesn’t have to save the view orientation at all. Of course you can if you want to, but what is really cool is setting up the layers and classes you want visible AND which layers and classes are ACTIVE as well as the layer/class option settings. In your template, you would just go to your saved view “Trussing” and start dropping in truss. Because you saved the proper information, the symbol automatically assigns to the “truss” class on the “rigging” layer. Go to the “hoist” saved view and any hoists inserted will be in the right class and layer. This process ensures all the correct embedded classes are on/off as well. no more “why aren’t my label legends showing up?” Keep going with “flown lighting”, “floor lighting”, “audio”, “video” “staging” etc saved views and your workflow gets streamlined really quickly. Spend an afternoon creating these saved views in your template and you will be amazed at how much quicker you can get things done. Side note: that is why I have the “none class” tool on my StreamDeck. Since various classes have been made active at any time in my workflow, sometimes I just need to go back to the none class to create a symbol. Just a key press now. I get dozens of VWX files from all sorts of people and hardly any of them ever have saved views. How much time do people spend turning things on and off to work on a drawing? Maybe people just leave everything on all the time?

I believe so, but that is the part that reverse engineering was not helping me to figure out.

Patrick, Using the bump shader is probably the way to go. I figured that out for a speaker grill I was working on a few months ago as a proof of concept. As with so many things, I don't entirely recall how I did it, and reverse engineering didn't really help with trying to create your grid. It's on the tip of my brian somewhere. The point of the image below is this is a flat surface with a texture with the bump shader enabled. It is not truly a 3 dimensional surface. pretty much what you are looking to do except with hexagons.

And I appreciate the plug Peter.

MacOS indeed. I’ve been using Chrome but will check and see.

My opinion is this is a bug. I am on 2023 and it has not happened in quite a while, but it would happen fairly frequently previously. If I recall, it happened almost every time I published. But it would happen randomly as well. Once that happened, a restart would solve it. It was a huge hassle. By the way, using the space bar to temporarily invoke the “hand” tool is called “boomerang”.

@Pat Stanford very informative and timely. A colleague of mine asked about this on Friday and I couldn’t explain it very well. This is precisely what I would have been looking for.

When I can get things to slow down a bit, I am going to look forward to diving into this!

@jeff prince I don’t know that a line type will translate to CNC output. Typically line types are not recognized. As to symbols for the clips, that is a great idea, however, that is how I initially started doing these kinds of projects some time ago and it turned out to be far more cumbersome than the trimming. Curvilinear forms are always problematic. Ellipses even more so. I have a couple of hours left on this project and one more to complete in the next week. I’ll get through it, but what should be a fairly simple process just becomes a little annoying.

Reviving an old thread. Why can't the trim tool work as expected? I do lots of CAD files that involve channels with widened areas for mounting clips. I create the first wall of a channel with arcs, straight lines or whatever tool is necessary. I use the offset tool to create the opposing wall of the channel. I again use the offset tool again to create a concentric set of geometry for both walls of the channel that will define the extents of the clip mounting location. I use the double line polygon tool in the "create lines" mode to determine the end of the clip mounting locations. Then it is a simple matter to use the trim tool to leave the proper clip mounting location; except it SELDOM works correctly. Here is the first step prior to trimming: After I have used the trim tool: Notice one of the four clip locations (top right) actually worked correctly. One clip is missing one line, one is missing three and one is missing four. Here is what it looks like after I fix it by manually drawing lines: I have sorted out the order of operations to make the fix simple, but when there are hundreds of these clips to draw on any project, this becomes VERY tedious. By the way, this project is very curvilinear in nature, but the same is true when it is simple arcs, circles and, to a lesser extent, straight lines.

Sorry, I meant “symmetric by distance”. Thanks for the clarification.

In the US, the term water closet has started gaining traction referring to a toilet in a small, isolated room as opposed to being open to the entire restroom. I recall a story from the ‘70s where an American architect had designed a wayside chapel into an overall concept. He abbreviated it “WC”. An English client was extremely confused to fine the WC had seating for up to 40 people….. Regarding hybrid symbols, this was a huge selling point to me back in the MiniCad 5 days. “You can draw in 2D and 3D simultaneously? Sold!” Keep in mind that the 2D component doesn’t have to be a literal representation of the 3D object. Two examples: The accepted symbol for a wall outlet (at least in the US) is a circle with two lines through it. Create a hybrid symbol that has the circle and two lines as its 2D component and an actual 3D model of a wall outlet as its 3D element. Very handy. For people symbols, take a 3D person, but in plan view add a piece of text detailing what that person’s function might be and a small cross hair mark as to where they are actually placed. Of course you could also render the person in top view, export that image and use the image file as your 2D. Tons of useful options in hybrid symbols.