scottmoore

Todd, I made these several years ago. I am not entirely certain how accurate they are as i don;t recall what I used for source material, but I have used them many, many times in laying out site plans and they have always sufficed. Bus w/o slide outs, w/ slide outs on the driver's side, slides on the passenger side and slides on both sides. Vehicle production prevost.vwx

If you disregard the hoist attachment (and frankly, there are plenty of other ways to do this like we have for the past 30-40 years), then design layer viewports are a great solution to this. Draw all of your elements of the automated structure on a dedicated design layer. Create a viewport of that and place that viewport on whatever design layer makes sense. In my case these always go to the RIGGING layer. Place that design layer viewport (DLVP) on a dedicated class. Now you can duplicate this viewport as many times as you want and assign each to a dedicated class. You can show your structure at any trim height and any rotation with each iteration just being a viewport that has been moved/rotated to the proper location. I do this on a large percentage of my projects. Two really nice byproducts: 1.) You already have a lovely 2D plan view of the structure without the need of a schematic view. 2.) Any changes to the geometry are done in plan view like you would any other part of a drawing. No dealing with rotations or any additional, time-consuming nonsense. And, as you mentioned, there is only one set of geometry. Once you get the gist of it, this is a very quick workflow. Downsides: - As mentioned, you can't specifically hang hoists to this structure but truly, if this structure is really going to rotate in real time, a rigger should place the geometry into another drawing and rotate it to each necessary position and attach hoists to each iteration to calculate the dynamic load in each of those positions, so this is not much of a downside. - If you export to a visualizer, you will want to export this structure as it's own entity that can then be rotated in the pre-vis program as required. If it is indeed moving, you were probably going to have to do that anyway. I do that on every project and it is quite simple. - There is a bug in VWX that appeared a few versions ago where if you save a file with rotated viewports in top/plan view, the DLVPs tend to roate back to flat. Very frustrating. So I create another class that has guides and notes as to how to rotate those viewports back into position. Put that in a saved view so you have the correct orientation to perform that task. That is really the only downside for me. Thanks to Andy Dunning for coming up with this concept in the first place.

Jesse is right on here. Wey quick way to make sure layers/classes show up in the right viewport or saved view. Another quick tip: I believe if you create a new class by duplicating and editing an existing one, all the current visibilities will stay intact. For me, that is one of the deciding factors on if I need to duplicate a class or create a new one. (The other being the specific class attributes)

@Jesse Cogswell Reviving this from 2 years ago. I realize that I had not transferred your plug in from 2022 to 2023 or 2024 as I did not save it in the correct place. Got that sorted and this plug-in is AWESOME! So very appreciative as this is a massive time-saver. Thank you sir.

For any embedded classes created by symbols and PIOs that you use regularly, I suggest bringing them into your template file and get all of your visibilities set in saved views in advance. This way you can avoid tedious work while designing or drafting. You can always purge later if you desire.

I have a pair of 35” curved and I love it. I have them set up somewhat asymmetrically. In other words, the bezel is not centered but instead off to my right. My main screen is just off center to my left so that is not uncomfortable at all. Currently I like having information split up on separate screens. That said, a 49” might be quite nice!

Video images are via textures. Add an image to the “color shader”. Apparently the plug automatically adds a glow attribute to any texture that’s used for video, but I always do that myself so I can adjust the overall brightness. I typically start at 125% and then look at results. as far as mapping is concerned, the plug in will default to scaling the image to the overall width, you can adjust scaling and position from there. Keep in mind, it will NOT asymmetrically scale. In your case, you have a wide format image, wider than 16:9 for instance. Ideally you would want either an image that is proportionally correct for your output screen ratio, just like you will have for actual event content. Alternately, you need a screen image that can scale up and not lose any important visual content. in your case, a really quick fix would be to import that image into your drawing, then create a square the same width of the image, center it on your image and move it to the back. The square should be made the same color as the existing background. (In the color attribute pallets use “custom color” and you will find an eye dropper that can sample the color you need for fill). Take a screen shot of the square. Now replace the color shader of your existing screen graphic and your black background will fill the top and bottom of the screen. Sounds like a lot to do, but should only take a minute.

Thanks for the plug Grant! During the pandemic I started a new library of more detailed symbols since many users are rendering in other applications that are much quicker at processing higher polygon counts. Then the pandemic ended and I have been slammed, but at some point I will have them available. Here are a couple of images of a vintage style drum kit. These are VWX symbols that are textured in VWX and then rendered in Capture. At 4k the renders took less than 5 sec each. These are scaled back to upload.

That is the same thing I have been seeing. The process is exacerbated greatly when a user is on a slow internet connection. On a few occasions I have actually seen the temp file that VWX creates (.tmp perhaps? I don't recall), which really should only happen in the background from what I understand. I've stared at my dropbox folder and have seen it pop up for a split second and then disappear. On one occasion it popped up, replacing the .vwxp file and never left. That's how i figured out there was such a thing. Regardless, we seem to be moving along ok at this point. There are a lot of users on this file which also creates a bit of a challenge.

Rick, thanks. I can imagine that someone may have neglected to trash their working file after a reset and seeing an issue. That does make sense. What I don’t understand is what causes that in the first place. This particular project has been a bit of a hassle for some reason.

Pat, sorry for the confusion. “Working on a project file” meaning that we are using a project file. Everyone is indeed using their working files. I can imagine that someone has used an older working file once the project file was reset which can cause issues, just not sure how this happens in the first place.

I am working on a project file, shared on Dropbox and we have been getting the “reset the project file” notification. I have reset it, the lead administrator has reset it, and I am still getting this message. Any suggestions? I am guessing it is time to start using the cloud service for hosting.

Sweet

Jake, thank you for the kind words. As to the suggestion, I love the idea of a completely parametric arena model, but I have no coding skills whatsoever save for manipulating some existing scripts to do very simple tasks. Maybe Andy Dunning and I can partner on something, but neither of us have any spare time! What I have done in the past for smaller arenas is turn off the 200 level, add a wall around the perimeter 100 level and lower the steel and ceiling. Takes a couple of minutes.

He’s looking for Ribbon Lifts. I believe formerly Stardrive.