scottmoore

Also, respect to Matt Geasey and the team at Clear All Visuals where I pilfered that concept.

Data visualization is the way to go. Make sure the items you want to highlight have something about them that will work as a criteria for data visualization (let’s assume class assignments for this example) Then create two data visualizations: data vis 1: set criteria to “class is scenic element 1”. Then set the fill to white for instance and make sure it’s active. data vis 2: set criteria to “class is not scenic element 1”. Then set the fill to something gray. run both of those data visualizations in a sheet layer viewport and you should get the result your looking for if using shaded render with color but not texture. Alternatively I would imagine you could render using color and textures and only activate the second DV that would then leave your highlighted item in full color.

It would be a difficult thing to try and demonstrate various render modes. There is so much going into the look of a render beyond the specific mode: textures and how they are implemented (and that is another deep dark hole one could go down), backgrounds, reflections, lighting. Then there are the specific setting for each render mode. There are no magic buttons to produce amazing renderings. To illustrate the point, one can create what might seem like a great chrome texture, render it with the highest quality rendering engine and it still won’t really look like chrome. Instead, it will probably look kind of gray and kind of “shiny”. In reality, as in the virtual world, chrome really only looks like chrome when there is an environment for it to interact with and reflect back to the viewer. Creating great renders involves far more than a great rendering engine with the proper settings.

Thanks for the shout out Justin!

…so, having a field that would sort the RM and every other place where one sees all their resources might be cool? Of course, no one would understand the workflow and then complain. I feel your guys pain!

No, but I am using my own symbols. From the way you asked, should I assume there is a recent workflow update about which I am unaware? Perhaps a field in a record that allows one to group symbols? And to Justin’s point, I agree that the critical information in a symbol’s name was often buried. I like to leave my RM in thumbnail view, but often have to swap to list view just to see the full name of the symbol.

If the “Light Inst” is removed from the symbol name, won’t that make searching for fixtures in the replace fixture type in the OIP much more challenging? I assumed that was the reason for appending that to the front of every symbol name.

For those interested, this is a FANTASTIC resource. Not everyone needs material handling symbols, but if you ever do, these are brilliant at a great price point.

The idea of assigning the class of trussing through Spotlight preferences assumes that a design is suitable with a single class of trussing or the user would create multiple trussing layers, neither of which is a particularly good workflow in my opinion You would often want to have grid or spanner trusses separated from standard trussing or be able to classify trusses by department should various departments provide their own. How about, when we reconfigure trussing it simply maintains the class to which it was previously assigned.

You are correct on ID and Position names as well. That is frankly, ridiculous.

Is it normal that when running the “change configuration” command from the OIP on a truss system, that the resultant trusses do not take on the class assignment of the original truss and instead are assigned to the currently active class? That seems to be the case and if so, needs to be fixed as that is not only counter-intuitive, but endlessly frustrating.

I know exactly what you are talking about and it’s pretty infuriating. Basically, a hoist suspended from a grid truss or “mother grid (but not like the ill named tool in VWX of the same name) has the ability to “push” the truss to which it suspended up. The process seems to work fine when you first insert a hoist, but if you decide to move the upper hook height to put the hoist where it might need to be in reality, it then moves the mother grid. Is this what you are seeing?

To add to this, there really needs to be upper sling attachments and hard point attachments for inserting hoist drops from a grid truss to a secondary truss. Currently I handle this by having custom hoist symbols that already have the necessary rigging attachment, however, it would far more intuitive to just be able to add an upper pick-up symbol. This kind of thing happens in productions all the time.

I find the "change configuration" and frankly the "replace truss type" operations to be rather clunky. - It seems extremely odd that the change configuration dialogue cannot locate a compatible truss item unless it is physically inserted on the design layer. In other words, If I have a truss that consists of 10' and 5' 20.5" x 20.5" utility truss and I need to add an 8' unit, simply importing the 8' unit into the resource manager does nothing. There seems to have to be an instance of an 8' piece on a design layer. - I find it particularly frustrating that a truss system is reassigned to the current active class if you reconfigure it. It would be far more helpful if a truss system would maintain its class assignment when reconfigured. - It is very frustrating that the change configuration dialogue only shows the available lengths of compatible trussing but nothing about models. Therefore if you have various different types of 12" x 12" truss in a drawing, you could see multiple options for each truss length available and have no idea which is which. This is most likely handled using a particular naming specification in the symbol records, however, I do not know which field the change configuration function is searching for but probably easily fixed on my end. See the attached image.

Agree with @jcogdell above. Note that you need to set your shaded render to use color for the live data viz to work.