Andy Broomell

Yes - VE-102421. I didn’t cross post to beta forum though, in order to keep comments in one place.

Next time you see it, hover over one of the quadrants then click the gear icon. That'll take you to the settings for Smart Options Display. You can customize an additional keyboard shortcut in your personal workspace by going to Tools > Workspaces > Edit Current Workspace > Keys > Trigger Smart Options Display.

You can select multiple symbols and then do Model > Add Solids which will glue them together into one Solid Addition. While this would allow you to map one texture across all of the panels, you would no longer have the individual symbol objects for counting in worksheets and such (if you edit the Solid Addition the panels are still inside as individual Symbols, but are effectively hidden from the rest of the program). This might not work on all Symbols, or might not be economical for other reasons, but it could achieve the result you describe. Also, in 2022 it's possible to put the screen texture on only the one front surface, whereas in previous versions the Solid Addition would only take one "overall" texture (so the content would be seen on the back side of the panels too, for example). An alternative approach is to have a separate extrude right in front of the LED panels.

It was from 5 years ago so I wouldn't expect you to - I think it's good that you brought up the topic again! 🙂

VE-102421

Yes - there's a search field, and collapsible record formats.

This was added for 2022 (plus other helpful changes to criteria).

This is a request I’ve wanted to make for a number of years, but now that Cropped Perspective has been deprecated in 2022, this request has become all the more relevant and important. An easy way to tell if 3D modeling software is worth its salt is the quality of its camera tool. Setting up camera views is a task relevant to ALL industries, and this process needs to be easy, intuitive, and informative. I wouldn’t describe the RW Camera tool as any of those things, personally, and at the moment I want to focus on one particular subject that is the most glaringly bad aspect of the current tool: The 4 blue crop corners. They’re terrible. They don’t actually frame your view in a way that allows you to compose an image within the ‘viewfinder’. Everything outside of the camera view is still just as visible, and since the crop corners are so small and disconnected, your eye can’t visualize the frame in order to make informed decisions. Composing an image is arguably the most important reason to use a camera in the first place, so the crop corners fail at their most important job. Spotlight’s Video Camera tool handles this slightly better because it uses a full rectangle instead of just tiny corner marks. However it’s still not ideal since the thick blue stroke is a bit distracting, and objects outside the rectangle are still fully visible. (Plus, using the Video Camera tool is not a workable solution in the first place.) Ideally RW Cameras would work more like they do in Cinema 4D, where the area outside the viewfinder gets obscured with a translucent black overlay. That would be a million times better. Vectorworks should apply this same approach. The overlay should automatically be visible whenever you're in an Activated Camera view, and go away when working in perspective (non-camera). The color and opacity of this overlay should be controlled in Interactive Appearance Settings (some people might prefer a solid overlay which completely obscures outside the frame, whereas others might prefer to have the overlay be more translucent or even be a color). Prior to 2022, one workaround that sidestepped the camera’s unusable blue crop corners was to turn on the “Cropped Perspective” document preference. This setting would crop the view to the camera frame so that objects outside the frame weren’t seen, which was helpful when composing shots. While it had its own issues, it at least functioned fine for that purpose. However, Cropped Perspective was deprecated for 2022 as part of the screen plane deprecation task. So moving forward we’re left with no good way to view a camera composition, and this should be addressed asap. There are other improvements needed for the RW Camera tool but this would be the most impactful change.

I wish I could add the palette tabs for Lights and Cameras to the Navigation Palette, so they'd be accessible right there where my eyes are used to looking (I'd put them after the References tab, for example). I know Lights & Cameras are actually a part of the Visualization Palette rather than the Navigation Palette, but it would be nice to be able to combine the two to save screen real estate. VE-102420

@Dave Donley - the request is that the Alpha channel be loaded automatically when it exists, rather than requiring 6+ clicks each time. Take a look at VE-102417 which I filed today.

One aspect to be aware of is that OpenGL is purely raster-based, whereas Hidden Line is vector-based. I'm sure there are additional complexities but I think this is one important facet.

VE-102417

Agreed.

Looking at the help page... https://app-help.vectorworks.net/2022/eng/VW2022_Guide/Textures/Creating_a_texture_from_a_hatch.htm ...it sounds like this command is indeed supposed to generate an image of the hatch, but it seems to not currently work. It generates a white image instead, which is not useful.