Andy Broomell

Time? Who said anything about time? My carpal tunnel wants to talk with you 😉 500 clicks vs 1000 clicks is a big difference. Not sure why anyone would be contrarian on that. Unnecessary extra clicks are such a bane.

Can we just standardize having a mode group for all insertion tools to choose either single click insertion (no rotation) or two click insertion (the classic way)? For example: I'd love the regular Symbol Insertion tool to have a single-click option. I'd love Drawing Labels to have a single-click option. How often are we rotating Drawing Labels? It's easy enough to rotate them after the fact when occasionally needed. (If anything, I'd prefer the second click to determine the Control Point length, which I am always changing after the fact.) I'd love Reference Markers to have a two-click option, as the little bubbles with triangle shapes that are common in entertainment drafting are always angled to be parallel to the wall they're pointing at. Etc. In response to anyone who says "it's just a click," many of us are repeating the same operations hundreds or thousands of times per week, so it truly adds up.

I think they mean near-plane camera culling, where objects within a certain distance from the POV are omitted. Vectorworks doesn't give the user control over this, although I believe there's a default (and short) distance in front of the camera which is culled. I'd find it useful to have control over this. Blender has a simple slider called "Clip Start" and "Clip End" for camera objects that let you choose the depth range that the camera can see.

Not sure if this is what you're experiencing, but I occasionally run into an issue where if I zoom in too close to certain PDFs, they disappear. When I zoom back out I can see them again.

The "old" drawing label tool was a plug-in object that generated the geometry, so whatever class the Drawing Label was on was the class of all of the geometry. The "new' drawing label tool is more like a symbol: you can draw your own geometry in a container, and this geometry will be on whatever class(es) you assign it to, and will remain on that class regardless of what class you assign the parent Drawing Label object to. Just like with symbols, both the class of the parent container and the class(es) of the nested objects need to be visible to see the objects. It's working as intended. I would personally recommend trying to adapt your workflow to one where you never turn off the None class (except perhaps to test what's on that class). Too many things rely on the None class being visible. (And yes we all agree it's a dumb name for a class, especially the default one, but at this point it's probably too ingrained to change that).

While I consider myself a fairly advanced Vectorworks user, I have to admit I've never been able to make any of the circled options below work in a way that made any sense to me:

I just filed this VE-106566:

I accidentally used the polygon tool inner boundary mode about 20 minutes ago without hitting save first. Now I'm sitting here watching that beach ball spin, contemplating at what point it's better to just redo what I'll lose if I choose to Force Quit 😭 Happens about once a week...

I want to bump this post, but instead of my original suggestion, I propose the best solution would be to make dashed attributes controlled via Classes instead of manually within the dialog. This would make it more consistent with how we control attributes in so many other places (such as Auto Hybrids and Section Viewports), plus it would allow for even more control such as pen color and opacity in addition to lineweight and dash style. Mockup: Furthermore, I wonder why Dashed Hidden Line even needs to be a separate Render Style? Can't we just have a checkbox as part of Hidden Line that lets a user choose to show or not show occluded edges? Seems simpler and more straightforward to me:

💯%

Great idea. I'd definitely choose the option to not import any sheets when bringing in DWGs. I always manually delete them after importing.

Addressing this somehow would be a HUGE improvement and very warranted. Imported classes defaulting to off is a very common tripping point for new and experienced users alike. It not only affects importing items from the RM, but also copying and pasting objects from one file to another. In my industry many folks might be collaborating on a project, but everyone has their own class systems and file organization, yet we might copy and paste scenery or furniture between files frequently. Having to constantly keep track of what classes come in and then fixing the visibilities of those classes is such a headache. And generally we just want to see everything. It's easier to tell if something needs to be turned off in a viewport than it is to notice that something's missing from a viewport. I would propose that any action which brings in a new class or classes should have a prompt that has dropdowns where you could determine the visibility of the classes in existing Viewports/Saved Views (just like in the New Class Dialogue). Even being aware of what classes are coming in would be helpful, so listing the new class names in that dialogue would also be useful. It would also be awesome to have the ability in this dialogue to not import the class(es) and instead reassign that geometry to an existing class (though this may make the dialogue too unwieldy and I'm all for keeping things simple and straightforward).

I'm glad I'm not the only one that experiences this. It's Image Effects that causes the bug, somehow... If you uncheck Image Effects, hit Update, then re-check Image Effects, it should rectify it. Here's that Data Vis webinar: https://www.andybroomell.com/masterclass-data-visualization

Hey I recognize that 😉 To add onto that, I tend to make Background Render set to Shaded, then click Background Render Options and make sure "Draw Edges" in unchecked (this could also be where you uncheck "Colors" to get a white model effect without needing to use Renderworks). Then make Foreground Render set to Hidden Line, and click Foreground Render Options if you need to adjust the smoothing angle or other settings. As Grant says, use Images Effects to desaturate once rendered. That combo tends to be a good starting point for the effect you're going for. Anything more advanced such as changing out the look of something in one viewport vs another would either be Class Overrides or Data Visualization (very powerful).

I find that the Fillet tool often misbehaves or fails entirely on polylines. Something that I've found can help is to first Decompose the polyline, then try again, then Compose the parts back together if needed.