cberg

Looking at the text file, it would be helpful to understand what the headers signify. Very helpful. I can muddle through.... I will break out the Steel Manual and compare the data to the numbers. I am sure something refers to height, depth, web thickness, and the radii of the profile edges. I will tread carefully lest I break, and report back. Channel-Inch.txt

@Pat Stanford If you don't get paid to do what you do, you absolutely should. You are amazing!

I can add a custom profile to framing members/structural members by creating a symbol. It would be nice if the default library of steel shapes could be supplemented/customized. Many commercially available shapes are not listed in the VW pulldown menu. For example, a 1" x 5/8" x 1/8" steel angle does not show up as a default option; nor does a 1" x 1" x 1/8" Tee. I can name a dozen others. Architectural aluminum (square edge) profiles would also be nice. As would non-metric zees. (I know.... we are living in the dark ages here...) The default steel shapes appear hidden somewhere, which is atypical of how things usually work in Vectorworks. I wondered whether the list of standard shapes can be found and edited. Ideally, custom steel/metal shapes would exist in a fingerprinted file like custom door leaves, making them a user library resource that is transferrable from file to file. C.

Is there a way to add custom steel sections/profiles to the library of standard steel shapes?

Rectangles behave differently than Polygons/Polylines. If you only want to use key commands and the shape is a rectangle, hit Tab, right arrow, and then + or - the desired dimension offset.

With every new version, I keep hoping for the ability to use data tags with symbols.

And then there are the partially hidden object artifacts.... Sigh. The objects that won't go away are symbols that appear to be cut by the section viewport if that helps troubleshoot the issue. Screen Recording 2025-03-20 at 8.14.07 AM.mov

There appears to be a bug associated with object-level visibility. After setting up a file with three sheets of viewports (35+), each with object-level visibility set during viewport creation, the file decided to show objects that were set to be invisible in a half dozen viewports (just before the project was set to print). Zombie invisible object keep reappearing. This type of software glitch is very frustrating and can result in significant quality control issues with Construction Documents / Production Drawings.

It would be good to be able to set the defaults for the 3d Mass Property (Weight) Calculations. I had to find weights of a bunch of steel pieces and the dialogue box kept reverting to defaults that I did not set.

Like Hidden Line Render Mode, the Dashed Hidden Line render style is replete with glitches. The attached screenshots are taken from a model which consists of 3 solid objects. As files go, the model is about as basic as one can get. However, additional linework appears in the Dashed Hidden Line rendering. I have checked the solids, and there is no stray linework embedded in the 3d geometry. However the resulting viewport rendering is not clean. Something this basic, shouldn't be this difficult!

The Attributes palette takes up a lot of VW real estate, relative to its functionality. The big bars of color and transparency waste tons of space, and do not look all that attractive either. We need a version that can be minimized for use on laptops and smaller resolution screens.

It's very frustrating to encounter inaccuracies in VW Hidden Line Renderings. Curved steel sections, in particular seem to prove challenging. The first image shows the assembly rendered in shaded render. The second image shows the bottom edge missing. It is one CGS solid. Adjusting the smoothing angle doesn't seem to help. Why is something so basic so difficult to do well?

Thank you for alerting me to that dialogue box. It was unchecked, and grayed out since I don't usually use the Edit command. As I explore the file, however, something still seems wonky. In my main work file I wound up deleting Section Viewport 2 (a-1 Angle Section) and recreating it from the design layer viewport. That action reset the visibilities of sections 5 and 6 which are now behaving as I would expect. Sharing a stripped down version of that file to see if you see something that I do not. Object Visibility Test File.vwx

Can anybody help troubleshoot how to adjust object level visibility in a section viewport? Yesterday, I set up a sheet of viewports with the desired object visibility. I closed and saved the files. This morning, all the hidden objects reappeared. In the screen recording, I try resetting the Object Visibility in the first viewport and “re-hiding” the objects. Editing the model via “Section in Place” does not change object visibility in the viewport. In the second viewport, I edit ”Section in Place.” The hidden object is invisible in model space but visible in the viewport. Am I missing something? Or is this a bug that needs to be worked out? I thought I read somewhere that Section Viewport object-level visibility can be adjusted via “Edit Section In Place”. VW 2025 Object Visibility - Section Viewport.mov

Why don't data tags work in a perspective viewport? This functionality would be very useful in creating assembly diagrams... It appears that the geometry that VW depicts in the perspective viewport is very different than the geometry that the Data Tags highlight...