ubybc

Thanks so much for the file. I find it pretty silly that we are forced to........ "You are better off creating your own light objets for rendering purposes." Whats the point of buying a self contained light designer application that doesn't have a complete library of working lights?

yes, its rather difficult to find a workaround.

When I enter an extrude to edit a 3D shape the other drawing elements are greyed out and I can easily still snap to them moving vertices with the reshape tool. When I got to my next 3D object to reshape all the other drawing elements disappear and I have no reference for snapping or editing the 3D shape. Whay does one edit extrude show the rest of the drawing while another one on the same layer, same class does not? thanks......

I insert a fixture into a drawing. I change to a 3D view I use the OIP to rotate a Colorblaze or IBeam to the desired hanging angle. The fixtures rotate but the clamps in the symbol stay put? This looks really odd when a fixture is correctly rotated 180 degrees and the clamp is 12" off in the space opposite the fixture floating in mid air. Any ideas? or just "another" VW bug..... BTW - the colorblaze 72" does not turn on or show any light in renders.

thanks for the tips. i followed the suggestions Jim made, and I guess thats the best UBB can do. Not ideal for users. I have consulted on forum updates before and my advice to VW is archive the 10 years make it avaiable on the web and then start a new one that has current standards in place. It just makes more sense to get people the info they need as fast as efficient as possible.

I just completed the Spotlight getting started guide. The first half is great, but as soon as I got to the sections around vertical lighting positions, you can tell the authors changed or the writing of the manual was rushed. It gets very messy and sloppy with explainations. The DLVP and vertical lighting tips were very confusing.

I am total VW noob, but not a forum noob. All my other registered forums have an option for notification when a topic is updated and also have a colored icon that shows a status change of topics i have posted to in "my stuff". I can not seem to find such an option here. can anyone help please?

My version has RW so it's all good. It looks good unless you zoom in on an object, then the render quality suffers.

yes

thx Starling, thats seems very useful!!!!

I'm new to VW so maybe I missed these, but: I would love, love, love, love to rotate items or symbols (hybrids too) with my mouse (dragging to position) I would like to model with a customized 4 pane view in my main drawing window. I would like to crop an area to render for quick analysis, rather than rendering the whole drawing. I see these elements in Cinema4D and would love to see them in VW.

I also agree that a desktop is better for intense graphical workflows, but I disagree about rendering on a laptop. I render large scale drawings daily on a laptop with an external display and cooling fan desk stand. My MackBook Pro has 8 GB RAM and a 1GB ATI 6770 and renders just fine. I tend to upgrade my machines every 3 years or so. I have 7 years of Pro IT support exp and Dell makes great machines, but I would never buy an HP.

Without going and reading all the specs of each card, I always suggest that you get the best card you can afford, with the fastest clock speed, most memory, that fits in your case, and has good fans. Also make sure the dual outputs support both your display inputs.

Apparently this is still an issue with 2012?

Thanks, Frank. I am aware of the hanging angle setting in the OIP. I need to create truss frames with very odd angles and then convert them to lighting positions. When doing so the fixtures snap to z height 0" and i cant change them. in other works imagine a circular truss frame with a diameter of 20' the north end hangs at 30' and the south end at 35' the truss is populated with moving light fixtures all the way around it. any ideas?

I have read several forums posts regarding this topic and no one seems to have a definitive method to quickly draw a truss or a mutil-truss frame that is hanging at a skewed angle. The help file and getting started guide is rather vauge. Still searching for a reliable method. Using spotlight>visulization>create plot and model view seems cumbersome and confusing. I need to draw circular truss and straight truss at very unique hanging angles and attach conventional and moving light fixtures to the truss. Then I need to be able to render the scene accurately. I have had 2 LD's screen share with me very easy ways to do this in WYSIWYG and 3DSM. Can someone please share with me the proper workflow, and hopefully its as simple as it should be. My emphasis is to show accurate 3D modeling of a show set. Thanks in advance for any input.

Thank you for suggesting the drawing border tool to insert the symbol.

Defintely printing a sheet layer and I did set it to 300 dpi. Still same issue unfortunately.

yes resolution is set to 300 dpi for both printing and pdf export

So I drew two rounded rectangles side by side. Set the line weights to .50 Double checked the class options. No fill, no inheritance. Looks wonderful on the computer display. Looks horrible on paper and slightly better in PDF. The line weights shift as you look around the rectangle. I tired toggling quartz imaging, and rasterize before printing. No change. I contacted VW support and they said basically and in a very nice way.....sorry, deal with it. Anyone else have a solution?

2nd!

ok... thats what i figured. thx.

I want CMD+1 to zoom out I want CMD+2 to zoom in I saw the KB article saying these key shortcuts can not be changed. Anyone figure out how to do it?

I am a frequent user of many applications requiring zoom keyboard shortcuts. I am used to the zoom key being located on the right as in Adobe apps, DigiDesign apps, etc. I can also edit this feature in these apps. Vectorworks is fixed and I often subconciously zoom the wrong direction using cmd 1 or cmd 2 All I want to do is flip their roles and have cmd 1 = zoom out and cmd 2= zoom in thx.