Gilbert Osmond

This is fantastic work. If you accept donations via cryptocurrency or some other online tips platform, consider posting it so I can compensate you for what this is worth to me. At least $50 USD. Thanks again & I look forward to ongoing refinements time-permitting.

I just added this to my Resources in VW Designer 2021. An initial test shows that it works pretty well. Thanks very much, learning to program with Vectorscript exceeds my time/attention budget for the forseeable future.

That's an interesting round-about way to achieve a similar result. I wonder if it would work for "1-dimensional" site models, i.e. where the "site model" is just a single line of points with no width (i.e. no cross-slope area.) Maybe I could use this to create 2D figures and then just convert the site model (in 2D plan view) to lines, and throw away the site model. Roundabout method...

Not sure if any do. I am not a licensed surveyor but I do a fair amount of informal surveying using GPS equipment to capture client landscapes. The workflow is easy -- shoot points, download a .CSV file of coordinates, import it into VW, and it's ready to use -- just need a way to connect dots semi-automatically to expedite linework.

Maybe there's some plug-in or 3rd party script that will turn up to help me do this. As a CAD platform that aspires to be survey-ready I find it hard to believe that VW doesn't include this feature as part of its basic functionality. The very nature of survey work is point collection, and it's frequently thousands of points, many of them marking out non-rectilinear 2D features such as paths, roads, irregular garden beds, etc. I spent nearly 1.5 hours since I first posted this question here, laboriously clicking from point.. to point.. to point.. to point.. to point... with the Polyline tool.. to connect over 2,400 roadway survey points from raw survey data that were imported as 3D loci.

I know how to use the polygon tool to draw lines by hand. What I want to do is select a group of 3D loci (in this case, a roadway alignment from a survey I just imported) and have Vectorworks automatically connect all the points with a polyline or NURBS curve. If there was a menu command "Connect Points into Line..." I would use that but as far as I can see there is no such command or anything similar.

How do I select a group of 2D or 3D loci and then create a polyline (or NURBS curve, if 3D) from them? I just want to select a group of properly-arranged 2D or 3D loci (i.e. they are all in a proper linear or curvilinear arrangement, there are no path crossovers or branches) and do something like "Create Line from Points..." but there is no such command? VW Designer 2021 SP3.1

Bump. I can't believe VW doesn't have a catenary-curve tool in it. There must be 100 uses for it for all kinds of design problems. Utility wires, zip lines, clothes lines, indoor & outdoor decorative swag lines/ropes/wires, rope barriers, indoor & outdoor hanging lights, rope & cable suspension bridges, etc.

Hmm. For some reason, "Options" doesn't show in my list of available items, thus I have no way to select "Delete" Perhaps it's something to do with my access "level" on the VW support forums?

It looks like the vision panel you had defined was too wide for the leaf width, when taking into account the 120mm offset from the strike. By making some changes to the panel dimensions I was able to get a panel to show as-expected. You might also want to un-check "Show leaf as solid slab" in 3D detail levels, although by default this only occurs if the overall view level is set to "Low" detail. (Note: I made these changes on a door which I had converted to Unstyled.)

---- deleted content, irrelevant, see better answer below. It's annoying that VW doesn't allow posts to be deleted from the VW forums.---

Update: This issue is solved by going to Vectorworks --> Preferences --> Display, changing the setting from: "Best Performance" to "Good Performance and Compatibility." Hopefully the root cause will be fixed in a future Service Pack update so that it's possible to go back to using "Best Performance."

Query: What is the source of new, long, straight line display artifacts that are affecting on-screen display (not PDFs or print-outs) of drawings which have a certain Class visible, said Class using a custom Line Type resource? Is this a user error on my part due to known changes in handling of custom Line Types in VW2020 vs previous versions? Or have I come across a genuine bug? Background: The file is a native VW 3D model (built natively within VW2016 and then brought forward year by year, importing/updating the file to VW2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 in successive years) All sheet layers / viewports with annotation elements which contain are set to a specific, isolated Class have developed an annoying and reproducible display artifact. Characteristics: See attached screen capture of a Sheet Layer with 2 separate viewports on it, both set to Top Plan view. I've marked many (but not all) of the artifact lines with red dots to distinguish them from items that are supposed to be in the drawing. (Some of the shorter artifact lines I left un-marked to avoid visual clutter. The short artifact lines generally follow the direction of one or more of the large artifact lines.) These artifact lines zoom in & zoom out normally with the rest of the drawing, but they disappear temporarily during dynamic movement / zooming. (They only show up again after zooming or panning in Top/Plan view has stopped.) The artifact lines cannot be selected or force-selected independently. They only appear in on-screen display within VW, they do not export to PDF files or print out on hard copies. Changing VW's live rendering modes (wireframe, hidden line, OpenGL, Polygon) etc. does not affect the artifacts, nor does changing any of the many display-related settings within each viewport itself. Reproducibility: By process of trial & error I isolated the artifacting to a single item Class, for which the "Line Type" is set to a custom-made Line Type resource. When I turn off the visibility of that Class in the viewport, the artifacting disappears. (Along with the objects in the Class, of course.) When I change this Class's line type to a default / built-in VW line type (dashed, short dashed, etc.) the artifacts also disappear. They come back when I re-apply my custom line type. This persists even after creating a duplicate of the custom Line Type. Changing the Line Type's settings from Page Based to World Based (and back) makes no difference in the artifacting. The shapes to which the Class is applied that has the custom line-types were added back when the file was still in VW2019 format, as was the custom line type resource itself. The artifacting only appeared sometime after converting the file to VW2020. Further details: Here are the details of the Class and the custom Line Type: Please advise whether I am overlooking something obvious, or if this is a legitimate bug in VW2020 SP2. If the latter I'm happy to assist Nemetschek/VW in further characterizing it or testing fixes if appropriate.

I had a very interesting / concerning episode with annotations in a viewport. System: Mac OS X Mojave 10.14.5, MacBook Pro 15" 2017, internal display only. (No eGPU.) VW Designer 2019 SP4. Summary: Seemingly random/strange crash, followed by weird SBOD (beachball hangs), eventually seemed to be fixed by temporarily disabling network /WiFi while running VW. Unfortunately cannot reproduce or thoroughly document; sequence of events / attempted fixes too long & complex. Details: While moving a normal 2D object (just a simple overlay) in the Annotation layer in Top/Plan in a viewport, VW 2019 SP4 abruptly quit (entire app crashed out & disappeared, no hanging or delay.) This object had been added earlier in the day (a few hours) and was working as expected up to that point. (Move / adjust size / opacity / etc.) Upon re-opening the same doc, the app crashed in the same way. I figured the file itself had been corrupted. So, I opened a recent auto-created backup of the same file (~15 mins earlier) and got the same behavior. A hard crash. I tried rebooting and chucking out VW cache folders but that made no difference. I downloaded & reinstalled VW2019 from VW Service Select. That fixed the hard-crashing problem, but curiously, now these same files worked fine in all of the many (40 or so) sheet layers & viewports in them, but on the "problem" viewport, when I attempted to edit annotations, instead of a hard crash I would get a seeming SBOD (spinning beachball of death) hang. After poking around on the forums here I tried doing the "Refresh Library" command in the Resource Manager, along with turning off Wifi for a bit, and this seems to have completely fixed the problem. The viewport annotations in question now work as they ought to & there is no more "hanging."

It's a bit of a round-about path to get to my real underlying goal & wish here, but the reason I've inquired about this is that when I use a linked field (in the new 2018/2019-style "Title Block Border Settings --> Edit Style --> Title Block Layout" editing area,) I want to be able to link the text parameter "Title Block Border.Sheet Size Name" to a field in my Title Block and have that field display correctly when I select a non-standard paper size. For example, I do a lot of small US LETTER and US LEGAL-size drawings and details and I would like the "Sheet Size: " to appear as "US LETTER" in my Title Block, rather than having it default to displaying the actual measurements 8.5" x 11", which is what it does now if there is no named preset paper size corresponding to the actual measurements. So I was hoping to add a "US LETTER" and "US LEGAL" sheet size definition to the overall VW default paper sizes and thereby fix this problem. --- As a work-around I've been manually entering the sheet sizes in a custom-added field in the Title Block Manager on a per-instance (not per-style) basis but this is getting unwieldy.