LarryO

Autocad being a three dimension coordinate system I flatten the 3D object in the various orientations required or I would expect VW's to export the three dimensional original into Autocad's drawing space with viewports to its paper space looking at said object. Now there is as you mentioned the flatten option in the export dialogue which I have not explored whether it removes the 3D original from the drawing environment or not in the exported file. I wonder which way the option would flatten the 3D object? Top/plan view? and what happens to viewports that present a front or side view of the original 3D object? hmmm.

In this area the mills produce planed framing lumber in 38x89, 38x140, 38x190.5 (rounded to the nearest 0.5mm), but the tolerance for straightness and true leaves something to be desired and with the almost non-existence of 200 plus year old-growth in the market place these days the engineered products are preferable but again with their own sizing for small beams and joists. And steel studs are another matter altogether they can be 38 or 41 x63.5, x76, x89, x92, x102, x140, x152 depending upon the brand.

More accuracy never hurts it may only slow down the process due to the research required to find out the truth of the product size. A good example here that can cost sub-contractors $ is when imperial measures are use to size handrails in stairwells and other exits. I've seen 1 1/2" in the description of the required size. But there is no such product with a true outside diameter of 1.5 inches [38mm]. The closest size would be 42mm, nominally referred to as 1 1/4" and if the builder followed the document's description and supplied 1 1/2" nominal tubing or pipe the actual size would be 1.9 inches [48mm] which would be rejected by most building code inspectors as exceeding our building code specifications, unless it is on federal land where they often get away with ignoring municipal and provincial jurisdictions and their regulations. But really whose fault is it; my assumption is it's the architect/designer for not being accurate in their documents. Either way its the final owner who pays the price of these omissions and errors, because an observant contractor when bidding will add overhead into a project just in case he guesses wrong rather than submitting a time consuming request for information.

I've seen a couple of different conventions here in Canadian construction documents where we are dealing with a blend of materials arriving from Europe, Asia and the USA. The one that seems to keep projects operating smoothly with less errors is straight up mm. This avoids the pitfalls of the American Imperial system of nominal verses actual size of products especially in tightly regulated areas of construction like exit stairs, safety rails, and handicap provisions. In this convention the accuracy is always at least one decimal place greater than the dimension number presented on the documents. Information which would be subject to the jurisdiction of a surveyor, lot lines, contour elevations and building heights are presented in metres as thus 10.56M, almost never showing accuracy to the millimeter. Note we use a period separate whole units from fractions of units (decimals) and commas to delineate every third order of whole units in banking. In construction documents our comma is often not used even when displaying 10000 which would be ten metres outside of a site survey document. All other dimensions we dimension in millimeters. But in the object information palette you will see and enter the value to the nearest tenth of a millimetre where applicable. This helps reduce rounding errors where the sub-dimensions do not add up to the overall dimension. In presenting building elevations I've seen two systems, the surveyor's method 7.30M and where more accuracy is required 7 305 next to an elevation target mark (more European like). Implicit when no measurement indicator is present, millimeters are assumed. So it the case of stairwells we do see cases where dimension between faces of framing is 1125 but a clear dimension would show 1099 because the detailer rounded up the 1/2 inch gypsum board to 13mm instead of entering it in at 12.7mm when producing the wall assembly.

Create your viewports showing the object(s) as you want them presented. Then use convert to lines or convert to polylines on the viewport. You will now have your flat representation of the view. Warning curving objects such as ovals, bezier curves and text can render into 1000s of miniature straight line segments. Copy and paste the objects from your sheet to a design layer if you intend them to be in Autocad's drawing space and not their paper space. You will need to scale them according to the former viewport's scale. Make sure if you are working in imperial measures that you have a minimum of six decimal places of accuracy set in your file. Export each design layer as one Autocad file. That should get you started. Editing it will not be enjoyable so keep the original at hand.

I'll start be stating the obvious, that they (Vectorworks development team) have not supported embedded graphics processors. If the graphics memory management in the hardware is fouling up the application's memory support systems there is not much that can be done. As for the 4K screen setting I view it as counter productive for such small screen sizes. Unless you are operating a large external monitor the menu text will be unreasonably small as you have noted. In my understanding of how the graphics processors operate, a dense pixel setting such as 4K has to manage four times more memory than 2K and sixteen times more than 1K. If the system software is needed magnify everything prior to graphics processing the result I would think is a lower end resolution (2K) using CPU time and additional memory to do so. Because your system doesn't have discrete graphics processing (with dedicated VRAM) that memory is reserved from the main memory bank leaving less for your applications to work with.

There are a few things that could be occurring here. But it is difficult to help without knowing what behaviour you are observing and what version of Vectorworks you are operating. So here are a couple of simple potential situations you can check. The palettes could be directly on top of each other so that only the most recently activated one is rendered to the foreground. The palettes could be locked to one side of the application window and when both are active one is pushed off the edge of the monitor. I've also seen in VW2021 where palette tabs that are not joined to their original host palette reappear almost off the monitor's edge either at the bottom right or the right side. You can try moving the visible one to a new location, closing it, see if the other appears. When the other appears, move it to a different location and try again at getting both to appear. Sorry I can't be of much more help than that.

Some suggestions: X or escape twice to deselect any selected items cmd or ctrl 6 will centre the view upon and zoom to the printable boundary extents ctrl or cmd A will select all visible items ctrl or cmd 6 will now zoom to extents of selected items zero on the keypad will reset the view to top/plan, press a second time to reset workplane orientation, but not double click like then zoom extents Ctrl or cmd Q will quit the application and offer you a chance to save your work, press Y for affirmative, possibly more than once.

I have three 3d symbols being displayed in a section viewport. A section viewport because I needed to control the depth of view on an elevation. Two 3d symbols are assigned to visibility classes which when set to invisible in the VP class settings disappear as expected. The third 3d symbol however is assigned the none class and there are two objects within it. One being a symbol assigned a visibility class and the other being a group assigned a visibility class. The group contains a 3d HSS square tubing profile assigned a class to control its appearance, not visibility. THE PROBLEM: The HSS which is grouped remains visible when the class visibility of the group is set to be invisible in the SectionVP class settings and either Hidden Line or Dashed Hidden Line rendering is utilized as either a foreground or background. The portion rendered in OpenGL acknowledges the visibility settings correctly. The symbol portion inside the symbol behaves correctly. VW2021 SP3.1 (588748) Fundamentals/Architect/Renderworks

Is there an extension or process for viewing numerical control files (.nc1) using Vectorworks?

You need not worry about the arcs being there or not for future actions. The script runs from the beginning every time a parameter value is changed or a refresh is invoked.

Is there any connection detailing functionality available when two member are connected? Using standard bolted connections presented in the Handbook of Steel published by the American and/or Canadian Institute of Steel Construction? There also doesn't appear to be a means to set the standard 13mm coping offset as a default from edge of beam. Is there a means to present each beam used in an assembly individually so that it is linked to the beam in the assembly like a symbol would be? Change the one in the assembly and the presentation individual remains identical. When working in 3d the one used for presentation needs to remain close to the origin for the various views to be quickly created or you find yourself searching for where the object has disappeared to, especially if there is a clip boundary in use. If viewports could present symbol definitions and each beam became a symbol based upon unique Member ID's. This would not prevent the creation of more than one beam with the same ID but would keep them identical in their entirety.

You don't say if your code was successful (I've not checked), but if you are not seeing the final object then it could be that either arc1 or arc2 will be sweepHd. When using Clipsurface from the menu the furthest back object is altered. There is no option for the original unclipped object to remain. There would also be the possibility where the diameter of arc1 is smaller than arc2 leaving nothing behind after the clip process.

I've created a flat ring by using two circles and clip surface, subsequently deleting the inner circle before sweeping the ring. Then swept that ring along a path in the past. (I always forget how to create the correct inside radius for the 1/4 torus using the basic sweep command.)

A point object plugin would behave like the 3D W-Flange and 3d HSS objects in that there is no option to change the length and orientation by grabbing an end point with the mouse and dragging it to is new location. Whereas a line object has this functionality built into it by providing a start and end point for its length and behave like a line. The rest of the functionality is adjusted through variables you declare to display in the Object Info Palette with the script using this data to create your object in a step by step fashion. Program coding. The coding options being Python or Pascal like as mention earlier. All the VW specific functions and procedures are listed within the Plug-in manager. You refer to the language guide for it's functions, formatting and procedures.

As Pat says, VW will choke on that many raw points expressed as individual loci. I was able to generate 250,000 loci in a few minutes but only by creating and grouping them in blocks of 10,000 (100x100 array) and duplicating that block into a 5x5 array of blocks. I could post a simple layout of a Pascal procedure but it wouldn't be of much use if you have no programming experience. The following is a portion of a Pascal Procedure and will probably not do anything at best but more likely generate an error because the code is incomplete. Probably an example of poor coding structure too. PROCEDURE Beam_End; TYPE BEAMFORMAT=STRUCTURE Beam: STRING; d,w,wb,tw,tf,rf: REAL; {.d = beam depth, .w = beam width, .tw = thickness web,} {.tw = thickness top flange, .rf = radius flange, .wb = thickness bottom flange} END; VAR {declarations} CopeBeamSize,BeamSize: BEAMFORMAT; PIO_Handle,PIO_Record,PIO_ParentWall,hBeam,CopeBeam_Handle,hDim: HANDLE; TopET,BttmET,NumOfHoles,unitStyle,dimFormat,angPrec,A3: INTEGER; prec,dimPrec,A1,A2:LONGINT; LayerScaleFactor,FileUnits,CopeTop,CopeBttm,DimStrOffset,Y1,Y2, X_HolesCL,YHoleSpacing,FirstHoleOffset,GussetWidth,A4,rTemp1,rTemp2,HoleOfset: REAL; FileName,Filepath,PIO_Name,A5,A6: STRING; BoolResult,showMark,displayFrac: BOOLEAN; BEGIN {PROGRAMMING CODE GOES HERE} {THE FOLLOWING IS A SLICE OF CODE FOR A PLUGIN I WROTE TO DRAW A COPING PROFILE FOR THE END OF A STEEL BEAM} {HERE I WAS READING IN THE VW's BEAM DATA FILE LINE BY LINE TO POPULATE MY STRUCTURED VARIABLE WITH THE CHOSEN BEAM'S DIMENSIONS} {Choose Metric or Imperial Beam Data File} IF unitStyle>=7 THEN BEGIN FileName:='StructShape_WFlange-Metric.txt'; BoolResult:= FindFileInPluginFolder (filename, filepath); Units(7); END ELSE BEGIN FileName:='StructShape_WFlange-Inch.txt'; BoolResult:= FindFileInPluginFolder (filename, filepath); PrimaryUnits(2,4,4,3,angPrec,showMark,TRUE); END; IF BoolResult THEN BEGIN {beam data file found/not found} {Extract Beam Data} Open(Concat(filepath,filename)); IF NOT EOF(filename) THEN ReadLn(fileunits); IF fileunits=1 THEN WHILE BoolResult & NOT EOF(filename) DO BEGIN ReadLn(BeamSize.beam,BeamSize.d,BeamSize.w,BeamSize.tw,BeamSize.tf,BeamSize.rf,BeamSize.wb); IF BeamSize.beam=PBeam_SizeI THEN BoolResult:= FALSE; END ELSE WHILE BoolResult & NOT EOF(filename) DO BEGIN ReadLn(BeamSize.beam,BeamSize.d,BeamSize.w,BeamSize.tw,BeamSize.tf,BeamSize.rf,BeamSize.wb); IF BeamSize.beam=PBeam_SizeM THEN BoolResult:= FALSE; END; Close(Concat(filepath,filename)); END; RUN(Beam_End);

It wouldn't be too difficult to create a tool to read in the file's data and place loci at the elevations. The file's formatting is relatively simple. There are six initial lines of formatting data followed by the lines of elevation data. Each line begins and ends with a quotation character, and each number in the data lines are separated by a space. The second line identifies how many rows of data will follow line 6. The first line identifies how many numbers to expect in each line of data. Lines three and four give the coordinate location of the lower left corner of the 2d array, (the first elevation number in line seven?) Could this be in meters? (yards or feet?) Line five: I'm not familiar with how cell size is utilized. Maybe it is the marker size, like the diameter of an elevation dot? Line six tells you the placeholder number used for when no elevation data exists at that location. A Vectorscript can be written to read in the file and say place a 3d locus at the z location indicated except where the placeholder number occurs. I suppose with a little more effort one could draw connecting lines between adjacent points too. The script could lay 3d loci out at one metre increments with two REPEAT loops one embedded in the other. Reading in one number at a time from the file. You would have to determine if each line of data between the quotes represents a row or a column, and confirm that the first digit in line seven represents the elevation data for the lower left corner. It could be the top left for instance, but less likely.

What I've come to think that they are is closed tabs that are not hosted in the primary palette. By primary palette I'm referring to what we would have expected them to be before this new feature was incorporated. The navigation palette, the object info palette, etc. So if one tears off the data tab from the object info palette and closes the tab but leaves the obj info palette open. Then under some circumstance that data tab appears off to the side, but unformated, it is not identified with the data tab title or layout. If you go to the pull down menu and activate the data tab one of those generic blank palettes will refresh with the data tab title and layout. I can't seem to identify when the blank palettes are occuring, is it when altering the workspace, opening an existing project file in conjunction with the application???

I had these blank palettes too. Mine were hiding off at the very right side edge of my monitor. That was VW2021 before any service packs came out. So it was one of the issues that prompted us to delay installation until SP3. I've have seen the again but they are not as predictable. My small beef now is that when the tabs are merged as per previous years the tab at the far right in the palette becomes the active tab when ever the palette is reopened. The palette doesn't save the active tab when closing.

Could we get viewport functionality to include a display/render 3d symbol definition option? This would reduce a lot of overhead when doing parts take-off for assemblies. No need of multiple layers and or classes to control visibility and display each part. Each unique part (column, base plate, bracket, cabinet, drawer face, etc.) being a 3d symbol can be orientated about its 0,0 origin (and then be placed throughout layers to form various assemblies). The part can be measured up and annotated with standard view settings (front, back, bottom, left, right iso, etc.) without having all the other parts of an assembly cluttering the background or chasing around for the object in space to place an appropriate crop.

I think that this is about the visibility of groups not being taken into account by the hidden line rendering routine used in the for section viewports tool.

Section viewports permit layering of elevations. You can cut off the foreground so distant aspects can be illustrated with lighter weights and colours while the foreground is in another viewport on top of the background one. The foreground can then have normal line weights and dense colours to draw one's attention while retaining the context of the overall project. If you want to elevate a wall and not have a colonnade obstruct window placement or other details. I use it most where there are railings or mesh panels involved. Picketed railings on the far side of a ramp tend to clutter up any view that is not isometric. And ISO views do not produce true dimensions in viewport annotation space.

These are glitches that should eventually be addressed for section viewports. 1. Radial lines showing when smoothing angle should be preventing them. 2. Invisible objects being rendered when they are in visible symbols. Symbol contains two visible objects and the one invisible object. The invisible object is a 3D square tubing object with a class that sets its line weight and has been subject to solid subtraction to permit material use and then grouped to control visibility via class designation being applied to the group. I was attempting to use the front view (on the right) but there is no means to restrict the depth of field to prevent objects in the background from being displayed. So I attempted to use a section viewport (on the left) to exclude objects that are further back in my model.

thanks

Does anyone know where the functionality for labeling centre lines with an overlapped C and L was moved to after deprecating the CL tool?