LarryO

8402 Custom's House - roof hatch frames in ventilation shaft.pdf The size of the HSS in section B-B is as labeled using the 3d square tubing. 1. BUT when rendered in the section viewport it is only 74mm as evidenced by the sectioned tubing being slightly larger when they are all the same size. I had to fake the vertical dimensions. 2. Also the solid line parallel to the bottom edge should not be there. The smoothing angle is set to 5°. These lines appear unpredictably in part or whole from radial point(s) along an extrusion when said solids have been operated upon by one of the 3d modelling tools (add, subtract, section, etc.). VW Model file is 12.8MB

Illustrator has the ability to open Autocad's dwg format directly without the use of Autocad as an intermediary. My suspicion would lie in either Illustrator not supporting a certain type of curve or spline or the accuracy of the file is too low. Or the exported dwg file had insufficient accuracy for the units involved. The first can usually be addressed by exporting to version 12 of autocad's dwg. The second by using six decimal places of accuracy when the units are inches or one decimal place if they are millimetres.

Bluebeam's pdf viewer may save the state of the on off layers. It saves the last page viewed when closing a document. But of course it will not trim the fat of the file like that print to pdf printer can.

The list was not populated with anything when I opened it, but I think I may have observed from your photo why that was so. I think that I may have been in the annotation space with the drawing label selected rather than selecting it's parent viewport. I was attempting to get HB02 show in the bottom half of the drawing tag of the section viewport on page 03. I'll have to look at this one again when I'm back at the shop.

Can you explain this more? The viewport name when created and the selection to use drawing number/sheet number is selected names the viewport in the manner expected example: 1/HB02 Now if I want to change that drawing number assigned to the viewport, I select the viewport and in the object info palette change the drawing number to 5 or C or whatever, then the prefix of the viewport's name will also change once you allow the OI palette to refresh but only under one condition. The suffix of the name must still match the sheet name. If one changes the sheet name beforehand, as we have observed, the suffix of any viewport names on that sheet will not adjust to reflect the new sheet name and the process of updating drawing numbers to the viewport name will cease to function too.

I don't understand this. Your Drawing Label "Accord Primary" doesn't call up the drawing title. Your Labels "Accord w back ref" & "Accord Secondary " updates ok when the vp is selected and the drawing title or number are changed in the OIP. Are you seeing different? See attached screen recording. That part was the improvement, it started functioning after checking the "use automatic drawing configuration setting" you mentioned.

@Boh I sent you the file via private message. Don't worry about the titleblocks not updating; I built my own script to synchronize them.

Well that was an improvement. It's still a hit and miss on whether the viewport names reflect the drawing number and sheet number. The latter only seems to occur during viewport creation and the drawing number only updates when the sheet number is already correct, but it occurs after deselection of the viewport.

Hmm, I'll have to seek that setting out. It was not on my radar before now. Thanks

That brought a smile to me and an old memory of a renovation to public recreation facility where a former general contractor become construction management convinced the city that they could oversee the trades' contracts on the city's behalf and save them from some professional service fees and general contractor markup. But the guys continued to operate like a general contractors only without usual financial restrictions and contractual obligations in a tendered service contract. We were supposed to sign off that the product they were about to receive achieved our documentation's design intent. The list of errors that they allowed the contractors without repairs or penalties was a doozie due to the lack of attention to viewing the document details. A gap beside an automatic door frame and the adjacent wall assembly that you could clearly see the objects outside, fiberglass insulation laid on plastic film in the ceiling of a tiled steam room where foil faced rigid foam was to have been carried up and over from the walls, shower floors with no slope to the drains, non-structural steel framing in a ceiling assembly that called for pressure treated wood due to high humidity levels. They had one contractor install a water slide through the building envelope before they figured out there was flexible gasket sealing system and a different contractor was required to prepare it beforehand.

So in trying to familiarize myself with the new Drawing Label and how it functions I cannot seem to understand how to get the Drawing Label to update to reflect changes to the sheet number and drawing title. And I have just realized that viewports do not automatically update their name when the sheet number is changed. I never really paid much attention to viewport naming before because it was just a manual duplication of work for no visible outcome. When I change the drawing title of the viewport in the object info window the Drawing label doesn't refresh to show the new name. When I manually change the sheet number in the viewport name field (because viewports don't seem to be updated when a sheet number is changed in the sheet layers dialog) that change is also not transferred to the new Drawing label. Am I banging my head against the wall in thinking this should be occurring? Is there any documentation issued that I have simply missed that illustrates how to set up and use the functionality of this new label? Thanks.

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.)