Boh

So I'm occasionally still getting this: It doesn't seem to be related to a crash. Happened this morning after shutting down vw last night. I am using a custom workspace on located in a workgroup folder on the server, though not sure if this should effect workstation prefs which are stored locally. Any other ideas?

Wow! That is fantastic! And yes another script to toggle the guides class in all vps wld be perfect. To your questions: All viewports (incl design layer vps if that is easy) Toggle them all off. When run again the script can just toggle them all on. Thanks @Pat Stanford!!

I haven’t come across this issue yet. My grid bubbles are page based so are the same size on every vp. The bubbles auto adjust to the the vp crop.

You can use the U, I, O & P keys to quickly toggle between modes instead.

Thankyou Pat. I was hoping one already existed as I didn't expect anyone to write one. If you have the time and don't mind it would be much appreciated!

I like this script! Does anyone know of a script out that will toggle off the visibility of the guides class in all viewports? I know this can be done by editing the guides class but a toggle command would be really handy... 🙂

I agree that I've also been somewhat confused by this mode. So only unrotated objects can be scaled together? It almost makes this mode a bit useless. Grouping objects treats them like one object in which case the single object interactive scaling mode works.

If you want to post the file I'm happy to have a look. Otherwise go into your design layers and check if there is any 3d stuff there.

@Ben Beaumont What techniques / workflow are you using to call up the finishes in your documentation? Are you using data tags and/or worksheets? How do you accomodate finishes that can’t be / aren’t yet covered by materials?

Is anyone using materials to create finishes schedules? I am hoping this is possible. It would be a biggie in terms of bim. As I understand it Materials can have data added which could then be called up in a schedule. This is something that is not currently possible using classes I don’t think. I envision a library of material resources complete with finishes notes embedded into them. Ideally the data can be centrally controlled from the material definition rather than each instance of a material having its own unique editable data. I can also see that using materials could reduce the need for so many classes, especially classes that only exist for showing attributes ( not for visibility control purposes). However how do you manage which objects get which materials? Manually is ok on smaller projects, not easy on bigger projects so I can see that linking materials to classes would seem to be an efficient way to manage them.

Does the xs version do this or just the full version?

Alternative vector workaround: Edit the vp crop so a narrow “leg” of the crop object extends to the edge of the page at each grid line. In vp annotations place masking polygons in these legs so only the grid lines can be seen.

You can set the start and end set back for grid lines. So in the vp annotations select a grid sequence and in the oip make this adjustment to push the grid bubbles back to the edge of the sheet. I haven’t tried this myself. Hopefully this works and doesn’t effect the source grid lines in the design layer and corresponding grids in other vps.

Great tip! Thanks @Andy Broomell

That's a good approach Jonathan. Doesn't quite work though where you have several label styles in the same drawing and you want one style to be just like another one. You could edit it as you suggest however then you have two styles that are the same- which is fine I guess but not ideal. It would be better to be able to delete one and replace it. Or did I miss something? I'll try to watch the whole video soon... 🙂

Totally agree with this! It's annoying that when you delete a style you don't get the option to replace instances with that style with another style (as you do when delete standard symbols). All you get is a bunch of unstyled instances. i've tried using a worksheet to change styles but that doesn't work (it does help you locate all the instances of the style however). For adding notes/subtitles to drawing labels I often just use the "Custom Scale" option. You can however add an extra piece of text to the style definition and then link it to one of your own custom records and edit it via the data pane of the OIP. I just tried it and it works...

Also a big improvement is the ability to show back references on the labels - something that had been requested for some years finally came through!

That’s a pretty clever approach. The file actually had all the roof lines for all the houses represented by 3D polys so I’d be interested if someone knew a quick way to use these polys to generate the solid roof forms. If I was better at solids modelling then I think I would probably first create the extrudes as per my earlier post then, using the 3D polys as guides, use the solid modelling tools to pop up the roofs.

I have just noticed that my "Send to Surface" command from my customised object context menu doesn't work. The same command does work when select it from the AEC menu. Is this a known bug? Are there other commands similarly not working from Document or Context menus? Cheers

I'll send you my bank details! Hmm... well I had a look inside the file this time... and I think the texture bed technique is the go for showing roads etc. For for the houses though, as @Gro Mariann only wanted: then it might be quicker to just use the extg 3d polys to create simple extrudes? I noticed all the roof edge polys are on their own unique "Kart-Takkant" class which makes it easy to isolate and manipulate them. (Other roof lines such as ridges and valleys are on different classes). So this is my suggestion: Use the select similar tool to select the roof edge 3d polys and duplicate them, convert to lines, decompose resultant group, compose lines, extrude resultant polys (need to do this one by one so use of a shortcut key to extrude is handy here), change layer of resultant extrudes to same as site model layer and send to surface. See vid. The massing models do look better tho but not sure they can be made from the existing roof geometry so easy? It would be nice to model the roofs properly as the existing 3d polys outline them very well. I had a quick go at this but it seems you would need to do much more complicated modelling to do this so probably not worth the effort if you just want a quick context model. 2021-02-23 15-04-05.mp4

Hey @Kevin K Yes I give your response a thumbs up!

This is exactly what I would do. Don’t forget you need to “update” the site model for the texturebeds to show.

You can try using the attached worksheet to list and find all objects in a class. There are some instructions on the worksheet itself if you are not used to working with them. List objects in a class worksheet.vwx

Sorry dude - just keeping you on your toes! 😁 Attached a file with a detail callout that is currently navigating to it's viewport. I.e. script hasn't been run on it yet. Cheers Detail Viewport Rename Test File.vwx

I'm mostly just not 😅 (all the while cursing Vectorworks for the dumb way it currently names them.) As a set designer I have to pump out many drawings quickly, meaning a file might not be used by me for long, in which case it's not always worth the time naming viewports in a useful way. Without the script to do it for me I can't really waste time on it. (Depends on the file of course.) When it comes to linking markers, I make heavy use of the search field in the Linked Viewport dropdown, which is a godsend. Hopefully one day Viewport auto-naming will exist in a smart and useful way, and until then I'll send positive thoughts in the direction of the brilliant michaelk so that perhaps a scripting solution will be found for 2021. Thanks Andy. Yes I agree that a built in way to auto control vp naming is overdue. Meanwhile MichaelK's scripts are also a godsend! Cheers