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line-weight

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Everything posted by line-weight

  1. The official Vectorworks documentation on NURBS is very poor (it shouldn't need to be a process of trial and error) and this is only going to become more of a problem as more people move to modelling in 3d.
  2. Yes I'm always interested to see how others set things up so if you have a sample, post it!
  3. I use Layers. I have an "as existing" layer and a proposed layer. The "as existing" geometry largely stays as-is once I have draw things up from a survey. I find it useful to always have there in the background, to refer back to. In theory it can be done in classes, including with classes that are for objects that are existing, but to be demolished. In practice though, I find this just adds an extra level of complication to everything that doesn't actually provide much benefit. In particular wall objects can become very difficult to set up, where you have a run of wall that in the existing/proposed conditions is going to connect with different wall types at different places, may have various finishes added/subtracted, and openings removed or enlarged or added, and so on. You end up with a whole load of bits of walls that are then very troublesome to edit and this is more work than just copy-pasting the existing into the proposed layer and then making the modifications needed. My demolition drawings tend to be the "as existing" with demolished portions highlighted manually in annotations.
  4. You might find it useful to look at this thread, also current:
  5. I'd really prefer the computer to do the legwork here, though.
  6. This doesn't create a NURBS curve that exactly follows the radius, unfortunately. Near enough for many purposes, for sure, but it's not geometrically accurate. By way of demonstration here's what you get using 4 interpolated points. The more points the better, but it never quite matches.
  7. I've just had a quick look, and it appears that the problem exists when a Renderworks render is used for the viewport (top), but not when a "shaded" render is used (bottom). Does that match what you see?
  8. Because of the extra steps of extracting the curves and then creating the loft, it means going back a few stages if I want to change that radius. But I think yours is the cleanest method suggested so far, for creating the curves themselves.
  9. How have you drawn the NURBS curves from scratch, to follow an exact radius in plan?
  10. Yes, true, using the method you suggested. If I am being fussy, the problem using sweeps is that the cross-section of the handrail gets distorted on any steeply sloping sections.
  11. I agree that this is a way of getting something like the desired result - and it's similar to what I did in the end. However, it still relies on tweaking those transition curves by eye, which is what I would like to be able to not have to do. When it's quite a small radius it is relatively easy to get away with but it becomes difficult when a larger radius transition is required - it becomes (to my eye) more obvious that it isn't a true constant radius transition. What I really want is something I don't think I can have, which is a parametrically controlled transition curve where I can easily type different radii into a box until I get what I want. It also all gets worse if you are trying to to an inner handrail, where the radius in *plan* can be much tighter and also when the transition from horizontal to quite steeply sloping is much more abrupt. Any little wobble gets massively magnified when you try and run an extrude along the path. And this is compounded with problems of excluding twist from the path.
  12. Is this done with a loft? When I did a quick trial using my original curves, and a "one rail" loft, it produced a handrail with a twist in it. Are there extra steps I need to take?
  13. I started this thread and then neglected it somewhat due to getting busy with other things. Thanks for the replies in the meantime.
  14. I was going by one of the sheet layers in the sample file, which has the RW viewport on it. However yes I see you're right, it renders out with wireframe type linework for the windowframes and I can't see how to get rid of that unless the pen is set to none.
  15. The image in the OP is a renderworks render not shaded view. If the frames have no "fill" then I think that's what you'd expect to see in a RW render. Because it's using the "white model" preset render style, colours & textures are turned off and that's why the glass shows as opaque.
  16. Just don't use it! The path animation tool is one of the most horrible things in Vectorworks. It simply is virtually impossible to create an animation without lurches and jerks. There are other threads on this.
  17. Ah ok, I was getting confused by what you mean by "behind" the cut plane. Are you able to share the file?
  18. 2023 at the moment. I'm going to be away from my computer for a few days... But will retest it when I return. When I was experimenting with it, I was trying to see what happened if I entered a revision letter that didn't exist yet, or if I put one in that was out of sequence with the ones before & after. Could that have upset it somehow? I'm not sure it would actually be checking that though.
  19. When there's an element of a design that I suspect might get reverted to, I tend to save the relevant geometry in a duplicate layer, or hidden class, or similar. And I'll try and think about the "seams" where it would need to get re-attached and bear that in mind in how the model in general is set up and developed. Moving something back into the active model from elsewhere in the same file, rather than from an archived file, tends to create fewer problems I find. For example you can end up with duplicate class definitions and stuff like that.
  20. You realise that selecting "display extents beyond the cut plane" only takes effect *after* you then update the viewport? What you've written below sounds like expected behaviour to me.
  21. Thanks. I managed to set up a report with columns like this And this sucessfully lists all of my TBBs "Issue-data 1" is the most recent, and "Issue-data 2" is the previous one, is that right? So when I add a new issue, the information in "Issue-data 1" gets copied to "Issue-date 2" and replaced with the new information? Initially I thought it was working ... I could change letter in the "current revision" column for a certain drawing sheet and see that this got updated in the drawing register. But then I started finding that if I changed any letter in that column, every other letter in the column would change to the same thing (ie for every other TBB in the document). Do you know why that might be happening?
  22. Agreed about the principle of archiving, which I do at quite frequent intervals anyway. I don't use "batch convert" but might look into this - perhaps it provides a convenient way of making a copy of the notes database at the same time. To preserve the exact state of a drawing at an issue point, really I'd say the PDF already does this. The Vectorworks file is certainly useful to go back to, but (for obvious reasons) it's not like you can just copy-paste a sheet layer or viewport back into your current drawing. You might be able to copy-paste a chunk of 3d geometry to revert to a previous design, but chances are you'll still have to do quite a bit of surgery on it where it connects with other bits that have changed in the meantime and which you don't want to revert to another state. Another problem is to do with the notes database - reverting callout notes to a previous version is rather tricky. You obviously can't just revert the whole notes database to the previous version because there will be lots of other things that you've changed since then and want to retain. Any kind of merging is going to have to be done manually and very carefully.
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