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You have to either do that, or use auto-hybrids very heavily. But they currently have too many limitations to be really useful. (Hence the other thread about an overhaul for autohybrids) In any case, with either method, you are left with a certain amount of cosmetic repair work to make plans presentable.

Yes, here: http://www.vectorworks.net/training/2016/getting-started-guides/common/section-viewport-from-clip-cube but what happens in that video doesn't seem to be what happens for me. It also states that viewports created in this way will have all the normal capabilities. But as far as I can work out that's not true; they are not linked to a section marker.

Yes, it's basically because architectural drawing conventions use certain types of diagrammatic symbols for drawing things like doors and stairs when on a floorplan. What is conventionally drawn is not exactly the same as what would be drawn if you just took a slice through them.

I think something like that is supposed to happen but it never works for me. I don't get returned to a clip cube view.

I don't think layers need to be done away with or renamed as "levels" or anything. People can use them as they wish. The key is sorting out how floorplans are generated.

It's not the only thing but I certainly agree it's the main thing holding VW back, in terms of being properly usable for 3d BIM. I get the impression many are in some kind of denial about whether the existing system, using top/plan view, actually works, once you are trying to generate info from a 3d model. I'm not sure why this is. Is it because they are designing totally different types of buildings than I am? Am I too fussy about my floorplans actually being readable? Is there something that I'm missing? I went to a VW BIM day here in London a little while ago. Some demonstration projects were presented. One was called "The Cube". Why was it a cube? Because the reality is that the current system comes apart at the seams as soon as you try and generate floorplans from anything that's not basically rectilinear, or complex in some other way, in section!

I can create a section viewport (either horizontal or vertical) in two ways: 1) via the older "Create 3D viewport" command, drawing a cut line across the model in orthogonal view 2) using the newer method where I select a cut plane on a clip-cube view Both methods create something called a "section viewport" in its OIP but as far as I can work out they have slightly different properties. A section viewport created by method (1) has a "section line instances" control button so I can control where the relevant section marker shows up and I can adjust the cut plane of the section by moving one of these markers. But a section viewport created by method (2) has no "section line instances" control button. So as far as I can work out, once I've created the section I can't adjust the cut plane location. Another difference: if I create a horizontal (ie plan) section, doors seem to show up differently in the two types. Method (1) the door is drawn closed, method (2), the door is shown open and with a swing line (in neither instance is the door really shown correctly though). Can anyone clarify?

Tom Klaber, I recognise all the issues you describe. I am really struggling with how to deal with this stuff as I try to set up my drawings in a more BIM-like way. I'm not sure if getting rid of layers is the solution. Maybe it is. To me the most obvious thing that's needed is floorplan generation that's based on a cutting plane through the actual geometry, not the current mess that is Top/Plan view which really just generates a plan made up of limited-intelligence 2d symbols. I started a thread on this a little while back: For architectural work, I think layers can still be useful, just because buildings are generally organised into floor levels, and even if just for ease of editing, it's useful to be able to switch individual floor levels on or off. For elements that span stories, it can be up to the user which layer they put them on. If I have a double height space I can put the double-height walls and the windows it contains on the lower floor layer, even though they also need to show up on the floorplan for the next level up. This is only a problem at the moment because of the way the plan is generated - VW's top/plan view isn't clever enough to know they need to show on the story above. But if we have a more intelligent floorplan generation, one that is based on slicing the geometry, it doesn't need to care which layer anything's on. It just needs to know its position in space. At the moment the best solution I can find to generate my floorplans is a messy arrangement with two cropped viewports on top of each other. One shows the stuff that Top/Plan view manages to show correctly, the other is a horizontal section sliced through the actual 3D geometry to show the bits Top/Plan can't do. They have to be cropped into funny shapes around each other and it still needs some cosmetic patching up to make a decent floorplan. On some floors, with simple layout and not much happening in section, I can do nearly all in top/plan view. On other floors (for example loft spaces) top/plan is virtually useless and nearly everything has to be from a horizontal section. I have been using autohybrids too, to increase what Top/Plan can show correctly but am in the process of trying to work out if I can abandon them completely because of the many limitations they have which conspire to make organising or editing anything of complexity a bit of a nightmare.

Changing the Navigation Graphics options doesn't seem to have any effect for me.

This is how I have my drawing sheets set up (and for numbered drawings sheets, I don't want VW automatically changing those numbers) but as Tom Klaber says it's not really automatic. Also, if I have drawing sheets numbered 001 to 300, say, and then a presentation document with pages numbered 1 to 10, and maybe another presentation document with pages numbered 1 to 5... it quickly becomes confusing.

When I plug the Spacepilot Pro in... Firmware 4.11 When I plug the old Spacepilot in... Firmware 3.12 Although, the process of unplugging/replugging totally crashed my computer for some reason!

Ok, thanks. Strangely, as explained in my post a few days ago, my obsolete - and not officially supported on mac - old version Spacepilot behaves better than my new, current-model Spacepilot Pro.

Do you have a Spacepilot Pro you can try out at your end?

I find that everything works fine when using 3Dconnexion's own "trainer" software. All perfectly smooth and as it should be so it seems unlikely there's a hardware problem. (Does the same apply to the CADmouse?) The problem seems to come in its interaction with VW, somehow.

The Affinity apps aren't clones of the equivalent Adobe ones. The way they work is a bit different in a few ways. So there is a bit of a learning curve, although not a drastic one.

No, I guess I could try this but it doesn't really deal with page numbering.

I decided to escape from Adobe a year or two ago for the reasons you describe. I now use Affinity Designer/Photo instead of Illustrator/Photoshop. I am waiting for them to produce Publisher (hopefully fairly soon, although it seems to have been coming "soon" for a while) but in the meantime have been using Scribus. It's ok, a bit clunky in some ways but it works. If you've got an office full of people maybe you should hold your horses for Affinity Publisher and go straight to that rather than everyone getting frustrated trying to get used to Scribus. Although, actually Affinity Designer can be sort-of used for DTP in itself. I've not really explored that fully to be honest. I've been wondering if it's a simpler solution all round to try and do basic DTP in Vectorworks, hence this thread. What I find is because I don't use these other programmes every day - a few months might pass in between having to do presentation stuff that I can't do in VW - I have to remind myself how to do various things each time I use them, and forget shortcuts etc meaning it doesn't feel very efficient.

What you describe is kind of how I tend to do things. I don't use Indesign but something else similar. However, I'm pretty sure I've seen in a recent VW presentation an assertion that we ought to be able to do most of what we need to do within VW itself. Doesn't seem like that's entirely true yet. Files getting bogged down with image sizes is a problem I've had in the past. And for VW to be really useful for presentation sheets we would need proper master pages and auto pagination, etc, as you say.

Previously, when preparing presentation documents (usually concept-stage stuff, or anything that might have combination of VW-originated drawings, images, photos, text etc) I've tended to do this in an external desktop publishing application, exporting/importing VW drawings as necessary. However, as I understand it, we are being pushed towards the idea that we can do all this in VW itself, which, if it all works, suits me just fine because it's really tedious going through the whole export/import thing especially when drawings are updated and so on. Any tips for the most effective strategy here? One issue is how to deal with multi-page documents. For regular drawings I use sheet borders and title blocks and automatic drawing co-ordination. Each drawing sheet has its own number and is on its own sheet layer. But say I want to create a 5-page PDF with a fair bit of text and imported photos etc. It would be easier to work on this if I can pan around the whole document rather than having to flip between sheet layers, so I'm thinking I could have a sheet layer where I have used "page setup" to create a 5 x 1 grid of pages. Then when I export to PDF it'll make it into a nice 5 page document for me. Is this a good idea or should I still be putting each page on its own sheet layer? Also, what about page numbering? The page numbers for a presentation document are generally self-contained - independent of the sheet numbering for the main drawing issues. I like these documents to have pages labelled "page 3 of 5" and so on, perhaps with a small header/footer that contains project details that's the same on each page. Is there a way to set this up to work automatically (standard feature in any DTP application) or am I going to have to do it manually? And finally, do folk find they can keep text under control in VW now? When I've tried in the past, text blocks have always been a bit clunky and as far as I know there's not a possibility to have text flow from one page to the next. Any thoughts welcome.

In case this is useful for anyone else - I'm on a mac and on VW2017, and currently using the latest (10.4.2) driver from 3Dconnexion. Up until now I've been using the "SpacePilot", one of these: I could get hold of one S/H relatively cheap so got it to try it out even though it's not officially supported for mac, and is not one of the current models. The joystick works but not the screen and none of the buttons except for "1" which toggles between modes (walkthrough/flyover etc). Used it for a while in 2016, with the VW recommended settings. For me definitely a worthwhile investment, now use it quite heavily during 3D work. With an upgrade to VW2017 certain things changed and motion became a bit jerky in certain situations; I've detailed this issue on this thread - As of today I've upgraded to a current model, the "SpacePilot Pro" - this one: This was partly driven by a hope that maybe the jerky motion might disappear with a more up to date model (quick answer: it's worse) but also so I could start to make use of the buttons. Have now spent a little time messing around with it. It took me a while to work out how to toggle between modes - it turns out that it's by the "menu" key (it was via a previous post in this thread that I discovered this). Assigning shortcuts and functions to the various buttons works generally as expected even if this process is not hugely user-friendly. Assigned functions do show up on the screen, although, where they are assigned as keyboard shortcuts they rather un-usefully appear as "shift-K" etc rather than a descriptor of the actual tool function. This is as per discussion further up the thread and I agree with the comments already made. I feel that having the buttons is useful. If only because at this stage they potentially offer a workaround for the problem I describe in my thread linked above - when zoomed-in I can easily use a shortcut button on the Spacepilot to flip into "Translate" mode and then use the mouse to pan around smoothly when looking at small details. However, it seems that the general quality of motion is worse than on the older model. On the older SpacePilot, ignoring the problem of jerkiness when zoomed-in, generally the motion is fairly smooth. On the new one, it i snot smooth but jittery, as if the image is being refreshed at a lower framerate. Why this should be I have no idea. But maybe is part of the reason why someone further up the thread said they felt it was unusable at present. I can potentially post a short screen recording if anyone wants to see what the difference looks like. So, for now, unless I find a way of fixing this jittery motion I think I am going to have to revert to the older model. By the way as a general comment - when you first start using these things it's quite confusing to work out what's going on and how it interacts with the flyover/walkthrough modes selectable as tools in the visualisation pallette. When you use the SpacePilot to move around, the cursor turns to the flyover symbol, but in reality the mode you are operating in has nothing to do with what's selected in the visualisation pallette - the mode in which the spacepilot operates is determined by toggling through its own modes (in VW2017 called "helicopter", "camera target mode" and others) which are different from the walkthrough/flyover/translate modes that apply when using a conventional mouse. As someone further up said, the spacepilot should do its own thing, with the cursor remaining in whatever mode is currently active - for example the pointer tool. It's the currently active cursor symbol that reappears when you take your hand off the joystick - the misleading "flyover" symbol only appears whilst you're moving the joystick. Confusing. Also for the benefit of anyone else trying for the first time - at the moment there is no config for VW built in anywhere. You have to add VW as an application in the 3Dconnexion control panel, then define all the axes manually as per the advice in the knowledgebase article. Then these settings will apply whenever you're in VW. It seems that it doesn't make any difference whether you add VW2016 or VW2017 - if you add it as VW2016 then VW 2017 still uses those settings and vice versa. The actual behaviour in each version of VW is however a bit different. Anyway, I am praying for the release of the hopefully improved driver very soon!

What you describe is different to my problem. My problem only really becomes apparent when you are zoomed right in on details of a model - then the movement on certain axes becomes hard to control because it won't move below a minimum speed. So for example if I'm looking at a 40mm wide window frame, and just touch the joystick in the "up" direction for the shortest possible time, my viewpoint will have jumped upwards by maybe 75mm. Not to mars, but enough to make fine control of viewpoint positioning very difficult when working at close details. I've found that it's worse in "helipcopter" mode than it is in "target camera mode" but it's a problem in both. If I'm working in 3D I use a perspective view (not sure why anyone would want to use an isometric view??) but I just tried viewing the model in a "right isometric" for example and something strange does seem to happen when I touch the joystick - I didn't fly off to Mars but I suddenly seemed to be looking at the other side of the model. I've got it on 10.4.2 at the moment. I hope the promised 10.4.3 arrives soon and sorts things out. It's making life quite difficult at present.

Agreed, this issue makes autohybrids almost unusable for me - the paste-in-place problem plus the fact that they can't contain groups makes editing them very difficult in anything other than a very basic model.

There's rather a lot of "dressing" of drawings used in marketing material, I think. There are drawings I see in material accompanying new releases and think "oh we can do that easily, now - great" but then it turns out that actually, no, it's just the same as before: we can't produce something that looks like that without a lot of fiddling around and manual intervention.

I agree. It's weird that seemingly basic, universally useful things like this remain completely absent, whilst specialised and to me somewhat obscure extra features are touted in new releases of the software. Surely a working 3D grid would be useful to a wider portion of VW users than an irrigation tool is, for example.

Have sent you this in a PM. Thanks.