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I think I agree with you here...pressing the "f" or "r" buttons on the 3dC device is a nice shortcut except it gives me a front view in perspective - pointless - so I end up doing a cmd-5 shortcut to top/plan to get rid of the perspective before pressing the "f" button. The "f" button should put me straight into an orthogonal front view. Perhaps even a wireframe one too. Would be good if this could be user-configurable if not the default.

All saved "3d" views are in perspective rather than isometric and these are what I use most. I do sometimes switch into "flat" orthogonal views (eg front or top) and into top/plan. As far as I can tell it's usually when switching from these back to a perspective saved view that I get thrown into a navigation mode that is not what I want (ie. I want helicopter, always).

The "Structural member" tool appeared in VW2017, but when I tried it before it was full of bugs and horrible. Confirmed by a few other threads on here. I *think* that SP3 has provided fixes for most of the issues. A couple of questions: - Is it, in SP3, now safe to use? Or are there still significant bugs remaining? - Is it supposed to replace the "framing member" tool? - If not, when do I use one instead of the other?

Yes, that's what I was meaning. Then we just need sub-menus in the saved views dropdown as per my wishlist request from a while ago: If anyone feels like voting it up!

Actually this thread got me thinking a bit about how I use saved views. They kind of do two things 1) save a "point of view" eg. - perspective from inside a room - birdseye view - top/plan view for editing 2) save a "set of visibilities" eg. - show all elements - show primary structure only - show second floor only - show with the roof off Each of my saved views tend to save a combination of each: for example, - perspective inside a room with all elements visible - birdseye view with roof off - second floor only in top/plan view This means that I need to have the same number of saved views as number of "point of view" / "set of visibilities" combinations I want. Perhaps it would be more efficient to have a set of saved views that are "point of view" only (with visibilities unticked) and another set that are "set of visibilities" only (with view orientation etc unticked). So to get my "birdseye with roof off" I'd first select my "birdseye" saved view and then my "roof off" saved view. This might make adding new viewpoints, or redefining existing ones easier because I wouldn't have to worry about the visibility settings - they would be dealt with separately. Maybe this approach could solve your problem too? Finally: this makes me wonder, does anyone actually use those dropdowns in the top right, the ones which give you front view/side view etc and orthogonal/perspective etc? They seem a hangover from old ways of doing things. I'd much rather that I could use these dropdowns to access my project-specific custom views aka "point of view" saved views.

^ unfortunately this still seems to be happening. Often when I activate a saved view I seem to have exited Helicopter mode and been put in some other mode. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? Or is there some way to set a certain mode as default?

As mentioned on the other thread, it can be useful to preview line thicknesses/hatch fills etc whilst editing 2D linework that will usually be printed at a certain scale eg 1:50. Setting to 1:1 removes this. Again as mentioned on the other thread some kind of "preview at 1:xxx" option whilst in 2D mode would deal with this. I made a wishlist item.

It's a bit complicated because it's not just about the overall speed but the "miminum speed" you hit when you want to go very slowly. The range of possible speeds doesn't go down to zero so setting the speed slider to slower doesn't solve the problem. I only recently discovered that changing the design layer scale can help (whilst of course causing problems elsewhere). This is all discussed in this thread: If there was some way of improving this it would make me very happy.

I have the SpaceMouse Pro as well. Have just updated to SP3 and also updated the 3dConnexion driver to 10.4.4. I've set the mouse to the VW defaults for now. They seem better than before. This should make life a lot easier for people starting to use the 3DC devices for the first time (previously had to fiddle about with the settings manually and make them match a screenshot in a Knowledgebase article, not ideal). Previously the "menu" button on my SpaceMouse Pro did the switch between navigation types which as you say is now mapped to the button 1 as default. Like Lius M Ruiz I always use "Helicopter" mode and normal perspective. The only time I have been using the "switch navigation" button up till now is to get back into helicopter mode when VW throws me into some other mode unexpectedly, which is annoying. Going to see if that bad habit has disappeared with these latest updates. As mentioned on another thread, I have found that I need to set design layers to a scale of 1:1 in order to make navigation manageable at close quarters (if say I have layers set at 1:50 then navigation when looking closely at details is unuseably jumpy).

I hadn't even noticed this "ignore" option in the settings until I was fiddling around trying to understand your problem (although I think it might be better to call it "don't save" instead of "ignore" as that's what the VW dialogue box calls it). So thanks for that, could be useful to use in the future! However, maybe not so useful after all as I can now see what the problem is. I agree it should be as you describe. I can't see a good workaround. "Saved views" need improvements generally. The more I work in 3D the more I rely on them.

I ended up at this thread trying to install exact same plugin! There are some instructions here: http://scs-inc.us/Other/VectorWiki/index.php?title=Installing_Plug-ins it's the ZIP file you need to select to install in the plugin manager. Then it tells you that you need to restart Vectorworks in order to install plugins (but doesn't give any indication that you've successfully initiated the process). So you restart, and then it's there in the plugin manager. You still have to go and edit your workspace to add it to one of the palettes. In this case it's in a section called "Velux" in the workspace editor. Then you choose which palette to put it into. Not the most user friendly process.

Yes, and a checkbox northpoint would be handy too.

I agree, scale should be associated with viewport, not sheet. Sometimes a sheet might only have one viewport, in which case you can argue that the scale could go in the titleblock, but then as soon as you have more than one viewport, with various scales, you have to type "varies" in the scale section of the titleblock, as well as putting a scale in the title associated with each viewport. A while ago I realised having a "scale" entry in my titleblocks was a waste of time and paper space and got rid of it!

Done! Please vote up, folks!

Design layers should really be scale-less, especially when they are being used for 3D modelling. Scale should only become relevant once a design layer is being viewed in a sheet layer viewport. However, in top/plan view (and maybe just general 2D drawing) it's useful to be able to preview things like line thicknesses and hatches whilst editing. I sort-of set design layers to have scales for this reason. The wish is that we have a drop down menu, perhaps next to the ones that lets us choose perspective/projection type where we can set the scale at which we want to view the geometry we are editing. This could be saved as a property of saved views. Could have benefits for those of us that use 3D mice too, as the fly-around speed seems to be set relative to the design layer scale. So whilst in a 3d perspective view, we could set it to 1:200 when we want to move quickly around a site or massing model, but set it at 1:5 if we are working on a small detail of an individual piece of furniture, say.

When i am editing floorplans in top/plan view I like to get a bit of a preview of line weights, hatches etc as they'll appear at the scale it will most likely be printed at. In my case I set it to 1:50 because I tend to have 1:50 GAs and so on. If I set it to 1:1 this ability will disappear. In an ideal world perhaps instead of design layers having an intrinsic scale there would be a dropdown somewhere called "view at ... scale". Maybe saved as a property of saved views.

Something I've just discovered: The speed of navigation seems to be relative to the "scale" of the design layer you are viewing. Most of my design layers are set at 1:50. Working on a new file where the scale was set to 1:5, I found that the 3DC navigation speed was much slower, looking at close details and therefore the "miminum speed" threshold ceases to be an issue at close quarters. Maybe I should start setting up drawings with design layers at larger scale. I expect it will mess up something else somewhere though. Why do design layers have a "scale" anyway? I suppose it comes back to top/plan view somehow. In a proper 3D modelling world surely design layers should be scale-less. Everything that needs to be drawn at a certain scale should be determined by viewport scale or in annotations.

You can do this without "cheating" - get your clip cube set up, highlight the relevant face and do a "create section viewport" but make this a *design layer* viewport, then go to that design layer, choose your perspective view of that design layer "viewport" (which is actually more like a sliced 3d model) and then save this view as your sheet layer viewport and you get something like what you've shown. You can only do a single-plane slice like this though. This is about the most confusing procedure possible but it does work. Well, at least sometimes - I have a feeling there's a bug in VW2017 but maybe it's been resolved in SP2, I haven't actually tried doing this recently.

Sometimes that's the case but there are lots of situations where "fixing" something to look right in elevation messes it up in plan view, and vice versa. Particularly in situations involving walls of different heights meeting each other, for example.

Thanks. €400 a year though....

I thought that there might be a nice pipework tool which would let me define a 3D path for a pipe run including both horizontal and vertical sections, and then I'd tell it what kind of pipe I want, and type of elbows etc and it would do it all automatically, thus saving me loads of tedious drawing time and making my life wonderful. I've looked in the MEP toolset, whose icon is a promising looking 3D T joint. There are various piping/HVAC tools in there but as far as I can work out none of them do what I want. Either they are just 2D objects or they are hybrid objects the 3D components of which I can only rotate in plan, so they are no good for creating the kind of pipework illustrated in the image above. Am I missing anything? Do I basically just have to draw this stuff manually with path extrudes and so on?

Elevations and sections, generated from a 3d model, inevitably include various unwanted lines which can't be fixed by making alterations to the model. My method for removing these at the moment is to use various masking objects in the annotation of the viewport. I have a couple of "masking" classes which are basically white lines with a thickness a little bit greater than what I want to hide. This sort-of works but is far from ideal. It's time consuming to edit and it's not possible to make it completely tidy; it's never quite right at the ends of the lines. And when I export to PDF sometimes there's a kind of shadow of the line that's supposed to be blanked out. As far as I am aware there's no "official" way to do this. I think we are supposed to just pretend it's not an issue. It's not even possible to flatten viewports to make them into dead 2D geometry, which could then be edited (as I was rather surprised to learn). I have the same issue with floorplans where things get even more messy but let's set that aside for now. Does anyone have any successful methods for dealing with this?

Agree with the above! A reliable grid system that's not just a graphic element would make it easier to keep drawings organised. The grid should be the starting point of dimensioning - define the grid, then all dimensions are relative to closest grid line instead of in unwieldy chains prone to rounding errors. I would vote for the ability to have "working" grid lines as well as the ones shown on drawing output. Lines that help as reference points during drafting but can be switched off when producing production drawings. In fact ideally you would be able to select per viewport which gridlines you wanted to see. So, each grid line individually switchable on/off. Sometimes there are grid lines in plan that are only relevant to certain storeys, for example.

Ok, so in case it's useful to anyone else this was solved with some help from my local distributor. The issue seems to be that the clip cube was turned on in the files that failed to generate a 3d model. Opening the file, turning off the clip cube and re-saving solved the issue. I'm not sure why the clip cube was on in the first place, I didn't do it intentionally. I have a feeling there is a minor bug somewhere that turns on the clip cube, sometimes I find myself in a view with it turned on unexpectedly, although it's hard to remember the exact circumstances when this happens. Will try and take a note of it in the future.

Ah, I knew you could use shift to add/remove from an existing selection but not that it can be used to solve the marquee dragging problem - so thanks for the tip.