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line-weight

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Everything posted by line-weight

  1. If I do no overrides, plane mapping, and then rotate 90 degrees I get this. The top face is wrong of course, but would not matter if hidden by a thin layer laminate as a separate object.
  2. You could also choose to model it as per reality, with a plywood core and then a thin laminate layer on top. Then give each object the appropriate texture.
  3. Ok, the main thing to understand is that when you change a design layer "scale" in vectorworks you aren't really changing the scale of anything, it's just changing how it is presented to you - how it is "previewed" if you like. This is confusing and I've long argued that the terminology should be changed, to stop confusing people. When you change the "scale" of a layer in VW nothing at all happens to the geometry itself. If you've decided that 1 drawing unit = 1mm then that doesn't change. If you import something externally you just need to make sure that the drawing units match. So, if in your file 1 drawing unit = 1mm then you make sure that you import geometry such that in the imported geometry, 1mm = 1 vectorworks drawing unit. Depending on where it's coming from you might need to rescale it during the import process to achieve this, but once it's in VW you don't need to change it again. You can set different "scales" for different design layers in VW. So if you have a 10mm x 10mm rectangle on one layer, with layer scale = 1:1 and you have a 10mm x 10mm rectangle on another layer with layer scale = 1:10, and you have both layers visible at the same time, one rectangle will appear 10x larger than the other. But it's not. Change both layers to the same scale and the two rectangles will be the same size.
  4. What do you use section viewports for, on design layers? What are they placed relative to, and why?
  5. I agree with everything that benson shaw says. I think that trying to measure on the drawing to predict where the ends of the bent sheet material will end up, when attached, is destined for failure. If I wanted joints to be in specific locations, I would choose those positions such that the predicted edges of a bent sheet oversail them a bit, and work on the assumption that the sheets will be trimmed back on site. The issues you touch upon, of faceted curves and accuracy of snapping to them, these are a bit of a problem in vectorworks in certain situations. What is and isn't a problem is a bit complicated. But I'd say that in general terms, as soon as you start doing complex curves especially things like NURBs curves in Vectorworks, then in practical terms expect to lose a bit of precision. If you are preparing drawings for some kind of high precision manufacture then VW may not really be the right tool. However... the reality of building construction is that nothing is actually that precise, and you can get away with "near enough". But it does need some careful thought in how you prepare the drawings, and some sensible allowance for tolerances.
  6. I know it's easy for me to be an armchair critic, but whatever the current system is for ensuring good UI design, it doesn't work. If someone like me, a lay person, can spot UI inconsistencies everywhere then VW are not allocating sufficient resources. There needs to be some kind of tyrannical pedant (or perhaps a team of them) who looks carefully at every aspect of anything that is introduced (well, and everything that's already there too). The thing that's been raised in this thread, this should not have slipped through the net. Of course if you give someone a button that says "flip" they are going to expect that pushing the button will make the gate flip. Because (correct me if I'm wrong) that's what happens everywhere else in VW: if you press a button then the thing the button does happens instantly. If there's a dropdown with options, or somewhere to type a numerical value, then we know that usually this means the changes will take effect when the dialogue closes. That's fine, because it's what we expect. You close the dialogue by pressing OK. When you press OK it closes the dialogue and commits the changes. Again, pressing the button is what makes something happen. @Tom W. above has already suggested a better way of doing this, with radio buttons. I'd suggest something like that too. But it shouldn't need users to point this out. This is a very basic issue of consistency and expected behaviour. This absolutely should have been picked up before release. I do recognise that there are certain things where the best way to do something is debatable, and you have to choose one way or the other and some users will disagree with the choice. But this example, it's not one of those. I don't see why anyone would want to have a button that doesn't do anything until later, which gives you no preview of what's going to happen later, and gives you no record of how many times you've pressed it. There are no possible advantages of this. It simply is bad UI design, and a professional software package shouldn't be getting released with stuff like this. Again, I don't want to come across as criticising the people who develop & code the tool. I'm criticising the system VW has (or doesn't have) in place for thoroughly checking things for UI issues. That checking needs to be done by someone who has not had any involvement in the development of the tool itself, so that they can come to it in the same way a user might come to it.
  7. These yuk responses, which of course must be disheartening for the VW employees who put so much hard work into developing these complex tools, could be avoided if the company were to take user testing and interface design seriously, but it's very clear that the people at the top don't. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
  8. I think you'll find that you come up against various things that aren't possible with this tool. It'll let you customise up to a point and not further. And there are some things that you could do with the old version, that you now can't. For example L-shaped corner cabinet with unequal leg lengths.
  9. Although you can make it as @Pat Stanford says, I think you might then have troubles making it join with the horizontal overhanging roof element that you want it to be continuous with.
  10. Yup there's something whacky going on here: I zoomed right in and deleted some errant vertices, and then it seemed to be fine.
  11. I feel that I sometimes experience this too. Snaps & their cues stop working and things return to normal when I re-start VW.
  12. As l said above, the ability to use elevation benchmarks is benefit enough for me. Even if no objects are actually associated with them. I no longer need to have the bit of paper stuck next to the screen with a project's significant levels written on it. Part of the attraction for me is that I don't really like giving layers elevations, because I like to be able to paste-in-place between different building storeys. Having a single storey with a number of important/useful "levels" proves to be a good way of keeping Z values organised and recorded. For me and the kind of projects I do. I find it quite satisfying/reassuring when I can make, say, a steelwork setting-out drawing and with a couple of clicks have things like finished floor levels, or top-of-steel levels, or whatever appear in the right locations in viewports.
  13. I think it's because you've got "display 2D components" turned on. So it is drawing the 2d component of the symbol rather than rendering directly from its 3d geometry. To make it coloured you either need to turn off "display 2D components, or edit the symbol's 2d component so that it has the colours you want.
  14. Like Zoomer says, it's mainly about accessing Levels. The parametric possibilities are one reason, but also the ability to have reference levels that I can use to create elevation benchmarks on elevations/section viewports. Even if I never really change the levels, I find them very useful for making sure everything is in the right place. It's a visual check that things are at the correct height relative to things like finished floor levels, and is also useful when I have "existing" vs "proposed" and need to match a height somewhere. I like that the elevation benchmarks will always be correct automatically. Similar to grid lines in plan views.
  15. Do you have "use original" selected here? That controls what any objects seen in elevation will look like. If you also want the objects to retain their colours where they are sectioned, you'll need to select this too:
  16. Is it a building with multiple levels, and are those multiple levels repetitive? If not, just put everything in one storey. Then you don't need to worry about storey elevations. Just have a zero datum for the whole thing & relate all your levels to that.
  17. Sorry, my question was aimed at @Mickey.
  18. I don't really understand what you're trying to achieve. I'm not quite sure how a section of a wireframe would really be meaningful or useful. Can you post something that lets us see what you're trying to show?
  19. There's something wrong with the way this works. It often seems impossible to find the legend that's supposedly been created (even using the custom search). I have to resort to copy-pasting one in from another file, and then all new ones in that file are made by duplicating the first one.
  20. You can do - with pointer tool active and the dimension selcted, hover over the text block, then it lets you grab it and move it anywhere you want. Or do you mean have it align in a certain way by default? There are quite a few things you can adjust in dimension standards -
  21. The temptation to make a list of all the things that aren't quite correct is hard to resist for me, who gets really obsessed about getting surveys right and spends way more time chasing accuracy than makes any business sense...
  22. Hm. I don't think that's happened to me (yet). I wonder if it's a symbol-inside-a-symbol problem? In many cases, my custom doors/windows are actually groups rather than symbols (so the door leafs are symbols within a group).
  23. It's quite easy to achieve this if you build your own door objects. Make the door leaf a symbol, duplicate it and rotate one copy 90 degrees. Make two classes, one "doors open" and one "doors closed" and put the instances of the door leaf in each. Then you can choose per viewport which of those classes you want visible and hence whether the doors are open or closed. If you want you can make it more fine grained and control it per door. This of course is not very helpful if you need/want to use VW door objects. However, it makes it feel like it shouldn't be all that difficult to implement for VW doors.
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