line-weight

Yeah I was just trying that myself! My conclusion so far is that it's too subtle though. Also, is it an attribute that can be adjusted via data vis?

In a sheet layer viewport, I want to take a line like the one at the top, and "highlight" it something like what's shown at the bottom. To mock this up, I've duplicated the line in the design layer, made the duplicate thicker and yellow, and then placed it behind the original line. It's possible to do something similar using the viewport's annotations space. But I'd really like to be able to do this (or something like this) to selected lines in selected viewports, using data visualisation. Any clever ways of doing this?

Do you have any objects set to invisible (including things like components of walls or roof faces) within the model you're looking at? (By the way, when I first started using VW properly in 3d, instead of doing my 3d stuff in sketchup, I found it incredibly frustrating and came close to giving up a few times...it did get better though - stick with it.)

Could it be that the top surface of your plasterboard is overlapping ever so slightly with the bottom of the rafters? I can reproduce something similar if the top of the plasterboard is just 1mm too high. There is a kind of cheat in this situation: press B on your keyboard which will give you a kind of X-ray zone where you can see things in wireframe. If wireframe can see the corner you want, then you can usually snap to it, even if you can't in shaded view.

Note that if you want to keep the object as a collection of flat faces, make sure that all the faces you add are triangular. As you can see at the end of the recording, if you adjust the vertice of a face with more than 3 vertices it will make it into a curved surface. Screen Recording 2024-09-09 at 10.11.51.mov

Yes, you just need to change settings in the subdivision tool. I would go with the subdivision method, much easier & faster to adjust than anything that involves converting between object types.

I should start using them too.

The x-ray feature (press B) is very handy in this kind of situation! Like others, if I want to draw guidelines on a working plane, I tend to use 2d objects. Partly because they are more visible, partly because you can be quite sure they will actually be on the working plane. If you draw a 3d polygon it's possible to inadvertently snap to something that's not on the working plane.

This works until you start losing detail in other things where you want it. "Per object" crease angle would be handy...

Generally easier said than done.

Do you mean, create a new layer within the storey, then copy all the geometry that's set up with bounds etc into it? I would have expected this to work without the need to create additional level types. Do the objects forget their boundings when you copy them in?

Agreed.

Can you make a 3d chair symbol, then put this symbol inside the 3d component of a "rotated chair" symbol where it is rotated within that symbol? Then make your desired 2d elevations for the 2d components? I think VW will then recognised the "rotated chair symbol" as being parallel to the view pane and show the 2d components. There could be a few variants of the symbol, a "rotated chair 20 degrees", "rotated chair 40 degrees" and so on.

Is a script even necessary? Can't a data vis be quite easily turned on/off using the dropdown that already exists in the top bar?

This is something that I occasionally encounter and i think it's a bug. It's just happened now. Screenshots below show extract from a horizontal section viewport with and without the problem present. What seems to determine whether or not the arrowheads appear in my case, is what the "line endpoint style" is set to, in the attributes palette, when I update the viewport. NB. it depends on the setting in the attributes palette when nothing is selected on the sheet layer, not what is shown in the attribute palette when I have the viewport selected.

They will probably be arrowheads within the 2d components used for the sliding door & stairs.

By the way I agree with the OP that it's a bit weird that VW can't use colours within a hatch when it's displaying as a surface hatch in an elevation view. If you can set up a hatch with a background colour then it's entirely unintuitive that this background colour doesn't appear when you tell VW to use that hatch as a surface hatch. Also in general the discrepancies between what you see in shaded/hidden line views are confusing. For example if I give an object a simple solid colour as a fill attribute, then that colour shows as the surface colour in shaded views, but in a section view it is what is used for the cut plane (if I choose "use object attributes") whilst no fill is used for the surfaces that are visible in elevation, even if I choose "use original" for the fill in "objects beyond cut plane" as below. I have been using vectorworks for years and this still confuses me sometimes. In fact the hint text that appears for that option (seen in my screenshot below) is very misleading, is it not?

Did you turn off the class whilst within the annotations space? Or did you turn it off in the settings for the relevant viewport? It is possible to get confused between the two. Double check that all classes are turned on in the viewport's settings (in the viewport OIP) before deciding that they have vanished.

So, effectively trying to match the clip cube faces to the Point Cloud geometry, then using the face of the clip cube to set the working plane? Presumably this only works for faces that are truly vertical or truly horizontal - it would be good to know what the best workflows are when the faces are sloping for example. I had a bit of a look around for video tutorials on converting Point Clouds into models in VW but didn't find all that much. I may just need to look a bit harder.

A while ago I wondered if this was possible in the other direction (import file with elevation data in raster format and convert to something vector based) and I think the answer is no. I'm by no means an expert in this stuff but you probably need to do the conversion in another application. If it *is* possible I'd be interested to know how.

By the way... I have been watching the video below (now quite old) about methods of building a solid model using a point cloud as the basis. At around 15.00 in, the working plane tool is used to pick up a vertical wall. But it is not explained what is actually happening here. How does the working plane tool decide what the surface plane is, when it's just looking at points? Does it somehow see an area of points and choose a best fit plane? It seems to me inevitable that however it does it, it's not going to pick up an exactly vertical plane which is probably what you want if you believe the real-world surface to be near enough vertical. And then any small errors are going to be liable to get magnified when you do (for example) an extrude. Am I missing something, or is there another method that allows picking up a plane in a more controlled/precise way?

Thanks. Yes, I agree that being able to extract in a grid of consistent density would be very useful. In the case of my point cloud it's quite difficult to extract just the points that related to ground surface, because it is a steeply sloping site. So simply taking a horizontal slice doesn't really work. And while I can rotate the clip cube in plan, I can't rotate it around the X or Y axes (as far as I know). But it seems to me that this process (extracting a number of useful 3d loci from just the ground surface) is something the survey company should do as part of what they provide.

Yes...in the past there were a couple of companies that I'd use now and again and would know what to expect from them. Then, because of the nature of work I now do, 10-15 years have passed without me really needing professional surveys, and technology has moved on, hence this thread! I don't even really know if it's normal to use laser scanning & point clouds to do topographic surveys. I am wondering if they are using a method that's not really intended for the purpose. Most of their work seems to be internal floorplans. I didn't actually ask for a point cloud, just a topo survey plan in DXF form with spot heights and certain significant features marked. They gave me that plus the point cloud, but looking closely at the point cloud doesn't make me feel confident that the DXF plan they've given me is really accurate.

It does appear to have been done with a tripod scanner because you can see the tripod location circles dotted around the survey: But my impression is that the measurements taken from each location haven't been properly aligned with each other. It's not just the doubled-up ground surfaces - this is a horizontal section taken through an area of vertical tree trunks (it's a slice about 500mm from top to bottom) and it looks to me like there are doubled images of many of the tree trunks, I'm assuming picked up from different scan locations but not successfully aligned with one another. For example right in the bottom left ... is that three images of the same tree trunk? If so, these are the amounts (in mm) by which they are variously misaligned with each other and this seems way outside the level of accuracy that seems reasonable to expect.

Yes to be clear, these are thin slices through the point cloud using the clip cube.