halfcoupler

Hi Pat, I think it is possible, have a look at that German Version of VectorWorks. It has a kind of data manager , I think it working via ODBC connection and it does exactly this job. I can’t test it since I am working with the international Version.

Looking at this video my memories are awakend when 20 years ago I created my first curved truss in Vectorworks. This was precisely the method I used. I the end, what often helps in these cases, is to imagine how things are assembled in the real world. Nobody will ever bend a complete lattice beam of 50m and more. It will always be assembled by pieces of curved main beams and straight lattices. Considering things like this and following these assembling lines very often helped me to find the most straight forward ways for drawing real world things. The other approach is from the design world. I am often very impressed how designers use CAD-design tools in a creative way. These results can never be achieved while thinking about assembly lines. But after the design was created, you often have the question 'How on earth can this be realized?' and you will return to the most simple tools in drawing and assembling...

That is right. No chance to use Lookup with database rows. That's why I did not proceed on this topic,- no solution in sight. The German version of Vectorworks has a great tool for connecting data with (referenced) other data, which solves the above problems, but unfortunately I'm on the international Version. Maybe it will be implemented within the next 100 years to the international Version. 😁😁😁 In between I do my data-merging and analysis outside of Vectorworks with Base, Access, Excel or similar.

Had this issue too a few days ago. What helped was to chose another printer in the page setup, save the file, the return to the previous printer and set the Horizontal and Vertical values to 1. I wasn't able to find out why this happened,- perhaps a printer error.

Hi @GastonVigo, this is a common roof for building sites, not very common in the entertainment industry. But it is a good roof and it will work. This is the official dependance in argentinia: Layher Sudamericana, S.A. Av. Directorio 6052 (1440) Ciudad de Buenos Aires Argentinien / Argentina +54-11-46 86 16 66 +54-11-46 87 73 19 info@layher.com.ar www.layher.com.ar If you can't get the information you need there, pm me and I try to find someone in the German headquarters to help you.

Great Video, great explanation for working planes, it was a pleasure to watch this again and I really noticed that I had completely forgotten about some tricks with working planes. But there are some changes since VW21, sometimes very confusing: First, in general, to get rid of the 'pink square': Select Window/Palettes/Working Planes to open the workingplanes palette, then double click active Layer plane and it is gone. Second: Why does the pink square show up at all ? When changing to a side, front, or top view, the pink square shows up with a dashed border. This indicates that any 2D tool you will use now will be aligned to this 'temporary' working plane and not to the active layer plane. As soon as you leave this view the the pink rectangle disappears (usually). Now, if you want to keep this temporay working plane you can click the pink 'Align Plane' button to keep this (or any other view you are just using) as working plane. Now the pink rectangle looses its dashed border and becomes sticky, so from now on you will be drawing in this workingplane, unregarded what view you will choose. The pink square stays unless you choose the above command to return to the Active Layer Plane. I think this procedure was invented to replace the legacy 'screen plane only / working plane only' command. So now to the confusing part in VW25: For some reason that I can't reproduce or identify (and I really tried hard to do that), some operations sometimes lead to an automated change from 'temporary working plane' with dashed border to 'aligned Plane' which will then be sticky. Very confusing, especially when you do not know how to return to the active layer plane. Maybe someone else here can explain what causes this magic. I'm exited for comments. 😀

That is really great ! I was thinking about a custom selection or object visibility, but 'is flipped' is not available as criteria there... Thank you so much ! Great help !

maybe someone else stumbled over this too: flipped objects may be identical or not, depending on their symmetry. I often flip complete drawings to get a quick overview for quotations or rough calculations. When it comes to realization, all these instances need a revision, since attached records are copied with the flipped instance, and an overlooked flipped instance may lead for example to a wrong welding of the structural member above or prepping the wrong trusspiece in the event industry. So what would really help is to display in the OIP whether the object was flipped or not. Worksheets can show whether symbols are flipped or not, but only when not summarized. Not very handy when dealing with 3500 symbol instances. Also there is no solution for flipped groups and other flipped objects. Maybe I have overseen something, any comments appreciated 😀

I also had this 'issue' a few days ago,- I located the problem between my keyboard and my office chair: 'duplicate' a resource is only working with the active document. 😁 maybe this helps 😀

You can try to play around with Modify/Polysmoothing. I did this once and had some succes but with the price of incredible file enlargement.

indeed this is the quickest way, Im using this very often. After re-importing a purge command may clean off all coincidenting lines. OR: - Create a sheet layer viewport in hidden line. - Run Modify/Convert/Convert to lines/ on this viewport - Run the purge command if nessesary on the resultig group. This way You can stay in Vectorworks maybe a bit quicker.

You can save the settigs as Script, add the script to your workspace and give it a shortcut.

Here it is... 🙂 some background why I am experimenting with this: If you are using an erp-system, or rental software in the event industry, or whatever stock management system, you usually already have a detailed database of the items you sell/rent/construct. So it does not make sense to re-type everything again into record formats in Vectorworks. So it's obvious to set only an index to a symbol or object, reference this to an external database table and collect only the information needed for construction in Vectorworks. (I think that's the basic idea of BIM ?) test.vwx

20 stage decks is nothing,- try to move a grandstand with 600 ledgers... 😁 What is working in these cases is to use the move by points tool with the Reference point option (4th mode): select all you want (even the whole drawing), click endpoint (where to go), click object point(which point of the object to go there) , set offset to zero and choose fist click as reference point. -astounding quick, wonder why it is not working like this in the first mode- move by points has improved much, but not really satisfying. Sometimes I experience that the objects to move turn black or blue completely and finding the snappoint is a tapping in the dark. Still a topic that could be worked on...

Hi @Pat Stanford thank you for this. 🙂 VLookup seems to be the right way, and I played around with this, but I can't get it to work... I forgot to mention that my Worksheets are database Worksheets, can I apply VLookup to this at all ? It seems that VLookup can only find corresponding lines of a specific Value. How do I get this 'dynamic' ? VLookup(first argument is a cell in my third worksheet,but should be value in that column where the indexes are the same ? ,,,) Do I misunderstand this completely ?