nrkuhl

So I'm revisiting this to try and automate our drawing lists, and I'm having trouble setting up the worksheet to display the drawing list. I can't figure out where I'm supposed to insert the criteria to limit the list to only items with the True boolean. I feel like I'm missing something really obvious here... EDIT: I figured it out. I was missing the basics - I had no idea you could right click on a row to switch it to being a database.

@Kevin McAllisterI actually just installed 2018 on a 2+ year old mac mini, and messed around with multi-pane views in a moderately complex 2-family house with modeled site architectural project. Nothing has crashed, performance was fairly reasonable, and I'm pushing two monitors (1920x1200 and 1440x900). At one point I got a phone call that necessitated opening an active project file, so I popped open 2017 as well and navigated a more simple project to answer some questions. All that is to say, you might be surprised what the older hardware can do, even with integrated graphics.

@JMRI just installed 2018 to see if it was ready for primetime (now that we're 2 service packs in) today, and pretty promptly ran into this behavior with some symbols and PIOs as well. I had two view panes open and thought at first that they just weren't synching, but a few zooms later everything showed up.

@ChristiaanI see what you did there with the custom numbering, I'll have to put that into practice!

I've corrected myself: last February I sent this issue to VSS tech support and was told it "is a known issue that engineering is working on". I also just found the below thread from a couple months ago, so obviously nothing has changed. Re: the other behavior that you've mentioned, I don't think I've run into. But I think the keynotes always give you the option of selecting any legend in the document to reference onto the sheet? Not sure if I explained that well, none of my current projects are using the keynote legend PIO. We've had to make manual legends/keynotes with symbols since you can't assign custom numbering (i.e. reference spec sections) with the keynote tool.

Yes, we've had numerous problems with this. But have never been able to isolate it beyond that it only seems to happen on files with project sharing on. I'm pretty sure I bug submitted this for 2017 at some point.

@jakezyou designing some climbing walls? For the curious, that's a bolt hanger used in climbing to clip a quickdraw and rope into (or anchor to). Typically anchored into rock with an expansion bolt, or t-nutted to a plywood climbing wall.

@Claes LundstromI agree that Rhino does not easily put out decent 2D graphics, and if I can do things in VW with Plugin objects, great. Where VW breaks down is once you move past that though - Complex residential roof shapes get painful pretty fast.

I think it's both the price and the fact that the program is pretty non-threatening to beginners. I do get that things like Rhino can be pretty intimidating when it opens by default with a command line, 4 different views of the model, roughly a dozen tabs of tools at the top of the window, a toolbar down the left side of the interface, and a bunch of tabs of various additional functionality on the right. Sketchup opens with roughly 8 buttons and a cartoon person.

I agree with @Zoomer, the geometry from Sketchup is often revealed to be really terrible when you bring it into other 3D programs. It's often not suitable for any kind of 3D printing without a lot of cleanup. I have a pretty strong background in Rhino and if I need to do any 3D modeling more complex than a simple box, I usually do it Rhino. VW's modelling is like pulling teeth compared to Rhino. I occasionally 3D print models for work, and I always take the geometry out of VW to clean up in Rhino, because even simple things like joins and subtractions get weird really quickly. VW's NURBS implementation is not particularly useful, extruding can only be done on a limited selection of object types, drawing 3D polylines or curves is difficult, and surface creation is not intuitive either. I'm roughly 300% faster in any program that gives me a command line, vs forcing me to use a limited set of shortcut keys or menu/tool palette selections. You can also run Rhino on just about anything (seriously, I've run the most recent version on an ARM powered Windows tablet with 1gb of shared video memory). And it's more stable than VW (and cheaper). So if you're looking for a better 3D modeling program than VW, there are definitely options. There's also things like Blender, Solidworks, and all the Autodesk options, the choice of which really depends on what your application is. I do my architectural drawings in VW because I'm paid to and it's moderately ok at them and cheaper than other BIM options.

Hah, if I don't open the software it can't crash...

I combine a complete PDF, but via Acrobat. I don't import consultant drawings into VWX unless in need them for something.

The windows PC I have at home and occasionally work remotely from is far better spec'd than my Mac at work, and VW is far LESS stable on it. More unexpected behavior and crashes on windows than Mac in my experience.

Active shared projects are one of the reasons I've kept our office on 2017. I'm going to keep it that way for a while I think, seeing this.

I'm pretty certain that ty 2D drawings happen no matter what the software is, and VW users are just as bad as ACAD users. If anything forces people to be better, it's shifting to BIM/3D workflows, since I think it's more obvious when your bad choices don't work. But you can still fake it in 3D too.

This sounds like something I've run into before with linework that I copied from an imported dwg and turned into blocks for details. However, I don't remember actually doing anything to fix it and it might have just been fixed by a subsequent update. What version are you on?

There are a few tutorials on this kicking around the web. It's a process, as you have to make a symbol and then insert it and then fight with roof related dialogues. In my office we just make a hole in the roof and then draw everything else as an annotation (i.e. a simple outline for the frame in the roof plan, full details, or often nothing (in the case of sections at smaller scales). The last time I really looked into it, there wasn't enough control to make it worth while, so it's better just to manually draft the thing.

Yeah, I've found the supposedly associative objects work intermittently at best (dimensions seem somewhat randomly associative.)

One of the reasons that I've held off on updating our office is that it sounds like titleblocks work so differently in 2018 that I'm going to spend half a day fixing ours.

If you place them on a design layer they will update - they just won't look right in all (any) views. That's why I'm currently using the mixed workflow I described earlier.

I believe we've had this problem post-SP3 update.

It would be really great if objects or components of plugin objects could be set to change their display settings based on the scale of a viewport. For instance, on my general plans, I don't need to see shim gaps for doors and windows. But, on plan details, it would be useful to see the shim gaps. Similarly, I don't want shim gaps on my 1/2" scale elevations, but I do want to see them on my 3"=1' details. This could also be applied to wall components: at 1/16" scale, I don't need to see wall components, they just end up lumping together into a weird heavy line. If I'm really ambitious, I want to have this as a live feature in linked to zoom, and also controls the available snaps: If I'm at 200% zoom, then please, show me all wall components and let me snap to each of them individually. If I'm at 20% zoom, show me walls as a solid piece, where I only snap to exterior or interior vertexes / endpoints.

Yeah, I've been setting one reference elevation in the design layer that sits on my first finished floor. I then manually draw the markers I want in elevation viewports, and set their control points to land on my reference marker. It's not great. I haven't messed with using them in design layers extensively, so there might be a way to get them to work, but they'd only show properly when your view is to the same view you set them in or the mirrored elevation.

As folks have pointed out, the elevation benchmark is the tool that sort of does this. It seems to get weird graphically when used directly in design layers (I was just messing with it yesterday). It definitely doesn't work the way you think it should if you've used the equivalent Revit tool.

@DOVyou have to draw them in manually in your annotation layer.