nrkuhl
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Posts posted by nrkuhl
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I'm going to keep flogging this topic, my firm got really excited about the possibility of integrating energy modeling into the design process when this was announced, since we do a fair number of deep energy retrofits and new construction. The idea of being able to evaluate the efficiency early in the SD process without having to switch programs was very appealing, but the lack of documentation and the convoluted process required to get to an energy model have utterly destroyed our enthusiasm.
Are there plans to release some real documentation? Or enable energy modeling off of volumetric models? Or get Sefeira to do a VW plugin?
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It would be great if hatch line colors would actually read when they're used as surface hatches in viewports.
In fact, I'd like to have object line colors read in hidden line viewports in general, with the usual viewport overrides available.
The inability to have shades of grey in hidden line viewports is a constant PITA and often means I'm hatching manually rather than using surface hatches.
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Yup. I even purged all instances of the stair from the file (even the symbol out of the resource browser).
tech support has been keeping me posted on their efforts, no resolution yet.
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FWIW, I was just trying to work around the bug, and I think it has something to do with the story-bound stair that I have in the file. I just tried to take the layer that the stair is on out of it's story, so I could delete the story but keep the layer, and VW crashed again.
I think I've sent at least 7 of the auto-generated crash reports today.
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yup, file is submitted as well.
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I have a file (bug report has been submitted) that crashes everytime I try to change the elevation of an existing story.
Has anyone else run into this?
I'm VW16 SP3.
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Bumping this, anyone using Energos?
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I have an MSI laptop - their customer service is terrible. It was significantly cheaper than most of the competitors though. It's one of their gaming laptops, not a workstation laptop.
I've had previously bad experiences with workstation laptops, finding them often poorly designed with unstable hardware/drivers (had a lot of nvidia quadro related crashes when I still had one).
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Also, while we're at it, is there any documentation on Energos besides the Help file?
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Is it possible to use Energos without creating 'space' objects?
Also, is it possible to have Energos calculate from simple 3d objects and give them R-values? It would be nice to have something like Sefeira's functionality in the SD stage.
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Has anyone had experience with Vectorworks somehow changing the number of pages in the horizontal or vertical direction in page setup?
This is an option that no one in my office has ever intentionally changed, and yet we keep finding it somehow gets set to just slightly more than a whole page, for instance 1.0204 in the x direction.
This results in extraneous pages being printed with tiny pieces of lines on them. Today, we had an especially egregious run, where one effectively blank sheet got printed for every page of actual content.
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You also need to make sure that "show screen objects" is on in the viewport.
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I've had some similar experiences, and here are my thoughts so far (have not been able to reproduce anything on command, haven't submitted any reports yet other than the automated Mac crash report). We are an all Apple office, all project files are on a server, working files are sometimes local, sometimes on server (I've been experimenting to see what seems better for both ease of use and performance).
1. If you experience one of the random crashes that seem to be a symptom of 2016, while working in a project sharing working file, some or all of the symptoms described in the OP will happen (VW forgetting layer checkouts). Typically, I've been able to open a working file autosave backup, force release the checked out layers (even though they're checked out to me, I don't have control of them through the backup), and then commit changes. I have not had issues with crashes while doing this on my machine.
2. I came in this morning and my boss's VW was crashing on Close/Release operations. It was also disassociating layers from his user, so when a new working file was opened, his old layers were shown as checked out by another user. I force released, deleted his old working file, created a new one and everything seemed to work fine.
Where this gets particularly annoying is that in creating a new working file, our database related worksheets get all messed up again (which I have previously bug submitted and talked about here), so I had to re-import them.
Back the original topic, the major differences that I see between my boss's working habits and mine are that he works off a laptop that sometimes goes home with him (in which case he accesses our server via the appleshare protocol), and that he is really bad about leaving files open when he leaves for the day, even if he's committed changes. This results in his computer going to sleep with working files open. I'm working on training him out of the latter, but there's not much I can (or want) to do about the former. I would not be surprised to learn that either case causes problems with Project Sharing, even though working through the appleshare protocol (which basically seems to be a vpn?) shouldn't.
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Is there a way to copy formatting from one cell to another?
Also, is there a way to set up conditional formatting, like alternating row fill?
If not, we really need both of these things. As well as the ability to have bulleted lists in text.
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Ok, files are uploaded and bug report submitted.
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That is a much better way of putting it. Thanks for saving me a phone call! Would it be helpful if I upload the project and/or working file as a bug report?
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Has anyone had problems with worksheets not synching/breaking while using project sharing?
We have a pair of schedules that keeps losing all their associated data, and not displaying properly. One of them will still display the one row of fixed data on the sheet, but none of the database rows will display. If I import the worksheet from another file, it will fix itself.
It seems to be an issue with the worksheet synching from the project file - if I open a new working file from the main project file, the worksheets are broken. I'm going to put in a call to Service Select support later this week when I have a little more time, but in the meantime I thought I'd see if anyone has had similar experiences.
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Yeah, I am slowly developing a library of symbols for the office, I try to use the built-in tools where possible to save time and effort though. I agree that developing your own symbols is best.
Re: styles, that's certainly a reasonable work around.
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Option 1: so far as I know, this refers to the settings in that dialog.
Option 2: no idea
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I think what you want is in the Edit Wall Style dialogue: click Edit Wall Attributes and then at the bottom set Wall Caps to Use Wall Class.
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It's actually been years since I've used AutoCAD, so I have no idea what I used to do. I seem to remember you could set annotation scale for blocks [symbols], so they would scale appropriately in paper space while showing at whatever size in model space.
In the intervening years I went back to school to switch industries (entertainment-->archictecture), and spent most of my time doing 3d modeling and then photoshopping things. Now I'm working for an architecture firm that uses Vectorworks (I almost chose not to work for them because of the Vectorworks factor, but I was very interested in the types of projects the firm does).
My frustration here is that this is a symbol library built in to the program via the Electrical tools, and it basically seems like it isn't going to display properly at a design layer scale that's very different from it's native scale.
I'm already using basically all of the workflows you've mentioned in some way (I'm doing a lot of workflow experimentation because the firm was 2d only before I talked them into actually using the program). The viewport scaling settings in Vectorworks really aren't that useful because they aren't granular enough - we need to be able to select a single object, line, symbol, whatever, and set its scale for that to be really useful.
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I come from an AutoCAD background, so I don't put text and arrows in my design layers - that's what annotation layers are for.
We tend to use a fairly wide variety of printing scales, so having design layers optimized for a particular one is not going to be particularly helpful.
This particular project was an experiment for me in seeing if picking a layer scale other than the default 1/4" would make a difference to the workflow, and I'm learning that it does.
It's remarkable the impact these legacy features like layer scaling and screen plane vs. layer plane have, mostly in tripping you up in unexpected ways.
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I'm currently trying to draw an electrical plan on a layer set to 1:1. When I drop in fixtures using the incandescent fixture PIO, they come in very small (.2" dia).
Is there a way to fix this without having to adjust the scale factor of every PIO I want to use from the electrical tools?
I checked on the library file for "Imperial 2D electrical fixtures" and the design layer in it is set to a 1:48 (1/4") scale. If I change this, it breaks the positioning of the objects. Is there a reason these PIOs don't take on the scale of the layer they're inserted on?
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Ah, , the fill is the only part that I want - I don't actually care about the texture, this is a line drawing and I don't want to waste my time rendering it. I just want the surface fill to update with the object.
I think I have a feature request here for fully functional 3D hatches, that don't have to be associated with a texture. I'm doing this with a styled roof, so I just have the hatch/texture associated with the exterior finish component.
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Project Sharing Crashing When Committing, Refreshing and Releasing
in General Discussion
Posted
Thanks for updating Seth.
It seems like I'm going to need to push to switch everything to SMB in the office, which means we'll need to set up a different VPN system for my boss when he works remotely (he uses AFP now, which seems to function as both VPN and local network file sharing, I'm historically a windows guy, so this mess is all new to me).
We are also a server based office - I'm interested to hear the results of your offline experiment. Also, to clarify, do you always keep your working files on your local machine?
We have a long standing practice of keeping everything on the server - standard files, project sharing files, and even working files. I experimented a while back to see if I noticed a performance difference between local and remote working files, and didn't, but I didn't carry the experiment on long enough to see about long-term stability issues. Did the local working file improve stability over AFP, or just in conjunction with the SMB switch?