Matt Overton
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Posts posted by Matt Overton
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Sure not the most complex plugin and offered without warranty.
Add to your plug-in folder, then workspace and shift the key command you are use to.
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Yep 4 years later finally got run to making Plugin that does this.
Works rather nicely.
Also made one for close that switches close and release if a working file.
If anyone wants it let me know.
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On 8/27/2022 at 4:57 AM, JuanP said:
@Tom KlaberUpdate: The development team has started with Viewport styles, and It will move from “Active Research” to “In Development” with the next update of the Public Roadmap - Thanks
Thanks for the update but that just doesn't seem promising for even 2024 edition inclusion.
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13 hours ago, JuanP said:
@Matt Overton Great catch (Redshift and Color picker)- I verified with our R&D team and they were able to pushed these 2 new features sooner in 2023. The roadmap will be updated in the coming days. Thanks
Shame Viewports styles hasn't managed a late streak...
Sorry couldn't resist. 😉
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The roadmap has 2 of the features in this video as "active research" not "scheduled" like the features for the industry packs..
How is the roadmap meant to read as a guide to what is coming?
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Cautiously optimistic after seeing that. Shame "open in 3D" hasn't become a per viewport setting.
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What's this easy grid markers you speak of?
Last known feature in that direction didn't seem any easier that having a symbol with the full grid marker run including section markers.
Features seem tied to the same per viewport visibiliities interface that make sections lines on plan which is both irksome and inconsistent.
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3 hours ago, rDesign said:
Wow. That's quite a workaround. Let's hope Vw is listening...
Not really a workaround for us as we break up files that way then kind of just discovered it.
But yes dimension handling needs work.
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We actually generate our elevations and sections in a reference file so we can set the file units differently to get dimension tools like the benchmark to display correctly.
Every dimension like thing should be able to change the display dimensions.
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On 8/2/2022 at 9:40 PM, Christiaan said:
Because a release cycle based on major versions creates an incentive for the developer to save up changes for each major release, in order to make each release more attractive for users to upgrade.
A subscription model removes this incentive. Upgrades and changes can be pushed out whenever they're ready to go without having to justify it to the marketing department.
Next step in my mind is to make Vectorworks work in a web browser. Then we can also get rid of the antiquated model of having to manage software too. e.g. Onshape.
Also means your QA and beta testers get to pace themselves and can be active all year instead of a release crunch that might not time well for some. Let’s them concentrate on a smaller set of features at a time.
would like to see a published schedule as part of say the road map. Even go as far as say certain months will concentrate on the same feature group each year.
finally a plug for cleaning out the workspace make a new best practices one that allows improvements to slot in more effectively
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I believe you can also use a roof with 3 sides set to be gable ends then the roof will add in the walls to infill each side of the roof.
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On 7/30/2022 at 4:51 AM, Matt Panzer said:
I've been watching this one. 🙂
First, as a user, I really like the idea and it's something we've discussed several times internally. While I still want us to think hard on this, I will mention a couple things:
- To implement something like this would be extremely complex, require a reworking of everything that has anything to do with walls currently (wall inserts, wall features, wall closures, interaction with spaces/slabs/roofs, IFC export, etc.). This would take a huge amount of resources to do. It would also likely be very process intensive and have a big impact on performance.
- This is also one of those "be careful what you wish for" things. While I'm the one that likes to mention this idea in our internal discussions, this could have a big impact on workflow efficiency (and performance, as I stated in my first point). It surly would help being able to model in this way to reduce the number of needed wall styles and to be able to keep certain components continuous while other "finish" components could start/stop as needed. But there are many cases where you'd want to draw all components for a given wall at the same time because it's faster. There would be a lot more added complexity with how inserts, wall features, wall closures, spaces/slabs/roofs, etc. interact with these collections of walls stacked side by side.
In the end, it's very possible that the cons of implementing something like this could outweigh the pros. To clarify: I'm not writing this idea off because I do understand the pros very well. We just have to carefully consider the cons and there are many.
How does BIM/IFC want this to occur?
One of things needed in BIM to seperate responsibilities this would seems to be one of those areas where demarkation is required. Say separating Structure from General building envelop and further separating fit-out/interiors from General building envelop. I know, I know the answer is probably that it wasn't considered how to divide up roles as these "standards" seem to have come out of an everything under a single umbrella approach. Still how we work needs either demarkation or double handling. Basically double handling will continue, technology won't make our lives better but everyone will expect higher productivity because of it.
Still if there is an answer to the question it might suggest how the feature wants to work if implemented?
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Don't quote me if I'm off here going by memory...
In Custom Renderwork you can turn off Anti-aliasing as the anti-alias pixels aren't transparent and don't work to a the background* so often end up making a halo instead of a blend.
To me mind photo matching anti-aliasing isn't your friend anyway as things like plants are fuzzy to start with and building edges are hard and shouldn't be fuzzy.
*this might be just because I cheap out and set it to low which might make to the pixels to big.
Edit to add: Nice work on the entourage. Had so much trouble getting 3D cars to sit nicely aligned to the road surface like that in my last images.
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It wasn't hard to find. It wasn't labeled as such allowing for unwarned destructive action to occur.
Also poor UI that it looks visually the same as the non-destructive close window button.
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23 hours ago, mike m oz said:
Set up your Sheet Layers first.
Then:
- Menu: View / Create Section Viewport
- Draw a line and then click on the side you want to look towards.
- Choose appropriate options from the dialog box that opens.
- Click OK.
You can then explode the viewport to linework if you want to change a lot of things. or draw over annotation space.
Second option is best as It means you need to fix model issues if they are too far out to mask in annotation space.
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On 2/14/2020 at 5:04 AM, Pat Stanford said:
I normally work with the default workspaces, so I will leave it to others to explain what they change and why, but here are a few general thoughts (opinions) on why you might want to change your workspace and why you might not.
Why Not:
1. Asking for help is harder. At users group meetings people often don't know the name of the tool or command and say things like "Command-Shift M thing". If you have remapped that to something else and tell me Command-Shift J from your workspace I have no idea of what you are doing.
2. Training. If you ever go to a training class, it will almost certainly be done on a standard workspace. If you bring your workspace to the class you are likely to confuse yourself because you will have to do things differently than what the instructor is telling you.
3. Updates. We often come across people who developed a custom workspace a number of years ago and who are complaining about the lack of a feature that was already added to VW, but they didn't know about because they just brought across their workspace without checking on what was added to a newer version of VW.
4. Who gets to choose. If you set a custom workspace for your office, it is likely to be set to make sense for your brain and is probably no better for someone else than the standard default.
5. Harder for a new person in the office who already has VW experience to come up to productive speed. Coming from other programs is less of a problem as they already have a steep learning curve.
Why:
1. Shortcuts that don't make sense. Many of the shortcuts in VW are 20 year old holdovers and were set "geographically" so that the order of the icons in the palettes mapped to a row of keys before the workspace was configurable. Now many of the commands come in the defaults using the same shortcuts, but having been moved to a different location in the palette so they just seem random.
2. Shortcuts that are hard to remember. Many people find it hard to remember the VW shortcuts. They want to have things that make sense to them. Like "L" for Line (instead of 2), or T for Text (instead of 1). Or they want them mapped to a similar function in another application they use.
3. Custom use of tools or commands. It may be that due to the nature of your specific work, that you need easier access to certain tools that most people only use infrequently. Moving them or adding shortcuts can greatly improve your productivity.
4. Banish tools you don't like. If there are tools or PIOs that cause problems in your drawings and that you have come up with a different method (Maybe you like to use symbols instead of the Door object). You can remove those items from the workspace so they don't accidentally end up in your drawings.
5. Who gets to choose. By defining the workspace you make it easier for others in the office to "help" as the tools and shortcuts are the same. If everyone has a different customized workspace it is much harder to lean in and help with something quickly.
Just a few things to think about before deciding to customize a workspace or not.
All this leads me to say.....
Vectorworks should ship a legacy and modern workspace.
All the Why's would be answered by saying every say 4 years default workspace gets an overhaul (much overdue) plus there would be a Legacy2022 Workspace that gets new features graphed into it with a shoehorn like occurs now each release.
Engineers could plan on the 4 year cycle and leave key commands open for planned future items.
Every 4 years everything could be up for grabs in order to surface as much useful function as possible.
Most likely the first one would be major just due to the level of technical debt in the system but after that the changes at major revisions are likely to be more manageable.
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On 7/12/2022 at 10:38 PM, jeff prince said:
Unlikely, for this and your post about the 0 layer… Vectorworks is not AutoCAD. That’s what I was told when I converted to Vectorworks 🙂
Still Vectorworks "by class" has been a long standing option and would be useful to extend it as an option to hatches.
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Might be worth rebooting the survey here.
A lot has changed shifted in the market and well also we all had the lets all work from home for various reasons period in our lives the last couple of years.
Could product very different results to 2017
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5 hours ago, Andy Broomell said:
This is the real kicker. Tile fills are SO much easier to make, but they can't be used as Surface Hatches.
So Hatches need to be easier to make/edit... and/or Tiles should be available as Surface Hatches.
Are surface hatches every exportable to dwg?
if not or from memory they have to be rendered then exported as flattened which breaks them to mass groups of lines anyway I don't see why we shouldn't be able to use a tile fill instead of a hatch.
Make lots of more complex surface treatments more workable.
Indeed would be good with more random patterns like stone walling to be able to draw the tile directly over the image.
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On 7/10/2022 at 7:55 PM, Christiaan said:
I would love to be able to take an iPad away with me instead of a laptop.
The use case really has grown now that Apple has increased the performance of iPads so much, as well as providing large displays (including plugging into larger displays) and support for things like a mouse and files. There's not much holding back a VW for iPad in terms of processing power or ergonomics these days.
However RAM is still a bottleneck (although iPad 15 now allows apps to request for RAM). App size is another limit, although it's been 4GB since 2015 (keep in mind Vectorworks has or had one of the largest code bases on Mac apparently). But, more importantly, as I understand it, VW uses a bunch of code libraries that simply aren't available for ARM processors yet. And of course the platforms team at VW has had their plate full for years now.
I wonder if Nomad capabilities could be increased over time but—if we're going to do this—like you, what I really want is a full-blown VW on iPadOS. At least now that iPad is nearing being capable of that. However, because of the above limitations, what we might see one day is a stripped down version of VW. Perhaps with capabilities added over many years to bring it up to par with the desktop version, as the code base is optimised, ARM libraries become available and the limitations Apple imposes are lifted.
Word and Excel are both large installs on MacOS than a Vectorworks install. Scripting might be an issue but Python scripting in the confines of an App is acceptable under i/iPadOS. A focus on improving memory use would help Vectorworks users on all platforms.
Plus if the iPad version is tied to service select some more memory intensive operations could be offlined to the cloud as long as produced content could be brought back in to file. How much of the app size is reduced if Renderworks is drop and only VWGraphics engine is only on the device (for now).
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Is there a reason why it would be bad to have Low-Medium-High detail levels for a class presentation?
Take say a rug or furniture item. Low version of symbol is just a white fill with average pen line used in plans to give idea of layout and room use. For Medium we might add a simple colour and make the line weight white. For High - Image fill replaces colour dropshadows turn on. Similarly we could do the same with textures.
We could do this with 3 subclasses of every applicable class but then that creates a management nightmare that viewports already have a control embedded of detail level.
I realise this isn't the most high-brow use but once you have your head round the concept the use of level detail in the class itself solves many many low level frustrations that leads us to have many variations of similar classes and most importantly it then requires limited management at point of use. By using the controls that are there it encourages the use of that feature for what it can do now leading to improved libraries already configured.
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18 hours ago, phin said:
Seven years on and we still can't organise the basic building blocks of Vectorworks?
Also Project files are still large and can bring good hardware to a crawl. Too many things still block the main thread. Dividing up a project to WGR still takes too much time to do, when as it should be encouraged as a way of improving workflow. Viewport Styles which might help some of these has languished on the roadmap with no progress since the day the roadmap was published.
Hopefully the lack of visible action is a sign of a larger background project.... but I doubt that. Teamwork has never been a thing the company has improved with passion.
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4 hours ago, blanger said:
Please remember that architecture is not the only application. For set design purposes I often wish for more integration. For instance the ability to include base mould as a wall component would be a huge plus for Set Design. I'd say we work primarily with wall finishes and the flat itself is the simplest element. @Andy Broomell do you have any opinions on this?
If I understand correctly the wish is for 2 parts
A) a better system to combine a group of elements together and have that group react to each other if further edits are required.
So once you've created the the flat and trimmed it with a baseboard you could combine them to a symbol-like "thing" or a super-group.
The Object info would expose some controls from the combined object (like styled objects do) to allow selective changes to the object.
ie a Flat with Baseboard could be resized and it would all grow in the way you've told it to grow.
B) on the back of new system complex plug-in objects break up in to smaller easy to maintain object, allow 2 complex objects to use the same sub-object so for example a Stair-object and theoretical Balcony-object would both internally use the same balustrade object to the point of exploding either would lead to a group of the sub-objects.
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Also why does it render different to the rendering engine in the installed app.
Helpful that it is less buggy.
Program Icon Colour...
in Wishlist - Feature and Content Requests
Posted · Edited by Matt Overton
I'm sure it was an old wish but new version day and search doesn't find it....
Could we have different colour icons for Vectorworks versions?
Or maybe a traffic light system we could set in preferences of the version.
Black - current version to use.
Green - old version still in use.
Orange/Amber - New version testing.
Red - Don't use except for pulling old files up to current.
Added: Bonus Points.
Company wide setting of the colours from a server.