Wesley Burrows

Yes! All this for sure! I tend to make hybrid symbols of different levels of the space, including the roof on different classes, and then make a venue symbol of the whole thing. So you can turn pieces off if you need to. In the roof symbol I tend to make it a hybrid with the only thing in the 2D geometry being a loci, (or sometimes simplified rigging/steel, but I usually leave that separate.) I do this so I can see the roof structure when flying around in 3D but it's not in the way with top plan. (Or I can turn off the roof class, etc.)

This arena in particular was sort of a pain because it was originally constructed in the 1930's and has been renovated several times, so the DWGs, and in some cases the hand-drawn original section drawings, did not agree with each other. Reconciling them in to agreement was an interesting mind exercise. It took a lot of help from the site survey notes, dimensions and a bunch of pictures. In any case, after you have a solid frame work, it really comes down to time and how much detail you want to put in to it. I think that Arena as shown above took about a week to model. I used everything from extrude along a path, loft surfaces, nurbs, simple extrudes, add/subtract solids, extract tool, to the projection tool and more. It takes a fair amount of familiarity with the 3D modeling tools available to figure out what might be best to use for a particular task. Eventually you start looking at real world objects and think about what tools you'd use to model them in real time, it's a sickness. But generally speaking I work from the arena floor outward and upward. It really helps to have section views for elevations, but those aren't always available for some spaces so, I also rely on site survey notes, and in some cases photos with some educated guesses based on typical dimensions of different construction materials/doors etc. But for a few hints, you can take a section view of a lower bowl of the arena, draw a simplified version of it (basically like you're looking at a set of stairs from the side) and extrude that along the path of the arena floor. Some arena's don't have a lower tier that is the same the whole way around, so you could do a series of the above, for each different section. I've also used the loft surface tool to create the different tiered bowls. Every time I do it it's a little different, and every time you learn different ways of doing stuff. There really isn't a right/wrong way, it's what works for you. You kinda just gotta go for it and not be afraid to make mistakes and learn. I know that's not exactly what you asked, but I hope it helps.

Here we are in 2020 now and this still isn't a thing.

It's a better experience if they do but there is a web browser client too.

I use Teamviewer 12 (cause I have an old perpetual license for it) But you just launch it and choose meeting Choose Presentation You'll get this dialog and then you can just invite people with the green person + icon. (You can also schedule a meeting for later or one to repeat using a meeting ID for a specific project with recurring meetings) Hope this helps

Nearly all of my collaborations since 2016 have been digital in nature. I've used Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Skype and Teamviewer. I've used Teamviewer the most and like it because remote clients can click on the presentation screen and their cursor shows up on my screen which is great when they are pointing something out/referencing an object because I can quickly see exactly what they are talking about. There are also a ton of iMessages screenshots back and forth early in the process. (Most of my co-collaborators are Mac folks)

I use the Stage Plugin, and it works nice. Most of the stuff I do is conceptual so it's a mix of Stage fixtures for beamage and trash + hidden lights actually lighting the scenes. The model comes in to C4D from VWX but I usually omit any lights and do all that in Cinema. Then the LX plot gets nailed down later. Stage is supposed to support MVR now, but I haven't tried it yet.

The "Load More" button on the courses page is beyond irritating, it only loads 4 more. Why can't it just load the next segment of 12 as you scroll down? This isn't 1995, we aren't on 56k modems.

That's pretty awesome you're a Doctor AND an Architect! Kudos!

How's everyone holding up out there? It's kinda been a bloodbath in the live events world lately.

I won't be there this year either unfortunately. A lot of the live event industry is in capital conservation mode with all the cancellations of events. https://www.isitcanceledyet.com/

This post right here. x1000. I'd rather have a rock-solid specific area of focus oriented program than one that tries to do everything and fails at most of it.

I think you have these switched, if I recall, hidden line uses the CPU and if I recall correctly it's single threaded and is slow AF. GPU or Multicore CPU would be a vast improvement (unless this changed in a recent version). I agree with your points though, there are a lot of real world situations where schematic view can't handle it, and while I can appreciate the goal of it, it's fairly half-baked. And I don't know what has happened to DLVP's in this release, but they are almost unusably slow in 2020.

I'll give it a try when I have some free time, I have to say, resetting my preferences every time this program craps it's pants is enraging. I can literally think of no other professional piece of software that requires as much preference wiping/reinstalling as this one. It's akin to the mid 90s when Windows was behaving stupid and the canned answer was reformat and reinstall Windows. It became just a thing people did every few months or whatever.

Ditto. SP2.1 seems to be a stability regression.