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Jeff Prince

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Everything posted by Jeff Prince

  1. Well, you could edit your Plant ID to reflect your SKU if you want a tidy work around 🙂 Probably not a good idea for contractors who actually use the SKU to place orders though... Anyhow, you have limited ability to control the plant tag. For instance, you can not configure the tag to replace the ID in the Bubble to the SKU. You can turn off the Bubble and instead use Top, Center, or Bottom tagging to get close to what you want, sans rectangle. Then, do as @Tom W. suggest and use "set custom tag" to configure the displayed data as you wish. Plant Tag text styling is a bit more problematic compared to data tags. You can only use one Text Style for the entire tag, so no use of Bold or Italics for instance on part of the Plant Tag (you can do that with a data tag) You must use the Vectorworks default class for Plant Tags in order for Text Style updates to carry through automatically, so all plants will have the same text style regardless of phase, plant type (say tree vs ground cover), scale, etc. If you instead us the class the object is placed on to govern the Text Style, the plants won't update if they are moved to a different class because of how Vectorworks treats the application of text style to objects vs objects during the creation process (using a plug-in or similar, to make the geometry and features). A good practice is to create a Text Style for your Plant Tags and give it an easy name to remember (like Plant Tag Text for example). That way you don't use it for other things and have those things change later if you decide to restyle your plant tags. I've seen this happen so many times where people use the same style for general notes and then want to get cute with their plant tags and use a hand drawn style. Chaos ensues. Good luck with those built in Plant Tags.
  2. @InchSw3 are you designing this for manufacturing, rendering, or something else? If you need 3D modeling, I would approach it by making the various parts as 3D solids and "assembling" the building like you would do in real life. BIM tools like doors, walls, and windows are probably too much trouble for a specialized structure like this, especially if you have to detail it. If you don't need 3D, 2D drafting can get the job done far easier, especially if you are using off the shelf components & standard extrusions.
  3. You need to switch to Data Tags to do what you wish effectively. Plus, I suspect Vectorworks is abandoning all these built in tags in favor of Data Tags based on how things have been progressing. Better to switch now and get things working the way you want IMHO.
  4. Sure, it's easy. Go to your sheet layer and double click on the viewport. The Edit Viewport menu appears, set it like this: You will be transported to your design layer and will see a big green rectangle which represents the extents of the viewport. You can then change the rectangle's graphic appearance to suit your needs. One other thing you can do from a design layer viewport to get a sense of the paper size is to use Page Setup while in a design layer and select "Show Page Boundary". The reults can be seen in the image below... basically stops your grid at the extents of the page, which might be a good visual cue.
  5. Change your design layer scale to match the viewport scale. Then, from the viewport, enter the design layer. It will ask you if you want to place a representation of the viewport on the design layer (it’s just a green rectangle you can change with the attribute panel). that will give you a pretty good match with your sheet layer in terms of viewport spacing.
  6. If accuracy is important, it's not the first tool I would reach for. I find the iPhone LiDAR to be equally as accurate, but provides far more useful information for 3D modeling.
  7. Just curious.... Why would you need to have every plant object called out with a data tag? Doesn't that create some messy plans for you? I use symbols and plant legends to insure the right plant is put in the correct place with accurate quantification data. The only plants I call out data tag or note are existing to remain/protect, special specimens, or unique situations that need extra attention.
  8. @ericjhberg 's suggestion is extremely valuable. It's a logical expectation that your site wouldn't move while manipulating it, it's supposed to be a geolocated representation of the real world after all. I teach people how to site model and accidentally moving it is the number one mistake people make when editing the site or just generally using Vectorworks. The next one is not setting up their model to listen to the correct design layer for site modifiers. This usually happens right after they get so tired of accidentally moving their site that they decide to put it on a separate design layer from the modifiers and everything else to avoid the problem. Making a model position lockable, but otherwise editable would be a huge improvement.
  9. what makes you guys think otherwise?
  10. Having looked at this house, you might consider a different angle before committing to this drawing. If you rotate your drawing 90 degrees counterclockwise, you will be able to reveal the inside floorplan much easier. This reveals the building via it's window walls and open structure. Compare this to your current layout where you will primarily see the curved roof and little of the interior without doing a cutaway. Here's a mockup of how I would portray a building like this, but keep in mind Vectorworks doesn't do true axonometric projection, this is the isometric. To lay this out by hand accurately, you would need to cut a few horizontal sections to lay ontop of your ground floor on trace. This would give you the ability to move the horizontal sections up and trace them. I think two would do it and you could connect the curved section of roof through the horizontal sections. The building isn't spherical as I have depicted, it's more of an oblate spheroid as you have shown in your nicely illustrated section and elevation. The French curve will be handy for illustrating the roofs.
  11. Cool. It was tricky for me to explain it succinctly 🙂
  12. I believe it works like this: It takes the ratio between the current screen zoom value and the drawn marquee's longest dimension (in screen units) and applies that to the current screen zoom. Example: Your screen shows a 10m x 10m square centered on the screen at a zoom% value of 233, which is displaying an area 20m tall. You draw an "option+zoom marquee" which is 10m tall and 5m wide, which is 50% of the current screen height. This results in a screen zoom% of 116, displaying an area 40m tall. The 5m width didn't factor because it was the short side of the rectangle, only the long side is used.
  13. That’s a tough assignment. Did you choose the building? If so, ask the professor if you can choose something more appropriate for learning how to do an axo 😉 This author covers almost every graphic technique you will need for architectural presentation, including the antiquated hand drawing of axos. https://www.amazon.com/Architectural-Graphics-Francis-D-Ching/dp/111903566X
  14. The number of high skill employees required to create and document a project has radically declined over the past 50 years, and that is largely due to drafting improvements. When that part of the profession is further automated, fewer people are needed and the important “wax on, wax off” tasks that help train young professionals will be gone. When people start letting AI do the creative part, they are slitting their own throats. If you want to see the future, just look at manufacturing. AEC has always lagged a good 30+ years behind that industry. @BartHays mention of the graphic designers is another good example. That profession has been largely converted to a commodity traded on price. That’s been happening to commercial architecture for quite some time. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out and identifying opportunities to profit during the disruption.
  15. Unfortunately, AI will be doing almost all the stuff within your lifetime. Licensed pros will be required to sign off for liability purposes, until those laws change. So, the tedious process of checking the AI "design" so stairs don't look like a rip off of a MC Escher design will still be needed 🙂 It's going to be like the transition from manual drafting to CAD to BIM... only instead of outsourcing to India, you will be outsourcing to the cloud.
  16. Too concise… I forgot to put “don’t” after the comma 😉
  17. If that’s the case, I wonder which company is going to successfully develop the successor to the architectural design and documentation process. AEC AI will probably follow the Revit -> Autodesk path, with a big fish swallowing up a smaller one. Innovation like this rarely occurs in house, especially when radically different tech is being developed. The old guard typically resists this and it takes outside eyes to shake it up. The company with the deepest pockets is probably going to win.
  18. If you have to share live files and font matching is critical… Best if you are both on the same OS, system fonts, and PDF generators. Guaranteed you will have issues otherwise, unfortunately.
  19. Agreed. It is interesting in this age of 3D BIM that so many people have abandoned the practice of showing sectioned features with poche and referring to details. We see the same thing with cartography, where modern GIS users are forgetting the artistry and practice of cartographic generalization to enhance readability andinstead just let the system display things natively. We are all in the communication business, let your software trap you into thinking otherwise 🙂
  20. The skatepark video's methods of construction as related to the deform tool hasn't changed much in terms of the resulting geometry. The pick order and notion of the "screen plane" has changed. Perhaps you did not use the correct snap or working plane when you executed the bend. That could result in a distortion of the end circle. An easy way to check for that circular face being distorted is to use the Push/Pull tool to extrude it. If it is skewed, you will see it pretty quickly. Assuming the end of the pipe is flat and circular....the easiest way to set the hemisphere is to use Autoplane and Diameter mode. This will allow you to set the hemisphere on the circular end. Your first point should be the "Midpoint" of the circular face, the second snap point is the "Object/ Align Start 'Axis' " with a radius called out which matches your pipe diameter opposite of your first point. That put it where it belongs. See image below for a more graphic explanation of this. It's always a good idea to save prior to using any of the 3D editing tools on geometry like this. Bending and Fillets of cylindrical or irregularly curved surfaces can make many programs struggle and crash if there is a flaw in the geo.
  21. The center of the subject area appears to be at or very near 48.906562°, -122.693548°
  22. You probably placed those plants while using a plan rotation. To fix it, grab the effected plants and change their rotation value to 0.
  23. You are not doing anything wrong, Vectorworks has a bunch of issues importing LiDAR that have been going on for years unfortunately. The work around to positioning the file correctly is to note the bounding coordinates of the LiDAR tile and then move it manually. Yes, it's silly we still have to do this compared to just about every other software that imports georeferenced LiDAR.
  24. Hmm. Did the clip method not work? I know people in the past have had to stop there slabs at the top of structure and create separate objects to represent the floor finish in this circumstance. Perhaps @Tom W. Can help.
  25. That looks like a raster representation of a 3D surface. Have you heard of DEM (digital elevation model)? Basically they are grey scale images where the intensity of grey represents height. GIS software can use that information to create a representative surface or hillshade effect. I’m not sure if QGIS can import your file, but if it can, you could generate points or contours in there and export to a suitable format Vectorworks can understand. alternatively, if you have information about where this property is, what the bounding corner coordinates are of this file, and some elevation information… it may be possible to process it within excel to convert the cell values to coordinates and elevation. There may be an online converter somewhere that will geodetic the data if it is a DEM. If you can’t make progress, feel free to PM me this weekend and I’ll see if I can help further.
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