jcogdell

There are several ways to have this addressed by Vectorworks, You can post it on the trouble shooting forum as you have done and get help from the community. As @E|FA suggests you can submit a bug report or make a feature request using the links in his post. A third option is to contact our tech support team directly using the link below https://www.vectorworks.net/support/help They will work with you to find a solution.

Hi Nick The problem is that MA & ACT developed and control this plug in, we have nothing directly to do with it and it has not been updated to be fully compatible with the changes made in 2020. From my understanding moving forwards MA prefer to take advantage of the new GDTF and MVR file formats for this. This is not much help for you though, as only the MA3 software is fully compatible and to the best of my knowledge they have no plans to add this into the MA2 software as it is no longer under active development. Currently I would recommend exporting your file into 2019 and then using the plug in (not ideal I know). Sorry I can't be of more help

Sp3 is due to be released shortly and as normal will have lots of bug fixes and also some other improvements.

Hi Scott Regarding point 2 there is an existing bug where the X, Y, fields in the hoist label are not correctly updating if the hoist origin point is changed or the hoist itself is moved. The fix will be out soon. This maybe the root cause of your issue

I have opened a bug report regarding this issue.

This is a known bug and will be fixed in a up coming service pack. It only affects the old 'straight truss tool', the newer symbol based' insert truss' tool is not affected.

I'll make an enhancement request to have a 3D only option added to the lighting pipe and lighting pipe ladder objects, this is an excellent idea and will help maintain consistency between trusses and pipes

Hi Danny You need to use English on this forum, most of us here do not speak Dutch. If you need help and your english is not good enough you can contact Design Express directly or go to their dutch language forum. sorry I can't help more Jesse

Hi Sebastian can you pm me the file so I can have a look? Gruße Jesse

Hi AJ Your best bet is to reach out to tech support, they will be more than happy to help fix what ever is causing the problem with your file

no problem, I will pass on your suggestion to the developer.

I will add these to the enhancement request

Not for your fixtures but to identify the truss system and sub lines that you would have in the box truss scenario you descibed. Yes you are correct the ability to auto populate the position field of fixtures when you insert them or move them between hanging positions is currently the main benefit of creating them. Our objective is to eliminate the step of having to create a hanging position to have this functionality with the fixtures and other hung objects. When the hanging position was first added to Spotlight, trusses and pipes didn't detect and associate fixtures as being attached unless you used the command. Now because of the requirements of Braceworks this automatically happens in the background, what is currently missing is the auto population of the position field with the truss system name.

@Peter Neufeld Auto populating the position field of the lighting device is currently the main reason to still use hanging positions. At the moment Trusses and pipes already automatically associate lighting instruments and other load objects with the truss system and truss line they are hung from, this is necessary for Braceworks to be able to correctly calculate the system. We are looking at leveraging this to auto populate the position field in the lighting instrument, I currently do not have any info about when this will be implemented. Regarding the Truss object ID field, this is is the id of that section of truss (if you give it one), the 'Truss system' field further down OIP is the combined name of the truss system and truss line. There are 2 fields that are used to create this, 'Truss System' and 'Truss Line' which can be accessed in worksheets. @Benedick_Miller Personally I would use the truss line identifier part of the truss system for this, and use a custom data tag to label it

After looking into this further you are correct, currently you can only do this with records and not the lighting device. I will make an enhancement request to have this changed

If you are referring to using the assign circuit command to connect a plug box to a rigging hoist, you need to set the 'Circuit Assign preferences' dialogue to use 'Hoist' and then set the 'Place cable id Field' and 'Assign data to multi break out field' settings appropriately. The next and probably the biggest, issue is that the 'soca 7' and 'Hubbel for power and Data' connector/plug box types do not exist in the multi cable tool but do in the hoist object. You can edit them into the multi cable tool using the plug in editor, but due to the nature of this plug in you would need to re-customize them every-time a service pack update is released, as service pack updates reset all the standard plug-ins back to default during the update process. My college Brian, made a really good guide for how to do this in the linked thread below

for questions 1 and 2, go to the spotlight menu>cables>assign circuit preferences. the settings are there for your third, if you go the multicable jumper preferences you can tell the command to not draw the cables, however this will mean they are not created, so they won't be included in any cable worksheets. Putting them in a separate class or layer to control the visibility is the best solution if you want them included in the cable list

To be clear we have no plans of removing the function at this point, it does however cause issues in several areas you can't easily add more trusses to the position with editing it or running an extra command if the hanging position is created as a symbol it can cause problems when using the new MVR file format It makes it difficult to display the trim heights for trusses and pipes that are inside as the hanging position 'Z' coordinate is not easily accessible in worksheets or with data tags (to the best of my knowledge) and a lot of the functions that are part of the hanging position can be done just as easily using other tools like spotlight numbering or the instrument summary tool I will definitely check your worksheet, I am very interested in how you got that to work. One thing I love about this job is there is always something new to learn to address your points regarding hanging positions first you can rename a truss system to whatever you like using the rename system name command in the OIP, this will automatically rename all the elements of the system. By default the system name will reflect the order the truss system was inserted into your design. if the truss system has more than one line because it has corners in the system the line name will be displayed after the '-' in the system name field in the OIP for example T1-2 would be truss system 1 line 2. Using the 'Truss' record when setting up your worksheet you can access 'system name' and 'line name' in the criteria, combined with the model name and count function you can create truss counts broken down by the system. For labeling the truss system, I recommend using data tags, these can display a lot more information than just the name of the position. I tend use a tag with truss system & sub line name and the trim height Your point about the hanging position help documentation and best practice is well taken and we do need to update this.

Currently if you create a hanging position from trusses it is no longer possible to reference them in a worksheet. The hanging position is a very old part of Spotlight and many of the original reasons for using it no longer exist, such as associating lighting fixtures and other plug in objects with trusses and pipes (this is know automatic and controlled using the auto positioning settings in the Spotlight preferences) The 2 main reasons for using it are paperwork, specifically the preformated reports created by the generate paperwork command, which a lot of people still use and the ability to create hanging positions from any piece of geometry, such as a simple 2D rectangle To be able to count the trusses in a worksheet you will need to run the 'un-group' command 2 times on the hanging position to revert the trusses back to truss objects. This will break the hanging position, the first time you run the un-group command you will get a warning dialogue that you are about to un-group a high level object, you can ignore this as it is what you are wanting to achieve.

There is a tutorial video on the new Vectorworks University, that walks you through the process of adding speakers symbols to the speaker array tool https://university.vectorworks.net/mod/scorm/player.php?a=5&currentorg=articulate_rise&scoid=10

Just to be clear this bug only seems to affect the truss objects produced by the old straight truss tool and not the newer insert truss tool which is manufacturer symbol based.

Thanks Pat I didn't know this existed. Hopefully they will update it for 2020

Vectorworks will not do this sort of animation. We can render walk-through videos of of you design with static figures but this is about as close as you can get to what you want. Potentially, if you have access to Vision and understand how to program lighting consoles you could use the DMX transform feature to move the figure around in Vision, but it would not be animated as such, just moving it in 3D space within a predefined movement range.

I'm afraid @rDesign is correct that we currently do not export the PIO geometry normals correctly and as this is not my area of specialty I am not sure how to correct them. In case it helps I have attached a en example of a custom stage deck symbol I created myself with high quality textures, I know will works correctly in Vision when sent over as an MVR but I am not sure how it will look in MA 3D. It was created as 2 simple extrudes, one for the legs and 1 for deck itself. Let me know if it solves your issue, The only other thing I can suggest at this point is to get in contact with tech support and see if they can suggest a solution @rDesign I got some more info from my colleges about the texture normals and our progress to date, we currently are only exporting texture normals as grey scale height maps and so far this is specifically for the new MVR file format. However I know that the team is also working on creating plugins for Twin motion and Enscape simple stage deck example.vwx

Another option is to use the new 'Modify truss object color' setting in the Spotlight preferences- loads and rigging pane. This only applies to the 2D geometry of a truss object, but allows you to use the attribute palette to control the pen and fill color of the truss directly, either at insertion or when selected later. This can also be combined with the new automatic truss object classing. Making it very easy to to set up a template file with separate classes for each type or length of truss (to match your specific workflow or favored set up) and give each a class pen and fill color which will be automatically used at insertion, or when the truss is assigned to the class. So for example you have one for silver truss and one for black truss, a class for each type of truss or a class for each length if you are using only one type of truss in your drawing. When this is combined with live data visualization (for 3D views) it potentially eliminates the need to create custom colored truss symbols, unless you need them for rendering purposes or a specific work flow.