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Steve Hausz

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  • Occupation
    Architect
  • Location
    Santa Barbara, CA
  1. Hopefully the image shows.......this is what 7/8" stucco looks like, drawn in all 4 modes......lumpy!
  2. Alicia, Thanks for your response. I haven't used the forum much before, and I can't find any forum help to figure out how to post an image, or anything else I might need help with. I was going to include an image of how my stucco looks, in each of the 4 modes (all the same -- lumpy!). I got the impression you were saying that I'd get different results using the cubic vertex (you said spline....same?) mode. I see the button for adding an image, but it requests a URL for the image location, and that's what I needed help with. Thanks, Steve
  3. When I use the linear materials tool for stucco detail, and set thickness at 7/8", I get stucco that's so lumpy there's a 3/8" difference between high and low spots. In addition, regardless of whether closure is on or off, they're not square to the run of the plaster. Together, these two problems render the tool useless, unless there's something I'm doing wrong. The only workaround I can come up with is to make the stucco 4" thick with a density of 1, convert it to a group, squeeze the thickness back down to 7/8", and trim the ends. What a hassle! Haven't seen anyone else with quite the same problem. VW12.5, XP.
  4. Hmmm...I was hoping this thread was going to lead to an answer! The post that said to do a search for "tab" didn't lead me to any useful information, and I don't know if the post about loading east asian fonts was a suggestion or not. Are you saying that until the next version comes out, I'll have to accept boxes wherever a tab has been placed? I surely hope not! Is there a solution? Thanks
  5. Possibly a bug with the stair PIO? If I choose to specify the starting layer and the ending layer for the stairs to connect so I can take advantage of the upper section and lower section displays, my handrails disappear! I tried setting up a simple model in a new file to eliminate any other corrupting influences, and the problem seems to arise when I chose to show stair break. I can't quite make sense of it, as some times playing with front v. back ordering seems to have an effect, even though the upper and lower stair sections go into two layers. Seems like I can't get any handrail to display on the upper section as long as I've got the stair connected to layers, regardless of stair break. Am I doing something wrong??? Another suggestion for future improvements to the stair tool....in addition to getting back to an angle stair break as discussed in another post, it would be nice to have the option in the PIO dialog box to display the part above or below the cut in dashed line without having to create that as a separate entity.
  6. Gosh, I'm embarassed! I try so hard not to be "US-centric" (doesn't have the ring of "Eurocentric"!), and here I wasn't even thinking about the worldwide user-base of this program. But with a little broader perspective and better choice of wording, the point would have been the same.....why not make it possible to specify the number or angle of winders? Then everyone could conform to whatever codes or lack thereof that they needed to! Hope that improvement comes along soon. Sure is a great tool!
  7. Michael & Robert, I duplicated what Michael was talking about. First, let me observe that the stair tool doesn't address real-world issues of how the stair might actually get framed, despite the impression one might get from the opportunity to enter info such as stringer widths and depths. (And, my comments are only relevant to wood framing, not the possibilities of welded steel.) So none of this has to do with "how a winder gets built", and as I observed in my original post, the stair tool doesn't even allow you to draw or model a winding staircase that conforms to the building codes. For the most part though, it does do an excellent job of depicting the spatial volume of a stair to assess relationships and clearances, and as alluded to before, it might even represent reality if it were of welded steel construction and could stand up on its own. The curious thing is that the U-shaped stair I've been battling with depicts a very continuously warping surface on the underside (albeit faceted), but when I make an L-shaped winder with a straight section above and below, I see the aberration you're talking about. Doesn't matter whether I view the 3D model in wireframe or rendered. You can also see it in the wireframe model in the construction tab of the stair tool. The bottom line though, is it doesn't really matter since it's not supposing to represent actual framing realities anyway. I just hope the next patch allows you to specify the number of winders and/or already have the math built into it so they're always 6" min. at the narrowest and are the specified tread width at 12" in. -Steve
  8. Thanks Peter, I tried every combination I could think of, widening parts of the stair, but to no avail. Could never get down to a minimal number of risers (and not end up with a 2' wide wall between flights....). Gosh, I sure hope they have a "code expert" on their staff to advise them when they create tools like this! While I think the stair tool is awesome and an incredible improvement, it's a sad statement if it can only make "pretty pictures" and not a stair that you can actually submit to the building department! Don't know what the building department is like up in Ashland, but I'm just concluding the "plan check from hell" here.....5-1/2 months for a residential remodel!!! -Steve
  9. I've had the same problem, and have more than one solution, depending on what you need to end up with. The newest version of Acrobat Reader (7.x) has a "snapshot" tool, with a camera icon in the toolbar. You can set the resolution of the copy so it will be crisp and legible in VW. If you tinker with it, you may not even have to resize in VW. The downside of this it that it is a .bmp, and adds to file size. Sometimes, I just prefer to scan it and OCR it, assuming it's letter size to fit in my scanner. Even the OCR software bundled with my Epson 3170 scanner is awesome compared to the early days of OCR. Then I just copy and paste the text into VW, and now have the option of editing and formatting it as I like (the prehistoric text editing capabilities of VW aside.....hint, hint). Steve
  10. Just transitioning to 12.01 and using the stair PIO for the first time. Have read the help files, viewed tutorials on the stair PIO, and searched forum for "stairs" & "winders" to no avail. Can the stair PIO produce a code-conforming winder? The UBC requires winders to have a minimum width of 6" at the narrow end of the "pie", and to have the required tread width by the time you are 12" away from the narrow end. If memory serves me, this usually means that you're going to get 4 winders at most on a U-stairway. I've played with different dimensions for sides 1,2,&3 on the winder landing, but they always have too many treads - up to 9! - and I don't see a way to specify. To further torment me, there's a box showing the number of treads when I'm viewing the landing with winders portion, showing 9 treads, but it's greyed and not editable. Further, if you choose curved flight or skewed winder, you can enter the number of treads, but unfortunately it doesn't stick when you go back to U-landing winders. The skewed winders option seems unuseable as well, as anything other than 12.5 degree start and end angles makes the width of that stair section wider or returns some very contorted geometry!. Unfortunately, the whole thing's of little use if you can't make a code-compliant stair! I'll send this in as a bug as well.......
  11. Recently, I've done some very intricate work to create stencils for decorative painting. Think vines and leaves, etc. I use the polyline tool to trace over a scanned image, drawing a portion of a vine for instance, knowing that I'll need another line consistently 1/4" away from it. I find the cubic vertex mode to be easiest to draw with in the first place, and easiest to do the inevitable adjustments to fit the curves to the original. I then use the offset tool to create the other line, ultimately using "compose" to join all the different drawing components to one another. The huge problem is that the offset copy might have hundreds of closely spaced vertices in it, making it impossible to edit. It's worst with bezier or cubic vertex mode, not as bad with arc vertex. A lot of the vertices are also corners, instead of curve vertices. Smoothing command is of no help. The only work-arounds that I can come with are either taking a lot of time to remove all the unwanted vertices, or to lock the curve and use it as a guide to draw a new one on top of it, then deleting the guide. Any solutions out there? Can this be fixed in the future?
  12. I'm still a "young pup" when it comes to VW and CAD, but I've got a few additional techniques that serve me well. Block out some basic layout lines with the line tool, then convert them to guides. These can be set to non-print, or turned on and off easily. This could be used with or without the rectangles suggested above, which can also be converted to guides. I never knew there used to be an offset wall tool, but duplicating and moving probably is nearly as simple. I'm a big user of keyboard shortcuts, so one way would be ctrl-D (I'm PC, by the way) and then ctrl-M. (Make sure you have 'offset duplicates' turned off in preferences.) Another way is to duplicate and then go to the Object Info Palette (OIP), click in the X or Y coordinates box, and add "-2'4.5" or "+28'3", etc. As suggested before, use the wall join tool every so often to effect the T or L joins you need and clean up the drawing. When I do my field measurements, I always measure to the center of doors, windows, fixtures, etc. Then it's easy when inserting Plug In Objects (PIOs), symbols, or symbols made from PIOs, to use the offset insert mode, clicking in the corner where you measured from, placing the object approximately, and then entering the exact distance in the dialog box. This also makes it easy to place doors that you know are 2 studs off the adjacent wall. The DDB mentioned above is very useful as described above, and also the floating datum. Turn that on in preferences, and when you pause over a point, the x and y boxes in the DDB will reset to 0 automatically! Now I've gotta post my own question about offsetting polylines...... Ta ta.... Steve Hausz VW11.5, just installed 12
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