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Conrad Preen

Vectorworks, Inc Employee
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Posts posted by Conrad Preen

  1. Hi Neil

     

    Well being in a lockdown and getting bored does improve my response time 😉 . Thanks for pointing out the issue with rotating an Equipment Item - I just confirmed that and the team will be on that first thing Monday morning.

     

    And yes, we are working together with the Spotlight team to make it all play nice together. Expect even better things in the near future.

     

    Conrad

  2. @AceRoehrborn Hi Neil,

     

    The choice is yours and really depends on the level of detail your project requires. Equipment Items can be placed in 3D models of the building your are working in to show the exact positioning. Or for some projects it may be completely sufficient just to indicate which area (Room) the kit is located in. In these cases really all you need is a 2D layout which is normally convenient to do in the same layer as the 2D rack elevation.

     

    Equipment Items have a checkbox Draw in Front View which is displayed when the equipment is outside of a rack. This lets you select the mode most appropriate. If I was doing a simple 2D layout along with my racks I would check the box so the view is consistent. You can also use symbols as graphics for Equipment. If you check the Use Symbol box then you can select a symbol to display instead of the default graphics. So, if the manufacturer provides a 3D model of the equipment you can import it, create a symbol from it and have your gear drawn in glorious 3D !!!

     

    The layer names in the standard template are not compulsory - you can use whatever layer names suit your purpose.

     

    The reason we have 2D and 3D racks is quite simple - building racks with 2D drag and drop is fast and simple. The 3D rack is just a visualisation tool for the 2D rack. We would do it all in 3D if we could, but we don't have really great  3D editing ... yet...

     

    Regarding your questions about schematic devices vs. equipment, here's how it works... The Equipment Item represents the physical device. You can have more than one schematic device with the same Name. ConnectCAD will assume that these refer to the same piece of Equipment that also has the same name. Once an Equipment Item exists for a device the physical characteristics of the device are controlled by the Equipment for all devices with that name, and those parameters are disabled in the OIP.

     

    The only reason we have physical device info in the schematic device is because that allows us to create all the equipment in one click - a massive time-saver.

     

    Each piece of Equipment should be uniquely named across your project. If you have two or more Equipment Items with the same name ConnectCAD will use the first it comes to. Check Drawing has a function to locate duplicate Equipment. We do not automatically enforce unique naming because that would limit your workflow.

     

    Hope I've managed to clarify a few things. Thank you for putting your questions here. This is how I discover what people find confusing so I'll look for ways to make this workflow clearer in the software and the documentation.

     

    Best

     

    Conrad

  3. I'll have think about it - not promising anything.

     

    ConnectCAD did without hop-overs for almost 15 years. And very few people had a problem with that. Quite often a hop-over is a sign that a drawing would be clearer if laid out in a different way or that the circuit in question should be set to arrow-style. One of the neat things about ConnectCAD is that it's really easy to re-order sockets in devices to uncross your wires. Not saying that your use-case isn't valid but sometimes it pays to think out of the box.

     

    Conrad

  4. 2 hours ago, isyme said:

    If there was a way to autohop and break based on forward and back positioning that would be ideal!

     

    That sounds like a nice idea... I'm a little wary of how the process of detecting the crossovers would scale on big drawings though.

     

    Conrad

  5. Hi Ross,

     

    Yes you can change the look of sockets. But first you have to understand how they work.

     

    Sockets internally place a couple of symbols: skt_con_xxx - the graphics, and skt_txt_X the label i.e. the text displayed. If the socket is an IN type then the skt_con_IN is used, if it's an OUT the skt_con_OUT is used etc. There are specialised versions of these symbols e.g. skt_con_djf_IN which is used in Data Jackfields (a.k.a patch panels). The label symbol is selected by orientation so for a L socket the skt_txt_L symbol is used. So these are the symbols you will need to edit in order to change the look.

     

    But where to edit them? To avoid altering your Vectorworks installation and then having your changes erased by the next upgrade I strongly suggest you create a copy of the standard template and work on that. This will give you a way back if your modifications cause problems. So in your new template look for the symbol folder zNestedSymbols you'll see the symbols I described in there.

     

    Good luck!

     

    Conrad

  6. Hi Ryan,

     

    Yes. That's because all the parameters are in fact Circuit parameters that the Circuit objects gathers up from the connected devices. Vectorworks reports can't do a database JOIN as things stand - maybe one day in the future. Meanwhile we simulate this by doing all the work in the Circuit.

     

    Conrad

  7. Hi Rob,

     

    We're looking at how to improve user customisation for the Circuit object. So I wanted to re-open this thread. I see you posted an image of these "feather-style" arrows. I wondered if you could decode the text inside them for me. And generally let me know what you find missing in terms of the look of these objects in ConnectCAD.

     

    Best regards

     

    Conrad

  8. Hi Andrew,

     

    As of Vectorworks 2021 the Link object is deprecated. ConnectCAD is now fully compatible with Vectorworks Project Sharing and this is now the recommended way for multiple users to work together on the same file. You find lots of info on Project Sharing in the Vectorworks Help.

     

    In 2022 the Link mode of the Connect tool will also be removed. Links though ingenious proved to be almost impossible to maintain properly and in essence duplicated the functionality of Project Sharing. So for that reason it was decided to relegate them to Legacy status.

     

    Using Project Sharing the best way is to divide your project by layers and allow each designer to check out and work on separate layers. The Connect tool in arrow mode lets you connect between layers.

     

    Hope that clarifies things.

     

    Best regards

     

    Conrad

  9. Hi Ryan,

     

    8 hours ago, ryanww said:

    I didn't do anything crazy to get there.

    I'm sure of that! Just trying to get a handle on how the condition arose (if we can). Generally the philosophy with ConnectCAD is to keep restrictions to a minimum so that you have a lot of 'get out of jail' cards. That comes along with the power to mess things up a bit :-). If this comes up again let me know.

     

    Conrad

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