Technoflash

Hi Matt Just trawling through your mini tutorial, very interesting, thankyou. My issue is that the Reference object and the Camera Match object don't line up. What's the point of putting those two points in if they don't align immediately and become the centre of rotation or scaling for the model? Also, can you use the horizontal reference lines instead of the vertical, I can't get a good vertical reference measurements for those lines.Cheers Mike

Youtube and check out Jonathan Pickup's channel

Hi Fred Julian Carr at OzCAD makes a tool called WinDoor. In most cases it is superior to the window and door tool that ships with VW. It can create window and door elevations from the object automatically. These are created as a group of lines and can be exploded if you want to edit them further. Drop him a line, Julian Carr, support@ozcad.com.au or check out his website, http://www.ozcad.com.au/ Cheers Mike

Hi All I believe Gunther too because he is a top bloke and wouldn't lie to you but I get the feeling that Nems is a little "under resourced" when compared to AutoDesk. It's not really fair to compare them. VW is a fantastic program and delivers far more bang for the buck than most. You just have to live with the work arounds...for example I purchased Win7 64bit the other day. Now you would think that a 64bit operating system would speed up VW but no..it actually slows it down, not that I've got to witness this because VW wont install on my machine...keeps telling me all sorts of things about missing DLLs...sheesh. Of course Revit and ArchiCAD just loaded straight on and run like rockets. But here's the thing. it! I just just LIKE Vectorworks, I like the people that use it, I like the local distributor and I like Gunther too so I put up with the little irritations. oh yeah my work around for Win7 was to go to dual boot. I do all my CAD in Vista and everthing else in Win7. I'll try installing VW in a month or two and it will probably go fine. Meanwhile I'm just chillin out and getting on with it LOL Mike

Hi Tom No, I'm still listening LOL. Thanks for your thoughts. I've had to go back to my "day job" so this has gone on the back burner for a while.

Hi Islandmon Wow!!!! you clearly are a guru. I think sadly though, most of us haven't a clue what you are talking about . You iterated it 1440 times to create an icosahedra spheric shell. What the heck does that mean? and how do we learn how to do that cool stuff?...I'm impressed. So Mr Guru, please tell us lesser folk how you make NURBS curves go exactly through 3D locii points, it's pretty clear from that picture that you know the secrets of doing "bendy bits" :-)

Hi Nicolas Actually the Rendersing looks pretty good in FQRW and is not too bad in OpneGL. I guess my real issue is still the NURBS and Locii point thing. But there is also one other thing I can't resolve. That being the intersection point of the solids. For example along the chine I get gaps between the solids. Considering they both share a common set of locii along one side I don't understand why the junction of the two pieces isn't perfect. I've tried to use ADD SOLIDS I've tried INTERSECT SOLIDS but I get varying results. I might try to to fillet it next. I'm going to go back and study your post of the 25th August again. I think clearly there is stuff here that I am missing.

Thanks everyone Katie, if you are watching this thread, could you please provide us with a definitive answer on this issue?. As you can see there does seem to be some confusion on this issue. The question is: How do we get a NURBS curve to go exactly thru a series of 3D locii?

Hi Nicholas What worries me about all this is that no one seems to be able to duplicate what I'm describing. In regard to your question on acceptable tolerance, the worst "miss" I can measure is 4mm and although that would be well with construction tolerance for a hull with 3700mm beam, I'm not so sure it's is acceptable in the CAD environment. So can you please just check something for me. Draw a series of 3D locii, say 1 every metre for 10 metres. Make sure they are in a curve with a displacment of say 1500 mm. Then draw a NURBS curve through them. Now zoom up close to one of the 3D locii points. If your curve goes straight thru the middle of the loci point when viewed in any plane I'll kill myself :-) (sob sob) Also I tried setting the Open GL to high res as you suggest but it made no difference.

Hi Kaare Thanks for the info. If 18 points is too many though, how do I then get the curve to follow the prescribed shape?. My reason for 18 points in the first place was to try and get what I thought would be sufficient resolution. My theory being that the more positional data I supply, the more accurate the curve would be...is this an erroneous asumption? Maybe the easiest way for me to understand this is for you to tell me how you would draw a curve that must follow a prescribed path.

Opps...Katie sent naughty Mike this, please take note: "The comments on the message board regarding having people send their bug fixes to me and I will compile a list is not appropriate. I can understand your frustration of not having the list available. It was out of my control. All I do is support the program. The list is devised on the engineering end. Please refrain from disrespectful comments in the future." It was a joke Katie...you know, haha, humour. For the most part I think everybody understood this. No disrespect intended. However, any of you out there who actually took my post to be a serious comment have my deepest apologies (and sympathy) Smirks quietly to himself and goes back to work.

Hey Malice I think you're on to it, it's a trick. 11.5.1 is a blank update. It doesn't actually do anything but at least it looks like they're working on the product and issuing regular updates. Here's what to do. Make up your own list of bug fixes and send it to Katie, she's goning to publish the most interesting one as the official list. Here's some of my list 1. Stopped that annoying rattle from the cooling fan 2. I've noticed my coffee stays hot for longer 3. No need to thump the screen to speed up rendering 4. Less famine in the third world 5. I can now always find the correct side of my scale rule...first time! 6. That little bald patch is growing back. Heck...I can't wait for Version 12. I can just see the advertising now. Upgrade to the all new Vectoworks 12, the latest fastest coolest CAD program ever, we're not going to waste your time telling you about all of the new features. Just buy it and find out for yourself ya whimp!

Absolutely EJ There's nothing like using your customers as beta testers. Where would Bill Gates be without us? :-)

Hi How hard can this be? It is usual to include the bug fixes in the release note for a software update isn't it?. I looked in vain

Hi How hard can this be? It is usual to include the bug fixes in the release note for a software update isn't it?. I looked in vain

Hi David Thanks for the reply. I actually was doing as you suggested and I still have the problem. The curve "passes" thru 18 locii points but when the hull is surfaced I end up with 5 distinct flat planes instead one a nice smooth curving surface. Obviously all curves in CAD are actually made up of small straight line segments but I would have expected a few more than 5 over a length of 13500mm. Again I wonder if there is some resolution setting I can adjust.

Hi BiplabNNA Man I must be missing something. I've done just as you directed and I end up with the same result, the cuve bypasses many locii points. However what I have noticed is that if you zoom in close to one of the points the curve does miss the ponit but if you click on the curve, the 3D loci highlites. Maybe it really is passing thru the points but because the line appears to be made of many short line segments its just a resolution problem. In which case I would need to be able to increase the number of line segments that make up the curve. Or am I way off the track still? Maybe I could send you my file and you could have a go yourself and see if you get the same result

HI BiplabNNA Thanks for the reply but no, actually it doesn't. If I use that tool and click on eack of the locii in turn and double click on the last one the nurbs curve then does its own thing and misses many of the locus points . If I surface that result I end up with a faceted look instead of a nice smooth curved surface. I suppose what I want is for the locii to be anchor points thru which the nurbs curve MUST go, I don't want VW to choose another path for me. This must be possible?

Hi Tom Don't you just go, Page-Set Grid and uncheck the "show grid lines" box. That kills the grid with the little pink dots that you see in 3D.Is that what you are talking about

Hi Guys All you 3D guru's, how do I do this. I want to create a nurbs curve that goes exactly thru a series of 3D locus points. The nurbs curve tool doesn't seem to do it. I'm trying to create a boat hull. It has a hard chine and I have the gunnel, chine and keel mapped in 3D space and want to create these curves so I can use them to loft the hull surface. Imagine a simple canoe made out of plywood, that's the sort of thing I'm trying to do (except this is a 40foot steel boat)

Hi Delmer It does seem a little off the wall I admit but it actually was happening. I have had the strangest problems with VW ever since I purchased it. It makes you start to doubt your own sanity.My advice is not to have previous versions of VW on your machine after you update. I had to because I had 10.5 files that would not open in 11.0-11.5 (this can't happen by the way either). I ended up with 4 versions all installed. I think this must have caused the problem because now VW is as stable as it has ever been. Previously it would crash 4 or 5 times a day and quite often take out the operating system in the process, requiring a hard reboot. It got to the stage a couple of weeks back where I was seriously considering ditching VW altogether. Archicad was looking really good :-) "Techno, make up something that has a possibility of being valid but isn't and ask your vendor about just for fun". You're a sick man :-)

Thanks for all the input everyone. I do know the difference between the line tool and the polyline tool and the polygon tool and yes, I was using the line tool (2). I took Martin's advice and did a complete reinstall. Not as easy as it seems. I still had VW10.5 and 11.0 and..11.0.1 installed. I nuked them all. Windows could not automatically uninstall VW11.0 because uninstall.log seemed to be corrupt. This left bits of the program lurking around. I eventually had to go through the registry manually and delete all keys and data referenced to Vectorworks and Nemetschek. The upshot is that the program seems to be behaving normally now.

Hi Ray Really, your VW doesn't do that?. I started with VW 10 and it has always automatically created polys from 2 or more lines created by the line tool. I found it very irritating and still do. My vendor said I just had to get over it because I should be now drawing everything as a polygon, it's the new drawing philosophy. If for example I wanted to draw a square using single lines intead of the rectangle tool. After I create the second side of the square VW will turn those two lines into a polygon automatically. Sometimes it is a bit random and it may do the creation after the third line is drawn but I can bet that I wont make it all the way round before VW creates a polygon for me. Another example of this behaviour would be the case where you have say two single lines at 30? to each other and not intersecting. You use the connect/combine tool to trim/intersect the two lines and...bammm one two sided polygon is created. My video driver is 6.14.10.6693. This is taken from the N'vidia info under the display properties tab. I'll check for updates...good point

Hi Islandmon Hah?...how does that stop VW turning a group of lines into a polygon automatically? Or are you suggesting that overall I use "combine into surface" instead of "Compose"?. I'm always keen to learn a better way of using VW, could you please explian your point further.

Hi Ray Actually I am using the line tool. I draw a line of "x" length. I draw another line connected to the end of the first line of "y" length and bamm..I now have a polygon with two sides. This is not very helpfull as polygons are a pain to reshape. I then decompose the polygon and continue to draw lines. At various times VW tries to create a polygon again and so it goes. All I want to do is finish, in this case the profile of a handrail stanchion, before I then compose it and extrude. By the way Ray, I notice that your computer setup is very similar to mine. Are you experiencing any stability problems? I have little problem like graphics disappearing at different zoom levels or the screen not updating until I change zoom levels. I have also had problems in the past creating site models