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Petri

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Everything posted by Petri

  1. quote: Originally posted by Mbuck: Petri, Now now - no need to personalise your frustrations, Well, who in this discussion started to personalise the matter and insult an entire profession if not the BS engineer Mark Buckton?
  2. Via class attributes, cairo9. And remember that you don't have to adhere to the class naming rules set by the Minister of Silly Classes: you can edit the pop-up list values of all PIOs to suit your needs. There is a fundamental design flaw in the NNA PIOs (fancy that!) which makes this a bit less user-friendly as one might hope, but you could eg. have something like this in the pop-ups for frames: MATERIAL-PINE MATERIAL-HARDWOOD MATERIAL-ALUMINIUM COLOUR-WHITE COLOUR-BLACK COLOUR-RED and for glazing MATERIAL-GLASS 1 MATERIAL-GLASS 2 MATERIAL-GLASS 3 By assigning textures to the classes, you should get what you are after.
  3. quote: Originally posted by Mbuck: but I must say, in my experience, must architects have some trouble in writing cheques especially for software upgrades. In MY experience, engineers are no better. Why do I have the feeling that your cheque for VWA was zero dollars? Sure, it was a lot of work to be a beta-tester (been thre, won't do it again), but this holier-than-thy comment reminds me how difficult it was to extract fees from you when I helped you some years ago. Anyway: we have VW Architect + Landmark + Renderworks. Of Architect features, only Julian's WinDoor has been of any use, of LandMark features, we have tried to use terrain modeling, but that is a total disaster. RenderWorks - OK, I do test renderings with it, but any real work has to be done with ArtLantis. Fortunately, I have some 500 VS-based add-ons of my own, so we get by, despite the shortcomings of VW. I'll never again waste money to buy the half-baked jokeware add-ons that NNA offers.
  4. quote: Originally posted by Mbuck: I thought you knew that the Australian version of vectorworks architect allows walls to be offset from their internal or external edge or dare I say ?from their centre. Unfortunately, this is not true in the sense I meant. quote: See sometimes even a humble ?BS? engineers can teach an architect a thing or two, I wonder... [ 07-30-2004, 07:21 PM: Message edited by: Petri ]
  5. quote: Originally posted by Mbuck: Why is resizing from the centre of a wall so bad; at least wall cavities keep their centreline / alignment. Presumably you?re not changing the cavity size? Presumably I don't even work with cavities. I don't do small-scale residential projects and even if I did, I could not care less about showing cavities. quote: I not an architect thoughWell, that explains a lot - the issue is definitely beyond a 'building services' engineer. During the design phaseof even a medium-sized commercial, institutional or apartment building project, various construction methods are explored and all these have ramifications to load-bearing and shear walls. While partitioning can usually grow from the centre, walls of a lift/service core cannot. quote: maybe Petri can give all of us fascinating discourse on why this limitation is so bad and maybe NNA will change the wall behaviour if the need is so great.Well, let's take a recent example. A 6-storey apartment building was designed to be constructed by in-situ concrete, but an opportunity arose to use prefab elements, including prestressed hollow-core slabs. Practically all wall thicknesses changed: those on property boundaries were drawn from the outer face, many others from inner face. The change from wall/slab to column/beam/slab changed all walls between apartments from 150mm load-bearing to block masonry etc. etc. In ArchiCAD, 90% of the changes would have been trivial and done as a matter of minutes, with VW I spent over 2 days making the changes one by one. Cheap software can get very expensive... Luckily, I had not generated (and laboriously edited) the crap that is called 'sections' in VW. [ 07-30-2004, 12:52 AM: Message edited by: Petri ]
  6. quote: Originally posted by stan61449: How exactly does that correspond to paper and pencil? It doesn't and it shouldn't. VW is not a drafting program nor can it read your mind. No roof, huh? Well, if I create a roof that is in a pre-existing class, it is or is not visible on sheets depending on the visibility settings. If I create a new class for the roof, how is the program supposed to know in which drawings it shoud be shown? I generate even tens of drawings from a single VW model and I do not expect VW to know how each if them is put together in terms of visible classes.
  7. If there is one thing that really annoys me in VW, it must be the stupidity of walls. Change the thickness, and they change in relation to their centreline, not the original reference line. ArchiCAD has had this under control since 1986... I'm still on VW 9 and my next upgrade may well be switching back to ArchiCAD - just spent a whole day moving walls & joining them after finally receiving structural drawings.
  8. I have no idea what a "C" print is, but assuming that what you want is the same as wanting to print an A2 landscape drawing on A1 wide roll paper, yes, you do have to create a custom page size. Takes approximately 10 seconds. I have 5 printers (3 Epsons, 1 HP and 1 Brother and have gone through perhaps 10 others - including the original HP ThinkJet ca. 1984) and with all of them, the situation has been the same or worse. The method is straightforward because when you choose the paper size, the document remembers it. With my limited testing with VW 11, each sheet layer even remembers its page setting, so you can just say Print and press Enter.
  9. I don't have any problem with the 130 driver. Page rotation is an anachronism and requires an extra step when printing. Choosing the page orientation in the page setup dialog is more straightforward, consistent with other printer drivers and persistent.
  10. quote: Originally posted by Katie: A portrait will really print landscape and landscape will really print portrait. Well, that is one way of putting it, but it is perhaps less confusing to think that in all A1 and larger printers the page is 90 degrees rotated from what one is used to with normal printers and that the print head moves 'up and down' the page, not 'left and right. When I was installing large format printers en masse (OK, half a dozen or so...), I sticked a 'little boy drawing' image (a scan of Linus - not my compatriote L. Torvalds, but the Peanuts character, after whom the creator of Linux was named by his parents) on the printers to remind people how the 'little man' inside the printer sits.
  11. Hi P Retondo, Did you by any chance rename 'None' class? The symptoms sound like it.
  12. Apart from pirated software, my point is exactly that VW costs only as much as AutoCAD LT. Secondly, very few people set up shop immediately after graduation; in architecture extremely few. In fact, you must (in Australia) work at least two years after graduation under a registered architect to get to take the registration exam, so your example is quite hypothetical, not relevant. Thirdly, plain vanilla VW is a de facto entry level version: your software combo costs, I think, about AUD 4500! For serious, productive professional work one needs at least one add-on package, maybe two, and there's the upgrade path. Finally, if we look at the situation from NNA's end, creating a low-cost version is an expense - and would at the same time erode their revenue the same way LT erodes Autodesk's revenue. I know many AutoCAD shops where all licences (except perhaps one) are for LT. (And even more of those where they don't have even one licenced copy.) Software is expensive, I know that all too well, but in the scheme of things, VW is cheap compared with practically anything - CAD or non-CAD. Why, a simple page layout program such as InDesign costs over AUD 1000, PhotoShop almost AUD 1000 and so on. QuarkXPress is AUD 2300. Anyway, my experience is that those people who most loudly complain about software prices (I'm not referring to you, Nicholas, but my fellow architects) would complain just as much for half the price. Having worked 10 years as an IT consultant for architects, I know... [ 07-23-2004, 08:36 AM: Message edited by: Petri ]
  13. There used to be an unsupported Pantone colour picker for MacOS 9, by Apple. Worked OK with VW, as I recall. I don't think there is an application that can build a VW colour palette (because they are document-specific), but a reasonable workaround for OS X goes like this: - Use PhotoShop (full), PageMaker or InDesign to define the Pantone or CMYK colours. At least PageMaker has even Munsell colours, for those so inclined. - Keep Digital Color Meter open when you are editing a colour and key in the RGB values it shows when you hover above the colour you need. So, while you are in colour palette editing mode, you have to have the 'source' application and Color Meter open and visible. Sounds more complicated than it is. Now, if someone can come up with a working formula for converting CMYK to RGB (those at EasyRGB do not work), I'd be happy to incorporate that into my freeware program 'A Pint of Paint' which creates gradients (ie. named colours) into VW 10 and later.
  14. C'mon, folks - there IS already a VW Lite: the standard issue. In Australia, that costs AUD 1897 with free support, while AutoCAD LT costs AUD 1734, from a discount mail order store without any support. I challenge anyone to demonstrate that AutoCAD LT is even close to VW as comes to features and functionality. Upgrade path - yeah, right: not in the price lists, but surely upgrade from a to a program that retails for AUD 5445 must be somewhat expensive.
  15. In VW 10 and later, the 'rasterize' print option should work in this respect with any printer. However, personally I find drawing elevations a lot of extra work, so I always create a model.
  16. Just click on the row number of the 'header row', by default 2, keep mouse button down and a menu pops up for editing criteria and some other useful things. Oh yeah,almost forgot: then you say 'more choices' and add the layer. [ 07-22-2004, 07:11 AM: Message edited by: Petri ]
  17. Yes, by adding the layer as a criterion to the report OR by adding a column with function =L and then summarising by layer and symbol name.
  18. Petri

    Large DTMs

    It is indeed. It is called 'real world data.' VW 9 cannot even create a DTM of less than 3000 points (after segmenting and filtering the data.) However, as usual, results are very inconsistent as some segments are OK. A couple of years ago I had to resort to asking an AutoCAD user to help with a DTM. I can't remember the complexity, but it was too much for VW. With a $200 DTM add-on my friend generated the TIN as a matter of seconds, including slope analysis (which VW is supposed to do, but does not.) Conclusion: VW's DTM is for small and simple projects and makes unrealistic assumptions of the source data (ref to inconsistency.) This would be fine, if it would be made clear to prospective buyers. The unreliability (reported by several users), however, is so severe that the whole product is hardly of merchantable quality.
  19. Petri

    Large DTMs

    No, it is not a DTM but either a digitzed paper map or one generated from stereo aerial photos, probably latter. Topgraphic maps are not created via DTM, so your condescending, canned reply is fundamentally flawed and you are seriously misinformed. There IS no actual data set, so this is the real world. And even if there were, in the real world there is no hope for anyone to gain access to original data held by Government cartographic agencies - if you think otherwise, you live in a dream. As comes to filtering, as I already explained, I have tried that, coming down to 2700 points in one section, but still can't get the DTM generated. I would not call 2700 points a large data set.
  20. Petri

    Large DTMs

    This is going to be interesting - VW 9 could not model the data even as 10 separate sections.
  21. Petri

    Large DTMs

    It is quite obvious that VW 9 cannot create a DTM of my current data set, with 8700 3D polygons and 164000 vertices, but how about VW 11?
  22. Firstly, one should use extrusions only when walls won't work. (I assume the arc is in plan.) Secondly, zero-thickness objects seldom make sense, except in pure visualisations. Finally, the behaviour is a 'feature' so to speak. An arc with a fill becomes a slice of pie and so does an extrusion created with a no-fill arc and then filled. Solutions: 1. Use walls. 2. Create a polyline with a thickness: - copy the arc to clipboard - reduce its radius - paste in place - send to back - select both arcs and say 'Clip surface' (the larger arc becomes a polyline) - delete the smaller arc 3. Instead of fill, use texture. 4. Convert the extruded arc into a mesh. quote: Shouldnt the arc just be... the arc itself? And not include geometry related only to its creation?Not in VW. For extrusions, sweeps, roofs and floors, the original 2D geometry is kept 'inside' the resulting 3D object. The benefit from user's point of view is that the shape can be edited by saying 'Edit group.' The above applies also to 3D solids: you can enter a solid and change its components & their relationships. You will in future learn to appreciate this.
  23. Now as comes to the various rotated rectangle PIOs, including the one I wrote for my own use, far superior (well, of course - he hee) to those at VectorDepot and also to the one Julian Carr offers, one has to keep in mind that in SOME ways they are pseudo-rectangles and not eg. recognised as rectangles OR polygons in reports. They also interact with walls as any PIO or symbol (ie. get sucked in.) So, by and large, they are a workaround and an aberration. But useful.
  24. Petri

    HP DesignJet 120

    quote: Originally posted by Ricardo: Petri I?ve read in previous posts that the now discontinued designjet 120/120nr could not produce good quality black CAD lines in normal paper, what can you tell us about the 130nr? is it as noisy as the 120? thanks Ricardo Black lines seem OK to me on normal bond paper. I have no idea how noisy the 120 is, but the 130 is quite quiet except for a click for each stripe. Does not bother me.
  25. Petri

    HP DesignJet 120

    quote: Originally posted by LarryAZ: Petri, Are you using Verson 11 with your 130nr? And what verson of OSX are you running? Thanks, Larry Sorry to have been away... VW 9 and also VW 11 Viewer (in fact, to test the configuration) with OS X 10.3.3 & 10.3.4. Ahh, yes: also with OS 9.2.2, (The plotter comes with an OS 9 driver - non-PS, fully functional! Fancy THAT!) [ 06-18-2004, 11:05 AM: Message edited by: Petri ]
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