grant_PD

I've never even considered RAM clock speed when buying computers. Photoshop and your browser will hog a lot of RAM, and also VRAM. I would think you would be better off with more RAM, regardless of the speed.

search Musical instrument / backline symbols in this forum. @scottmoore has a great collection for sale, 2d and 3d symbols.

Kind of depressing to hear all of this about the callout. I guess I'll submit a wishlist request to overhaul it. Thank you all for the cool other tips and tools.

@pjs8888 yes, that's the thinking exactly. Symbols allow objects to be in two different orientations at the same time, so creating a DRAFT layer with the symbol on it can greatly speed up your drafting time. Kind of like how a scene shop does not care what the orientation is of the scenery on stage, they build it in the most efficient manner possible. Separating out scenic elements into their own design layer allows for groundplans to remain fluid, which they often are. Could you do it with classes....yes...but isolating layers is much quicker. Classes on the the other hand control textures, so if you are going to be rendering that is the importance of classing your scenery.

@michaelk so what is required to make this work? Does vw have to recreate the callout from scratch? Are we doomed to never being able to control one of the most commonly used drawing tools?

@Jesse Cogswell My first run w/ your plug in was really cool thank you! Is there a way to force all the objects to take the class attributes as well? Aside from not putting things in the right class, sometimes people just override the class attributes from the attributes panel.

@michaelkI looked at that thread, I'm not seeing how this helps? What does that worksheet do exactly?

@Rolan Castaneda I am fully onboard with your sentiment. I'm that type of person where even if I KNOW that the miss-classed object is not going to affect the final outcome, I feel compelled to change it. That being said, I am also wondering why in this day and age vw cannot allow us to map objects to classes as we see fit? Is that what auto-classing does in the architect version?

@Pat Stanford But I need to get them to go through 80 pages of drafting first and change all of the callouts and drawing labels to the correct class!

If you are just going for straight drape with fullness, I'd use the drape tool. If you need to do something swagged, you're going to need to build it nurbs style or use a texture.

@line-weight what a labor of love and frustration! The custom modification tool does not work (I've run it thru tech support, they acknowledge the bug) on all items. Custom tool command does.....not really create custom tools with these objects. I have a custom script that forces the class of a few of these items. That seems to be a workable solution. Does anyone else have any workflow ideas?

@Kevin Allen yes some sort of tool mapping would be ideal. Years ago I recall someone telling me they put all drawing objects into symbols that exploded into groups into a resource folder, so they would never use the tool button for those objects again. Sounds like an idiot proof method, but I don't want to keep looking over to the resource folder everytime I want to place a callout.

Starting to work with other people on the same file, and noticing that things like crop objects, drawing labels, callouts etc, are ending up on a variety of different classes since some user are more cavalier about classing objects than others. How can I make the work flow for these objects idiot proof? I can create a class for each object, but I can't enforce that class usage...can I?

I keep running a custom modification, to change the class of all my detail callouts. The dialog box tells me I have them all selected, and lets me change the class. But none of them change.

@pjs8888 I did a webinar on scenic drafting for theater/tv, explaining some methods for organization. It's somewhere in the Vectorworks University.

@line-weight the link only moves in one direction. So any moves done in c4d must be manually moved in vw. I've taken to screen grabbing my plans after adjusting everything to c4d camera shots, and bringing in the screen grabs as a tool to re-align things. The move by points tool makes quick work of this, but it is still another item on the to-do list.

I just tried this and grouping between layers moved everything from its original layer to the layer I was active on when creating the group, so I'm not really sure how this workflow is possible. In any case, I would agree with @line-weight that this workflow seems to work against the structure of VW. Classes define the object, Layers define the position. In theater a lot of times Layers can also loosely define "Departments," so there can be an "audio" layer, a "lighting" layer, etc. I'm not sure what @pjs8888 means when writing that there will be multiple iterations of the design in various places around the venue. Perhaps an example could help. The example of the tabletop and legs makes no sense to me. Unless you were a furniture shop and you wanted different tops to go with different legs? Even still classes would be preferable there, since you could nest them and control textures etc.

I'll take any and all integration to outside assets. I do use NURBS modelling, I've never used Rhino, I hear it's great, let's make the connection and see if we can all be inspired. Upvoting now.

VW has gpu rendering from redshift, although it is nowhere near as fast as redshift in other modelling programs. Depending on your field (landscape, architecture, entertainment,....) you might find it better to head toward twinmotion, enscape, or a dedicated 3d modeller that has gpu rendering in the form of redshift or something like it.

Can't imagine why classes would turn on and off unless that's operator error. Is the font you are using for the file installed for both users? That could make the annotations jump around....

See if you can do a foreground render in shaded mode, turn off textures and colors and draw edges. Then do a background render with hidden line turned on.

@dtheory looking through your website you'll probably be happiest heading into twinmotion/lumion/enscape. They are all fast gpu style renderers and pretty easy to get used to. I would think the complexity of C4D or some other 3d modelling program+renderer will be too overwhelming for what you produce.

You could import the image as a reference, being careful to save the image with the same file name, and then update those renderings prior to exporting the sheet layers. But in essence, all external renderers are going to generate their own file, that needs to be updated manually by the user, the output of those files will need to be placed either in the sheet layers or in an external presentation. The trade off is that external renderers are going to give you faster and in most instances better renders. In my world better quality almost always wins, since that is client facing. The suffering of the user who needs to do more file management loses, since that is in house facing.

@Tom W.I'll take it.

Yes, but then when I edit the properties after creation, I want to have all of the fill/line/textures set to be what I normally set them to be. Is there a way to predetermine those?