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Diamond

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Posts posted by Diamond

  1. I have had this problem as well. The way I got around it was to set the length, depth & width ranges in the Advanced Properties of Object Info Palette to infinite. For me, the section shows up again, but normally in a different place. Not sure why.

    I wonder if it is to do with changing layer heights, or maybe duplicating a layer? That is all I can think that may be the case.

  2. Yes, the palette tends to be an OS thing, but that is changing, as seen in programs like Logic and iTunes. The reason for this is that floating palettes tend to add a learning curve. Don't get me wrong. In most cases I prefer floating palettes over docking palettes.

    A person who is learning a complex package can tend to do things without understanding what they are doing. I have seen a number of times with members of our office, that the have moved a palette, and turned another on, and the palette they just moved is now obscured by the just turned on palette. They go to use the obscured palette and it is now lost to them.

    So back to the reasons Apple is trending towards the path of a unified view - this is to assist the many Windows 'switchers' in being able to use the software. Also I think you will also find a common trend that people are using many different software packages these days and expect to be up and running in a short space of time.

    If Nemetsheck could address some of the user interface problems here, I think it would make a huge difference, and we could still keep the palettes we know and love.

    At the end of the day, what makes a Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad work is that Apple understand interface design more than most. Yes they can get it wrong, but where they do, they tend to improve on mistakes relatively quickly.

    So I would say that with the general high standard of CAD apps these days, interface will become the key factor going forward for companies to retain their existing user base, and attract new users (as Sketchup has shown). You can see Vectorworks has shown they understand this as well. Just having things like better snaps and the exit group button, I am sure these make huge difference for users.

  3. Hi Bruce,

    Nice assembly drawings. Well done. Really like your style.

    As far as stating a design preference as fact. Yes, maybe not the best decision. I think it just shows that we are all passionate about what we do, and some times we are going to push the boundaries! I think some grace is in order, especially as I am sure I am going to need some along the way! :)

  4. BTW Vincent,

    If you print at 0.03mm line thickness, you will find that these lines will fall off any photocopies of prints. Dangerous on site with contractors. Now I make sure my hatches or similar are set to at least 0.05mm line thickness.

    If you have all line weights set by class, you can set them to 0.03mm, print, and then set them back to the class standard.

  5. Christian,

    Don't get me wrong. I am what most would call a Mac power user, but that doesn't mean I have to understand programming. I can delete files from folders, move them around, delete preferences etc and generally speaking things don't go AWOL. This was the same in Mac OS 9.

    But I worked out very early on, delete an innocent looking .DLL file and it can hurt! I still don't know what they do? :)

    I am glad you are seeing some good results on your ASUS. To be fair, I have found VW pretty jumpy on my Mac using certain tools, and doing hidden line renders.

  6. At my previous place of employment we had Quad core PC's but with skimping on cheaper video cards etc caused a heap of drama. For a while I had Windows 7 RC installed on my 24' iMac via Bootcamp and it was wonderful. Much better than my PC with Vista Ultimate and the later Service Packs ever was.

    So Shaun, although I have never seen it happen, I can believe if a company has properly invested in good equipment then it can happen. As a general observation though, PC's require a small army of support staff. Our Sydney office of about 30 has IT issues in orders of magnitudes less than my last office of less than 10. This has been the case in every office I have worked at.

    As I said, Windows 7 is a great upgrade on my Mac. Much better than XP or Vista. It is almost Mac OS X-like in that it mostly just works. If you have had an experience that good on PC's then that is great.

    I had almost come to the conclusion that PC or Mac, good hardware = good user experience. But from what you are saying Vincent, and this is where my quandary begins, if you had a great PC, why was it such a bad experience, and me running a Windows 7 RC (beta) such a good one on my iMac?! I know respected tech commentator Walt Mosberg has said that the best Windows in a laptop is on a Macbook Pro. Is it purely that Microsoft has too many drivers to deal with, and that creates the cracks in the system.

    Which then leads us straight back to the point of costs. If a PC costs less from the beginning, but requires much more time and money to keep it running, is it really cheaper? Most of us don't want to have to be geeks to make our computers work like clockwork.

  7. Thank you for that. I thought as much.

    Now with so much intelligence in the Parasolid engine, is there any plans for clash detection? Or will that be left up to apps like Solibri?

    And how do you tend to deal with curved (in plan) buildings with slab & roof objects showing facettes where walls and nurbs and extrude based object do not? It seems I spend no end of trying to get around this. I love the 2D/3D hybrid objects and how they show in plan, but they can really mess up hidden line presentations when all of those facets come out. Besides modelling the roof and drawing polygons over for plan view I am not sure what to do.

    I apologise. I am all questions.

    Oh yeah. Happy 100 posts to me! :)

  8. Yes there is a demo. Obviously this app is for rendering and animation not CAD, but the tools are still able to be customised.

    It is funny what you say about palette docking. Coming from Mac, I hated it at first, but after a while on a PC it grew on me, now I am enjoying palettes again. But I was never one to move them around too much as many do (mostly Mac users in my experience).

    Having a bias towards extremity I have my workspace set so that my even the length of mouse movement across the screen will be minimised, thus saving fractions of seconds. I know, I know...a tad, well....extreme!

  9. Yes, I certainly agree on the multi screens part.

    If you are having problems with clutter, it might be time to look at spaces, and get the stuff off your desktop and into a holding folder for filing or deletion. That said, I tend to be a bit of a neat freak! :)

  10. The next CINEMA 4D User Group Meeting will be held on June 24th at Adimex.

    As always we are looking for people to present and it was suggested that some of the presentations cover using C4D with CAD applications. I understand that this topic may be of interest to only a small portion of our members, so I would suggest we mix it up a bit to keep it relevant to as many people as possible. I look forward to your feedback on this one guys.

    Please also send me a short confirmation email if you will be attending so that we can get an idea of how many seats we will need.

    All the best

    Nigel Allen

    Senior 3D Animator

    Brains Intelligent Design

    nigel.allen@brainsdesign.com

    Email from Nigel Allen, the user group organiser regarding the Sydney C4D user group. The next meeting will partly focus on CAD (mostly Vectorworks or ArchiCAD at a guess) workflow integration, so if you are seriously considering this please RSVP.

    6-8pm

    Adimex:

    5-7 Cleg Street

    Artarmon

    NSW 2064

  11. The irony of what you are saying Christian is that the PC version of VW is far more unified view like than the Mac version. The three years preceeding mid 2009 I was on PC's. As a die hard Mac power user, that took some swallowing. Coming back to the Mac was harder in many ways than it was to go to the PC. Maybe because as home I was using an old mac, and my Mac power user skills went out the window.

    Getting into Cinema 4D at the moment, and I really appreciate its unified view. I think the learning curve is much simpler. Having looked at the link the you quoted and its reference to Logic Pro, I can completely agree with the comments. People speaking of their frustration of earlier versions, and the extremely steep learning curve (I speak as one who had a license of Logic and sold it due to the exact issue described - and life took me in another direction).

    This brings up another point. In my current professional position it is my task of beginning to plan methods of training for 50 people in three offices around the globe. This is made much harder without the unified interface. Everyone has their own way of working (which is great for creative types) but with those that struggle the palettes can create an even greater struggle. I know the VW interface is very Mac (and very old school Photoshop) but I do think it is time for a change. Cinema 4D changed their interface in a recent version, and every review I read raves about it. Given they are in the same stable of Nemetschek, maybe we have this to expect down the road. Although given that the VW interface was only given a scrub up in version 2008, I wouldn't hold my breathe.

  12. Jeffery,

    Yes that is what I do as well.

    When splitting your building up so that each level is an individual file, how do you deal with the stair tool? The stair tool allows for an upper and lower floor, or do you have to forgo this for the sake of file organisation?

  13. Thank you Jeffery for that breakdown on the IFC data. Very helpful.

    I know what you mean by less is more. I am struggling with that as well, as others coming across my drawings find the multi-layer set-up confusing. Especially where everything is in the one drawing. Having worked in smaller projects this hasn't been a problem, but in a larger office on a larger project, breaking up a project is so important.

    I liked what you had to say about one person generating a model, and others detailing from the model in the viewports (instead of in another drawing whilst I am modelling, as is happening with the project I am working on at the moment). I think this was the single most important mind shift/productivity tip that I have had after reading the Ellicott Heights white paper. This and breaking the floors up into individual files. I think that would prevent a lot of confusion for those that find the multi-layer per level set-up confusing as noted earlier.

    In your less is more layer structure, you don't mention your grid layer. Where does this information go now?

    Thank your or your prompt reply. Really good stuff.

  14. Hello,

    This is probably a question for Jeffrey W Ouellette (the BIM-ologist in residence).

    I have been reading the BIM in Practice page on the Nemetschek Site, and are trying to work out how what is best practice for the setup of layers, and how are objects translated in the IFC export?

    Are they translated through the IFC entity classes, or through VW classes?

    Do the objects have inherent IFC classes, or do we need to add them?

    Years ago (back in VW 11 days) I was sure I read that when building a building model it was advised to have a separate layer for the floor. It seems Jeffery you are advocating this in your White paper with the slab & structure going on this layer. I have been doing something similar for some time, but wanted some clarification.

    Are there any other VW materials for some more reading on this topic?

    Thank you.

  15. I have been noticing my fonts to the markers changing size and font type as well, especially with viewports at differing scales. Has anyone had any experience at countering this issue? I change the markers in the 1:100 scaled viewports and the markers in the 1:50 scaled viewports goes tiny (and vice versa).

    Any clues to solving this?

  16. I didn't have that ticked on mine. Although I do know I ticked it wondering what it did. What I had to do was delete all of my Keynote Legends. But thanks for the tip that led me to the solution to my problem, and hopefully putting an end to any more time wasting.

  17. Well done markuskolb.

    I had thought I only needed to turn them on in the design layer for them to show up in plan Sheet Layer Viewports. Problem solved. It didn't twig in my mind to toggle the pull down menu. Two years of frustrations solved!

    Thank you!

  18. Thank you Jeffery.

    That works well. Although doesn't show correctly in plan, but at least better than an extrude to edit on the fly.

    An interesting note. I have found by rotating the object 90 deg in front view enables me to have a fully vertical column.

    Just have to make sure that the steel section object within a symbol that I used (in my case, a round hollow section) is converted to a polygon.

  19. I would like to add to this, for both the floor and the roof tool is an upgraded to how they are rendered / modelled. If you look at the column tool, it renders the curve more like a curved NURBS surface. The roof face and floor tools do not do this.

    If you look at the way floor & tools are rendered, especially in hidden line, they look ugly. I am trying to encourage colleagues to use the hybrid 2D/3D objects, but if the VW objects compromise the presentation of their designs, it creates a large problem for adoption.

    Also I have to use viewport annotation masks for 3D elevations where I have a curved slab or roof face.

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