markdd

I would like to be able to pick ups bunch of object attributes with the eyedropper tool and assign the relevant ones to a new class. It would save you remembering already made attributes when making classes. Thanks

I get this crash as well Mark Doubleday

Hello all When using the Focus Point Tool I am setting a point for a focus height of 2800mm. When looking at the beam in any view other than top view, the fall off of the beam still remains at the 1500mm default setting below the focus height which the tool is set for. Is there any way that I can change it so that the beam always falls at height 0 as opposed to always 1500mm below the focus height? Does that make any sense?! Many thanks! Mark

Many thanks for your reply Michael. I will give it a try and report back! Thanks! Mark

Hi Can anyone help me with the routine to create a custom 3d Hybrid symbol that will behave like the stock symbols do in that they pan and tilt in 3D according to the focus point. (VW 2011) Many thanks! Mark

Yes, I have had issues with exactly this problem. However have had limited success locating the rogue fixtures, even when I have found what I thought was the UID of the instrument. Very annoying, but not disastrous as I do little 3d modelling and I have chalked it up to yet another bug in the spotlight plug-in. However I am now wary of the info from the data base reports and often find myself checking carefully the LW file for any duplications/discrepancies. Kind of defeats the point really! This doesn't help you but at least you know you are not alone! Mark

Thank you. All that advise works perfectly! Mark

When we copy and paste from within a drawing, or from another drawing, is there a way of know/controlling the position of the pasted object. At the moment the pasted position seems fairly random.... Any thoughts would be great. Many thanks Mark VW 2008

Curiously enough, I was having this very issue yesterday. Spent ages trying to stop fixtures on floor stands "inheriting" the attributes of the position above. Eventually decided to create a specific layer with a height of 4'6" and placed the fixtures on that. That at least seemed to help. What I would really like is the ability to turn these obvious "improvements" on or off. Mark

I have entered my symbols as usual and attached label legends and all is as I expect. However!..... I want to change the Y rotation of the symbol to 180? so that the fixture appears as it would when on a floor-stand. No problem. But the symbol now obscures some of the info in the label legend. Is this an oversight on NNA's part or is there a simple fix, or as I suspect, I will have to generate a new symbol with the 3d geometry already fixed. Any thoughts would be terrific! Thanks Mark

Thanks Ray I knew it was something logical like that! Mark

A very simple question but something that has puzzled me a little. Sometimes when I place a 2d Locus I get the dotted lines extending along both X and Y axes, and other-times I get none at all except for the locus itself. This is particularly pertinent when dealing with Groups, Symbols and External references. Are there hard and fast rules or is this phenomenon just random, or Me! Mark

I have noticed this, however have put it down to sloppy clicking on the interactive scaling button of the 2d select tool, whichis just above the origin button. Back in my autocad days, you could lock the origin.... Mark

I am not sure you are right about this... Your previous post seems more accurate. I took your advise and turned spaces off when using VW and the problem disappeared. Mark

I was at a read-through of a play I am doing today at The West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, UK. I was in the production offices having a meeting with the technical director when a lighting plan generated on wysiwyg came through on the office plotter! The only thing that was really great about the way it had been drawn was the Key. Really neat and all the instruments listed by category, not unfortunately like the Vectorworks version which is a bit of a "hop-scotch" of all kinds of stuff... I am sure the basic tool is really clever, and clearly lists the instruments in the order they were inserted into the plot, but if there were a way to re-order them, then VW might be on to something...... just some thoughts. I think the whole VALUE and reason to have Spotlight is because it is so wonderfully customisable. It enables us to present our plots the way that we intend, and not the way a software firm thinks we should..... Mark

Thank you Pat. It worked! Mark

I have noticed something similar. What I have been doing is clicking away from the open Vectorworks window on to an area of desktop and then clicking back on to the application window which brings all the palettes back. I had assumed it was a peculiarity with my set-up as I have two monitors. Hope that helps a little Mark

Greetings There have been one or two really good improvements in 2008 which I am just beginning to get to grips with. The first is the ability to add viewports to the design layer and the second is the editable worksheet capability. Both are great. However, when used together they throw up a logical, but unwanted issue. I have been playing around with drawing boom positions in 3D and then using the design layer viewport functionality to display the 3D boom as a series of viewports of different boom layers (still with me!?) an idea suggested by Chris Dopher which is a great workaround to the long awaited (by me at least!) side light drawing plug-in. The problem lies with the fact that the worksheet tool counts the lights in the viewports as well, yet the Find/modify function lists the correct quantity. Does anybody out there know if there is a way to stop the worksheets counting the quantities within the design layer viewports? Hope all that makes sense! Mark

I have just installed my new 2008 version and am very happy with the general stability on of the software under Mac OS Leopard. However when attempting to export symbols created in a drawing back to a specific symbol file, the app crashes and shutdown. Has anybody had this happen and is there a "fix" or something that I may be doing wrong. That's all! Mark

While the instrument key tool in spotlight has taken alot of the slog out of the last stages of creating a plot, it would be really good to have control over the order in which the symbols are drawn. For instance all the profiles in order of beam angle, then Pars, then Fresnels etc. Does anybody out there know of a way of doing this or do I still have to spend 20 minutes re-ordering the fixtures in the group after the tool has created them. I mentioned this at PLASA in London to a somewhat bemused demonstrator from NNA. He did however show me a "work-around" to do with the "send to" command. Instrumentation order seems to have something to do with the order it is displayed in the inventory though. Maybe a way to re-order these is the key to this!? Mark

This happened to me a while back. This was after some major revisions to a plot. Somehow I got the feeling that the file where all the data is placed (see how un-technical I am) had got corrupted. I spent ages trying to solve it and gave up. I ended up deleting the instruments completely and re-drawing the lights again. Actually would have spent less time if I had done that in the first place. So not an answer to your problem, but just a few words to let you know that you are not alone in thinking that Vectorworks can from time to time be a little petulant!! If anybody does know the answer to this problem it would be great to have the answer! It is worth also mentioning that the drawing that this happened to also gave some very weird (totally inaccurate) inventory reports as well. Mark

Chris The label legend was applied before the arrray command. I suppose another reason to upgrade, however us limey brits have to pay ?299 for the pleasure, ($600) to most of you out there!!! I suppose I will have to notch it up as yet another business expense! MD

Hello all. When I "duplicate array" a symbol along a path, the symbols duplicate perfectly and in line referencing the insertion point. However when the same symbol is inserted as an instrument and then duplicated, it seems to be offset (possibly the distance the insertion point is from the actual centre of the symbol) I enclose a screen capture. The symbol is the one with the label legends attached! Does anybody out there have any thoughts about this, or is it just a bug in 12.5 or indeed a feature which I do not understand properly. There is an obvious work around by converting symbols to instruments, but this would involve manually inserting info like position and height etc. Is it rectified in v 2008? Many thanks. Mark

... probably not the solution, but worth a try...... on the selection tool setting buttons, make sure the interactive scaling mode button is switched on. It may have been inadvertently switched off by mistake..... happened to me a while back and took me about half an hour to try and work out what I had done wrong...... Just a thought. Mark

I had a demo yesterday. Some nice new features generally, however not an abundance of new features for spotlight. Some really nice other stuff though. I also had a long demo of ESP vision. That is going to be awsome with spotlight Mark