markdd

Do you have cast shadows turned on in Shaded Options?

I think you will find that it is just the Lit Fog that passes through. If it is, then this is a limitation of Shaded View at the moment. It used to work fine, but the shadow casting of lit fog has been turned off for now. My understanding is that it has something to do with performance issues on some users' machines.

Take a look at these two tutorial videos I made during lockdown. The first explains the principles behind how they work, the other is a practical example of how to build your own.

Multicircuit Lighting Devices are probably the way you need to go for now. These can be made to work for most things with a little care and you will need to build your Symbols for each type of configuration you want to work with. In theory you can put as many emitters as you like into these and I have had some good results. Certainly all the examples above could be achieved this way. Ultimately it would be great if lighting devices could snap to one another so that you can build a lighting device as you work rather than creating a symbol that then needs to be converted to a Lighting Device.

If you want to model it from scratch, then I would have thought that the Helix Spiral command is the place to start. Equal Top and Bottom Radius. Ungroup it so it is just a NURBS curve. then Place it inside a group. Stretch the Group to the Elipse that you need using the Group control points, then start modelling the treads..... I know nothing about how an eliptical staircase should be constructed, but this seems like a good place to start....

I use a site called Poliigon. https://www.poliigon.com

The Use at Creation function is controlled by each Class. Go to the Edit Class dialog and you will see a checkbox indicating whether you want this function active or not. Alot of people do. You can disable it for every class and you should not be bothered by the alert that you have shown above. To turn it off for all classes in one action, go to the Organisation dialog and remove the Check Mark from the Use Column.

You can use the Move by Points tool instead. This has a button in the Mode bar to let you keep the original selected or not.

I’m interested in what you propose. I’m not that familiar with Capture so don’t completely understand what you mean. Can you illustrate your idea a little further? Thanks

I noticed the new behaviour a few months ago. I am a long term user and so am used to never being able to overwrite a symbol name so rarely encountered any name conflict. however a few months ago I made the mistake of accidentally creating a symbol name conflict and I got the “do you want to replace the existing symbol” alert that you described in the first post. I was surprised and pleased that I had not noticed the upgraded behaviour. Yesterday I noticed the reversion of the behaviour back to the old way of working. I wondered what had changed but thought little of it at the time…… I will do some digging when I have a moment…

@BT30is absolutely correct. The behaviour they describe was a surprise to me but a welcome one. It seems to have been reverted back to the old behaviour. I wonder why.

I do all the time. I'm trying to get into the habit of using the Smart Options Display as well, but I find it too slow due to the animation time that has been used.

Try “I”. The UIOP[] keys toggle through the mode groups.

Thanks once again.

Pat, this is great! Thanks. Works perfectly. Can you recommmend a resource other than your good self which would help a non-maths, non-coder person like myself to learn this kind of stuff with particular regard to Vectorworks. For instance, what is the Worksheet/Data Tag language based on? Many thanks again. Mark

Hi Pat What I am attempting to do is display a note on a Lighting Device when it has a Pan value of between 45 and -45°. Based on your answer above, this is what I have entered into the Tag Field definition: #WS_IF(AND('Lighting Device'.'Pan'>-45, 'Lighting Device'.'Pan'<=45),'Number in Range', 'Out of Range')# Currently I get no error in the tag which is a plus, but also no text either! Thanks

In a Data Tag, is there a way to use an IF statement for a range of numbers. So: 'Use This' if the value is between 0 and 10 otherwise 'use this' Thanks Mark

Nice one. The problem with Graphic Legends comes when you have some Lighting Devices with Accessories and some with not and and you want to do a count of the Lighting Device. More often than not, you will see the Accessory as well. It seems that the tool searches of the the first instance of a particular Device Type and displays that Accessory or no accessory. It will also display label legends as well! All this can be managed by classes I know but is a bit cumbersome...

Have you thought about using the Instrument Summary Tool and using the Filter options there. You can't necessarily filter by Viewport, but you can by Layer and of course by Position Name I know it doesn't necessarily deal with the problem you are having, but it might be the most elegant solution for now...

For Graphic Legends to be useful for Lighting devices, I have found that you need to specify the symbol and not the Lighting device. Search criteria should be something like Record field is Light and Moving Light. Also, unless I’m mistaken, Accessories don’t work with Graphic Legends. It would be great if there was a search criteria for schematic Views but currently I don’t think there is one.

Is the Class associated with the missing field set to Visible in the Viewport? When you create an extra field after creating a viewport the Class will not be visible unless this function was enabled the last time you opened the Create Class dialog.

The only way that I know how to do this is to go to the Visibility Palette and make a multiple selection there and uncheck them....

Yes please! It’s such a pain when you are making viewport crops in perspective View. Especially now that screen plane is not an immediate option anymore.

Yes, in a Sheet Layer Viewport you can rescale your work to any scale you like. The Design Layer scale setting is just meant to be a guide as more of a heads-up as to what your work will look like when outputted to a particular scale. If you look at the Zoom factor at the top of the screen and change it to 100%, you will get an exact representation of what the viewer will see if you were to print the page out onto paper.

Go to File > Page set up and change it to something more suitable such as A0 or whatever will fit your needs. The Page outline is more of an indication of how the work you are doing will look at a paricualar scale on a printed page and is not intended to be a constraint. It's just a guide. You can turn it off from the Page Set up dialog if you don't want to see it. You can also move it using the Move Page tool which is hidden under the Pan Tool in the Basic Tool palette.