Matt Panzer

Hello Sound4U2, Title blocks need to be placed on every sheet layer you plan to have one in. If you're using the Vectorworks Title Block object, you can change any "project" data and they will be updated on all title blocks. Editing the "sheet" specific data can set only the one sheet. If you're using your own title block, make it a symbol and type any data that you'd like to show on all sheet layers directly into the symbol definition. Any sheet specific data should be placed as text linked to a record. This will allow you to set data for any placed title block symbol through the data pane of the Obj Info palette. HTH,

No sweat! :-)

Hi Kevin, No need to crop the viewport if you paste it in the viewport annotation space and turn ALL of the viewport's layers off. I've found this method very useful for Keys and other simple details that I'd rather not add design layers for.

Hi Jonathan, What I do is to create a viewport at the scale that you created the key in and turn all layers in the viewport off. Then edit that viewport's attributes and paste the key there.

Don, Select the viewport and click the "Classes" button in the Obj Info palette. You can select any number of classes and edit their attributes. These attributes will override the document's class attributes for that viewport. Once you have a viewport setup, you can copy these overrides to other viewports with the eyedropper tool (double-click the eyedropper tool and check viewport class overrides).

Brendan, Thank you for your compliments! :-) I certainly understand your points about the growing complexity of VW over the years. A big challenge for NNA is how to add new features and improve existing features, while maintaining old features and compatibility. There's a delicate balance of adding new without removing too much of the old functionality (and upsetting the existing user base). This is not to say that there's no room for improvement. But, much of the complexity comes from the great flexibility VW has. I feel that I wouldn't mind if NNA became more aggressive in eliminating more outdated features and replacing them with more streamlined solutions, but I'm also afraid that one of those omitted legacy features would be one that I don't want to be without. As for the RW backgrounds, I see what you mean. I suppose the idea is to move the view of the model, not the background. In any case, if accurately aligning a model to a background photo's perspective is the task, CameraMatch is the way to go (in my slightly biased opinion).

Take a look at the CameraMatch plug-in (by yours truly). This may do what you want and then some: http://panzercad.com/cm2010info.html

Hi Don, If you're using Sheet Layer Viewports, you can set the viewport Class Attribute Overrides to get what you want. I typically work with color lines but need them to print in black. Any fills I use are always set to the desired color for actual output. When I setup a viewport, I change all class overrides (except my "Redlines" class) to use a black line. This system works very well and makes sheet layers look more like a print preview (with the black lines). Plus, it lets me keep my colored lines for working in design layers.

Glad to help Gio. You have a good weekend as well. I plan to make mine restful. I've shoveled far too much snow this week...

You're welcome. You did almost exactly what I did! :-) I'd still recommend my version since it doesn't change the active class or selection state of any objects. This should make it run faster and leave the drawing state as the user would expect. Plus it should work on objects within symbols and groups. If you have a large file to test on, try both versions to see if there's a difference.

Hi Gio, It works now! :-) I added a one-liner subprocedure and a ForEachObject statement in place of: NameClass(LOC_ClassArray[x]); SetClassOptions(1); SelectAll; SetClass(h,assign_to); This method should be much faster and also will look inside symbols and groups. http://pastebin.com/m53c80150

Looks like it's coming along well! The link to the script doesn't work though... The behaviors of the buttons sound fine. I'm assuming when you highlight an item in the existing class list, all incoming classes assigned to it will be highlighted and the user can select/deselect from them. Conversely, if an incoming class is selected, then the existing class it's assigned to will highlight. The interface might make things a bit cumbersome for the user to tell what he still needs to assign. Here's another idea that still avoids list browsers: What about three lists: Existing, Merged, Incoming? The user could select an existing class and only it's assigned classes show in the Merged list. All incoming classes that have not yet been assigned will show in the Incoming list. Classes in the Incoming list can be selected and moved to the Merged list of the select existing class. This three column interface would immediately show the user what classes still need to be assigned and any left in the Incoming list will simply be pasted into the drawing. Also, the existing classes could be clicked through allowing the user to easily see only the classes to be merged into them. I hope this makes sense. I'm a little under the weather (and blizzard).

Thanks Manny, AnimationWorks saved me a lot of time, so I took that extra time (and then some) to make it even better. It's amazing what sound can do for an otherwise silent animation. A much more immersive experience... One thing you'll quickly find, using the built in VW animation tools, is that you have little control over the view as it translates between saved views. AnimationWorks allows you to define a target point for the camera while it travels along it's path. This allows you to place multiple cameras (with multiple targets) along a path and set the transition time between cameras (where the camera pans from one target to the next). This kind of control give much more professional results.

IMO, AnimationWorks is certainly the way to go. It gives much more control over the built in animation tools. I created the following movie with AnimationWorks a few years ago: http://panzercad.com/services_presentation.html I did a longer movie (of a larger model) last year but cannot release it yet :-( I've not yet needed AnimationWorks in VW 2010, so you may want to look into any compatibility issues first.

Yes. Raymond has a good point. I use the same var names in many subprocedures. It makes understanding and working with them much easier. What I typically do is prefix a lowercase "g" to all of my global vars to help differentiate them from local vars in subprocedures. And, as Raymond states, passing vars to procedures own parameter list makes things much cleaner.

Yikes! Good question. As far as I know, there's no way to deal with pasting inside a text field, text block or worksheet. If any ideas come to mind, I'll let you know.

Ha! You know I was kidding don't you? By early Monday morning will be fine. :-P

My pleasure to help! Another issue I found was that it appeared you were erroneously changing the NewcountClasses, countClasses in the dialog handler. In your original script, changing: GetSelChoice(4, 0, NewcountClasses, NewClass); GetSelChoice(6, 0, countClasses, OldClass); to this (the "i" variable being a dummy variable): GetSelChoice(4, 0, i, NewClass); GetSelChoice(6, 0, i, OldClass); should fix some things. Ben, you're correct. a list browser would be ideal (and a lot of work) for this. I think two listboxes could suffice. A left listbox would be the classes to reassign (allowing only single item selection) and the right listbox would show the existing document classes (allowing multiple item selection). When a new class is selected on the left, the ones to reassign could be highlighted on the right. This could allow multiple classes to be reassigned to one class, and would also allow all reassignments to be done in one dialog. Also, the reassignments could be saved/updated so that the next time those new classes are present the dialog will default to reassigning them to match the previous setting. So G, will we have this by the end of the week? :-P

Hello G, I reworked it a bit and it's working. While I didn't examine the entire script, I simplified parts of it. Part of the simplifying was to not use a popup for the class to reassign. At this point, the script requires the user to reassign all of the new classes anyway, so now they just have to do them in order. So the dialog now shows the new (offending) class as static text. This makes it easy to simply cycle through the new classes without dealing with reallocating the array. There were a couple of other fixes. If you have a text editor that can compare this with yours, you'll see what was changed. http://pastebin.com/m4e746acd HTH,

Yes. VW should list classes in their creation order. If it's is reliable, it'll be much faster than comparing class names. Wouldn't you want to sort the arrays so you can list them in alphabetic order? What exactly is not behaving well?

You're welcome G and great to hear it's coming along. An interesting addition to the Paste scripts could be an option to save the mapping of the pasted objects so that the next time objects of the same class are pasted, it could either remap them automatically or have the dialog set the default mapping (to the last one used) when prompting the user. Just a thought... Maybe for version 2.0? ;-)

You're welcome. You could also create another command that compares all classes to a standard class list. If any extra classes are present, it could prompt the user to reassign. These scripts should be fairly easy to write. You will need to keep the original "Paste" command in your workspace (because the new paste script will need to call it), but you can name your command something like "Paste Safe" and change the "Paste" key command from "Paste" to it. You may also want to create a "Paste In Place Safe" command as well... Good luck!

Hello Gio Pet, I don't think there's any way to disable the making of new classes. If this is solely to prevent creation of new classes when pasting objects maybe you could create a replacement Paste menu command. This command could: 1. count and store all existing class names in an array. 2. paste the objects 3. count the number of classes again 4. If the number of classes changed, then: compare all current document class names with those in the array When any are not found in the array, prompt the user to remap the class to one from the array. Just a thought...

Hi Irving, This probably isn't the case, but did you check the viewport's render background AND foreground mode? I came across a file that had the foreground render mode changed (probably inadvertently by me) from "none" to wireframe.

Hi Matt, Yes. Definitely look at Jonathan Pickup's training materials and online user group. Once you get going, this community board and the VW maillist are indispensable for specific questions. Best regards,