Tom K

Why not just set the opacity of a specific layer to 30 or 40 percent. This sort of creates a grey out layer that you can snap to. Using the navigation pallet it's to move the stacking order up and down. When your are done set the opacity back to 100 percent

Thanks SteveK, I had finally figured it out myself on Friday. However after much playing around I think I'll just take a pass on the Door Schedule. Here is why. 1) there are not enough user fields for the schedule we normally create. 2) I could not find a way to rename the user fields in the properties diaglog so that the name matched the information that I wanted to store in that field. With five people in the office adding data it would not be very pratical to pass out a memo that says User Field 1 actually means "A", User Field 2 actually means "B" etc. Then again maybe I just have it all wrong, and I just need to learn a little more about these schedules. Tom

Well I've seem to have wasted some time and money on this one, but I too would like to know in laymans terms. How do you get the user defined fields from door PIO to show up in the door schedule.

Here is the basic outline of the problem. A person (not I) created a drawing with five sheet layers. each sheet layer had several viewports. On day 1 they worked on pages 1 to 3. on day 2 they worked on pages 4 and 5. Some where along the way they accidently erased the viewports from pages 2 and 3. So now we have a current drawing with the information for pages 1, 4 and 5, and a backup drawing for pages 1,2, and 3. (whew!). How can I combine these drawings back into a complete set with the viewports intact. Any suggestions appreciated,

George I have already done that, Just don't know why they are not part of program. Thanks

Jeffe I am also fairly new to VW from AC and one of the first things I did was started changing the keyboard command assingments, ie L for line etc. The problem with that approach is that I started messing up access to other commands that I wanted to start using. I have seen the error of my ways, I fiqure it's better to leave AC to AC and to learn VW in it's own way rather than trying to force it to behave like another software. (the round hole square peg thing). That being said there are several commands from AC that I really miss, relative point to point copy and move being right near the top.

Ramon it seems to me that this how the keynotes features is supposed to work. If I have a number of viewports on a sheet layer, the note markers reside inside each of the viewports and the legend exists somewhere on the sheet layer.

jan15, you can slam AC for a lousy group command, at least I never found it to be very effective. But AC does have an excellent stretch, plus relative point to point copy and move functions. I downloaded these functions from VectorBits, but cannot see why they are not part of the basic VW tool set. I too would like to be able to do a stretch through section of a plan that would stretch all objects from one edge of a marquee, that would stretch all the objects that it crosses, windows, doors, groups, wall etc, without it distorting the proportions of any of the elements.

Eric are you using version 12. VW12 has the ability to set the class to something different for each viewport. ie you could set all the classes in one viewport to black, and in another all to red. You access it from the obj info pallette>classes when you select the viewport. This could be handy because you could have a viewport with all the lines set to black and still maintain your grey fills, and another viewport on the same drawing could be in colour.

Thanks Ray

Is it just me, or does anybody else wonder why VW Architect has a nuts and bolts PIO, while VW Machine Design has an enhanced nuts and bolts that includes wood screws. Maybe in the next release we can have woodscrews to use for detailing in VW Architect. That being said does anybody know where to get a good library of screw fasteners.

I played around with this a little this morning and I did get it to work. I may not be right but here is what I think my problem was, I think the names for the custom leaves in the library must follow a specific naming convention. For example "Slab HG-Name".

Robert thanks for the info, but I am still having a problem. When I select any of the custom leafs, they do not show up in the preview or the drawing. I am left with just the frame.

Is there a way to use the Door PIO in VW12 to create a door with a Vision lite to one side of the door. There are options to set the top rail and the bottom rail, but the Left and right rails are lumped together as one option. Any suggestions appreciated.

Originally posted by Skot: I still have yet to see how veiwports can be a useful tool for what we do. Every demo of viewports that I have seen is done from a 3D model, already prepared ahead of time. We are strictly 2D in my office. I hear everybody raving about viewports being the end-all, be-all, but I just don't get it. _____________________________________________________________ In the office where I just started working, they had each building section at 1:100 in one drawing, and then the detail sections at 1:25 in a separate drawings. Each time a change was made to the building section it also had to be made to the detail sections. What a pain in the ykw,. Since I had also just started working with VW previously from AC, I had really hard time convincing them that they needed to use viewports and sheet layouts. Here are the advantages, I only need to make the change to a building section in one place, since the detail wall section is only a blow-up viewport of the same thing (with extra info added of course). Also by using sheet views I can batch print all the design sheets from one file. This is a lot better than opening and printing 70 different files. Next job to convince the powers that be, to use a BIM approach on the next project. By the way all this information was created 2D.

On a drawing some of the callout notes were not done as all capitals. When the callout is selected the Capitilation>UPPER CASE option does not convert the text to all caps. Is there a way to do this. We are using VW 11.5 in our office.

ml, In my past lives I've worked for companies that fabricated both porcelain and copper panels. And I've had to produce shop drawings for several domes. Here is the reality, as far as I know it. You can draw your perfect onion shaped dome to your hearts content, but most likely whoever has to fabricate the pieces is going to do exactly what Propstuff suggested. It is almost impossible to fabricate a sphere, because the metal panels cannot be rolled in two directions. So what you end up with is a faceted shape that simulates a dome. So why not design it that way right from the start. If you want to see some examples of what I am talking about go to the website pgbell.com and check out their gallery.

Thanks for the help Charles.

I just discovered the notes database a few weeks ago (whew hoo). Now whenever I create a new note I add it to the database and place it on my drawing as a callout. What a great timesaver when you are repeating the same information over and over in different viewports. Here are my questions. If the notes database exists on my computer and we have five people working in the office on the same project: - how do we share the same notes database file? -how would we keep separate databases in sync.? (several of our people work on laptops which they use to work on at home).

jan15, alanmac, Antone, Sorry Antone, I didn't mean to get under your skin, about the real size thing. You are correct the units sets one to one is technically still not real size. This is a perception thing, in one's head I mean, when you are used to working in a virtual world. Also I said that I had to wrap my head around the layer to scale thing. I like this feature, I think it really simplifies things. It just to ok me a few hours to get used to idea that VW was doing pre, automatically what AC was doing post, manually. Although I did have a person call me for help one time. He said that he kept drawing a 2" x 2" square, and it kept coming out the wrong size in the this stupid, useless CAD program (AC). What I was able to finally figure out was that he was drawing a 2" x 2" square, then pulling out his scale and measuring it on his computer screen. I clued into what he was doing, when he asked how he was going to be able draw a part that was 20" long by 1/2" wide, and he only had 15" monitor.

jan15, Obviously you are an AC user. I've used the program since (version 9). With each new release, the first thing I do is buy a book and read through all the new procedures. I've always drawn one to one, most of my projects consist of a single drawing file, with all plans elevations, details etc, drawn somewhere in the model space and set up on paperspace tabs. Drawing everything real size then using viewports to set the scale is second nature to me, I forget that many people have trouble with this concept. I've only been using VW for 2 months now. The first hurdle that I had to overcome was wrapping my head around setting layers to a scale. But back to the colour thing. I still like using colour to control lineweight, because I am just so conditioned mentally to being able to see on my computer screen, cyan line = very thick, yellow = thick, red = thin etc (my lineweight settings)

Jan 15 says that CTB is an obsolete AutoCAD system. Thats news to me. A few versions back AutoCAD introduced the ability to set Lineweights by Layer, and they have always had the ability to give a plines a thickness. That being said everyone that I have worked with using AC, still use color as the method for plotting line thickness. Our office generates PDF files from VW, and we send these to the print shop, so far the quality has been good, and PDF seems to be consitant in that the PDF we print in house looks the same as the PDF from the print shop.

Originally posted by bclyeb: Drawing wall centerlines without regard to the fact that concrete, 2x4's etc. are not transparent and do not come with centering cross hairs. _______________________________________________________________ I agree with your statements, that was my point as well. It's interesting to note that as per your quote VW (as far as I now I'm fairly new to this program) does not allow you to dimension to the cavity lines. You can only dim to the finished face or centreline of the wall. The statement I've heard around this office is that guys in the field will simply have to do the math when they layout their tracks. I worked with a draftsperson who went to school in England, he told me that as part of his apprenticeship he had to spend six months working in the field on a construction site. I live in Canada and in the fifteen years I've been doing this work, I lucky if I've spent more than a total of one week on sites.

Here is my two cents worth. I went to college and received a diploma in Architectural technology. By the end of three years I was very proficient in CAD. When I started working I quickly found out that my CAD skills were light years ahead of most of the engineer and architects who I started to work for. I made fairly good money right out of school for this very reason. However I always felt that my education focused to much on the tools of CAD and not enough on the science of buildings and understanding how they work. What good is drawing a work of art on a computer or by hand if it doesn't make any since in the construction of the project.

I have printers with required paper sizes installed. The problem is that the virtual printer is a backdoor access to the MAC OS X operating system's ability to create PDF files. Unfortunatly this seems to default to letter size paper. In the mean time I will continue to hunt for a solution to batch printing. I also would like to be able to batch print sheets from multiple drawing files, the same way as the AutoCAD batch print utility works.