willofmaine

So are you saying that nodes that worked in previous versions of Vectorworks no longer work with 2021?...

@m.graf and @AlanW : Here's what I wanted to accomplish (attached VW file). It's used for creating curved slopes when working with DTMs. For example a curved swale that wants to have a constant slope. Or even the edges of a walkway with a complex shape, in which case the 2D plan of the walkway can be converted to a NURBS and used to replace the control geometry. A stake object can optionally be used to find the high and low points at each end according to the DTM, and then, either way, the high and low points can be entered in the OIP. The slider (thanks to @sbarrett's "Festoon" strings compliments of Alan) makes it easy to adjust the number of points along the curve; additional points can be added if desired (beyond the slider's limit of 25). The final step is to snap a 3D polygon to the points and use that as source data for the DTM. The 2D path stays down at Z=0 which is fine; it makes it easier to see and snap to the points. Thanks for your help! 06-3D Points along Curve-2.4.0.1.vwx

I think I got it working! Hopefully someday Marionette PIO fields themselves will be reportable in worksheets, both for simplicity and so that we can have two-way functionality. In the meantime, Thanks Pat!

Thanks Pat! I'll take a look at those.

I just gave it a go with the "Set Record Field" node, but no luck. Can you point me in any particular direction for how one goes about storing the values?... Thanks!

Is it possible to report on the OIP (input) fields for a Marionette object in a worksheet? I can't seem to find a way... @Pat Stanford?

@Don Seidel Good, so it's not just me that has stumbled big time with an inability to navigate in TM. The "dinosaur tech at snail speed" doesn't bother me too much partly because (at least 'til now...) I just didn't know any better, and partly because I preview my Renderworks renderings at very low resolution and final renderings are *relatively* quick (minutes vs. the hours of years bygone). Though it looks like now we're talking seconds (if that...) instead of minutes... Based on quick glimpses at their websites, Redshift and Octane look interesting. I kinda feel like, at least for me, TM has just been a glimpse into the near future. New to TM, I don't know anything other than the Datasmith transfer method, which worked surprisingly well when I imported my Vectorworks model. But then (even with the "SketchUp" option) I spent three minutes just trying to orbit my model...

@zoomer & @jeff prince I looked into Blender a little (so I even have a sense of it's two rendering engines! - though I didn't know Cycles + Mac GPU isn't a thing...) and Blender sure does look pretty involved... so no big boy pants for me; and not looking to get involved with the monster of a software that it sounds like Unreal Engine is. Especially because, after I duke it out with Vectorworks, I'm able to create very respectable renderings, without even leaving the software. The appeal of Twinmotion - it's extreme simplicity - seems to be it's downfall: it's too simple to even accommodate a second option for orbit control! (((I just found a response to my question at the Twinmotion Forum, and someone suggested switching the Navigation from Twinmotion to something else - for the "SketchUp" option only the middle mouse button (without shift) is necessary, and that seems to prevent the random zooming problem. It's still difficult to activate, but it does seem to help quite a lot; so maybe there's hope after all...))).

So... are there any good alternatives to Twinmotion for working with Vectorworks on a Mac? You know, ideally something only a little more complicated than Twinmotion... complicated enough to have different user interface options, such as, in particular, more than one way to orbit...

I had no idea! That's great! I just experimented with a couple of Kohler sinks; the first one wouldn't convert, but I was surprised, the second one did! Excellent.

@jeff prince Thanks for that tip; I don't think I'd seen that specifically mentioned anywhere. But even when I make sure an object is selected, the problem persists.

After looking at the Twinmotion forum, I've found that reducing my quality settings to "low" keeps the fans quiet. I tried "medium" and the fans were quiet, but that was only for a minute or so. It seems odd that a software that I would think needs to be all about efficiency just seemingly randomly works at hundreds of frames per second, even for still images, and that it puts full demand on resources even for one or two simple objects. Not that any of that necessarily matters because, sadly, the inability to orbit makes it pretty much an unusable software...

I only have what I think is a reasonable sense of what Twinmotion can do. It certainly looks very cool and very capable. But beyond that UnReal Engine, Epic, and the gaming environment are all a mystery to me. I downloaded Twinmotion for a trial run, and ran into some frustrating issues: 1.) I could barely get the middle button on the mouse to orbit and pan as expected. Sometimes it would work, but more often it wouldn't. Often when holding down the shift key and the middle button in an effort to orbit, instead I'd find the model approaching or receding. I restarted the software and the computer a couple of times, and I tried a different mouse, none of which helped. 2.) Also, my fans kept revving up, even though I'd imported very simple geometry, and even when I wasn't actively doing anything. On the one hand, maybe that's to be expected with realtime rendering? On the other hand, when I do heavy-duty Vectorworks renderings, I don't hear my fans at all. Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Thanks! Will

Often, but not always, I can add a shape, such as a rectangle or a polygon, to a Space Object to change its size to conform to repositioned walls. See attached screen recording. What am I missing? Even when I first set the boundary to "Manual," the areas I tried to add are ignored. VWIS213 0.1-No Can Add Areas to Space Object-2001-015W.mov

Hi Steve, Thank you for looking into this! On the one hand, I appreciate that a prominent advantage of Vectorworks is its flexibility, and that even if a feature reasonably doesn't work for one user, it may very well work for others, in which case user options can be paramount. But on this particular issue, I can't think of why anyone would ever want to be able to work three-dimensionally in an orthogonal view, which is inherently two-dimensional: anything changed in the axis perpendicular to the screen can't be graphically represented as a change (for example, in Top view, if you change the height of an extrude from 1" to 5,000', it still looks exactly the same (by "work three-dimensionally" here I mean visually; I'm not suggesting to eliminate the ability to numerically enter info, such as the height of that extrude, or for the "Move 3D Selection" tool). I'm not saying there isn't a reason one would want to work three-dimensionally in an orthogonal view, I just can't think of one, and it seems unlikely that there'd be one. I say all of that hopefully to the end of simplifying things, maybe as follows: Make it so that when working in orthogonal views (Top, Front, Right, Bottom, Back & Left), all snapping and all subsequent points are restricted to a plane parallel to the screen, and that plane is established by the value of the coordinate on the axis that is perpendicular to the screen of the first snap. That was a mouthful... so for example: let's say I have a NURBS curve, and one of its end points has a Y value of 120". If I go to a Front View, the Y axis is perpendicular to the screen. When I snap on that end point to create a new NURBS curve, the first vertex of the new NURBS curve, and all subsequent vertices (regardless of whether or not I click on another object) should use that Y value of 120" (which is a plane parallel to the screen)(and assuming the view isn't changed). Similarly, modifications to any of those vertices should stay in that same plane parallel to the screen. And I'm including points that are created even when not snapping to another object because of the following behaviors, where the first click is to a 3D point with a value other than zero on the axis perpendicular to the screen (let's differentiate between the "parallel plane," and the "zero plane," defined as where points have a value of 0 on the axis perpendicular to the screen): (((((Okay, "forget" this paragraph. At first I thought that 3D Polygons and NURBS curves could be initially drawn on the plane parallel to the screen, and that only modifications would move their vertices to the zero plane. But when I proceeded to finish my description, I found the behavior was inconsistent, for both the 3D Polygon and the NURBS curves. Sometimes, but not always, both would stay in the parallel plane when initially drawn. Mostly they wouldn't. For the 3D Polygon, it seems drawing the second of three legs vertically will keep all of its vertices in the parallel plane (shown second in the screen recording, attached). If the three legs are all drawn at angles, all but the first vertex fall down to the zero plane. This seems like inconsistent and unexpected behavior to me. It made troubleshooting kind of frustrating...))))). Okay, having read that paragraph and, hopefully having now forgotten it... the first part of the first sentence does however still stand: I'm including points that are created even when not snapping to another object as being among those that should always stay in the plane parallel to the screen (i.e., in the screen recording, the behavior shown in the second attempt is what's desired). Phew. In conjunction with all of that, just eliminate the availability of the "Snap to Working Plane" mode of the snap palette for orthogonal views. The description for that mode says "Snaps and projects smart cursor points to the working plane," so I thought I'd try setting a working plane to the vertical face of an extrude and see if I could draw a 3D Polygon in that working plane, but when I snapped to other geometry, while there was an indication of that object's projected point on the working plane, the 3D Polygon's vertex was created on the geometry that I'd snapped to, and not on the working plane. So that kinda threw me: what's the purpose of the projected point? But! This is another subject, for another day! I hope this is helpful. I had a difficult time articulating everything... 11-Inconsistent 3D Polygon-10W.mov