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mmoriarty

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Posts posted by mmoriarty

  1. All my lights are showing ONLY in Plan View. If the light is selected I can see an orange bounding box in other views but can't see the light itself. Includes Spots and Area Lights. Have I got something set wrong? I have "Display Light Objects" set to "Always". What am I missing?

    Vectorworks 2015 SP2, Spotlight, Renderworks

    Imac, OSX 10.10.2

  2. I'm having the same problem . . .

    Anything exported to pdf will have certain fonts garbled when printed from Acrobat.

    Printed directly from VW is okay.

    PRINTED to pdf from VW (as opposed to Export to pdf)is okay (except pdf file size is much larger).

    PDF that is garbled printed from Acrobat is okay when printed from Preview.

    Some kind of problem between Export to PDF in VW and printing the result pdf from Acrobat.

    This only happens in VW 2015 (I just tried 2014 and it worked fine.)

    OSX 10.9.5 imac 14,3 - 2.9 GHz Core i5, 16GB

  3. I have been using VW 2008 for a long time but now have VW 2013. I frequently print a pdf with a plan view image and and iso or perspective view rendered with Renderworks as Fast Renderworks background and Hidden Line foreground or just Renderworks using the "Cartoon" setting. THis works pretty well most of the time in VW 2008. In VW 2013 the Renderworks image renders okay but when I go to print the sheet it takes FOREVER . . . from 15 minutes up to ctrl-alt-del 'cuz I can't wait any longer. If it ever does print the pdf is very large. What would be a 1MB pdf for VW 2008 is 6 or 7MB from VW 2013.

    Can anyone tell me why this works in VW2008 and not in VW 2013.

    BTW: I would also like to know why if I open the resulting pdf in Illustrator, the renderworks image is composed of hundreds of images . . . one image for every row of pixels. Why isn't it just one image?

  4. I'm using VW 2008 sp3, Spotlight, Windows XP.

    The problem with exporting a pdf from VW is that when its opened in Illustrator it does not retain the font information (fonts are substituted and the original font name is not retained anywhere so you can't even replace the substituted fonts with the correct ones.) This also happens with the 3rd party pdf driver I referenced in a previous post.

    I realize this doesn't seem like a big problem but the graphics people use the pdf output frequently (using Illustrator on a Mac)and it drives them crazy trying to track down the correct fonts or having to entirely recreate the text.

    Its not worth pursuing. I was just hoping someone had run into this before and had a simple fix.

  5. I always print pdf's of my sheet layers and up until the other day I would get a dialog box and could give the pdf a different file name and browse to the location I wanted the pdf saved to. Now, I get the same dialog box but pdf ends up on my C drive and the name is the same as the VW file with a .pdf extension instead of the .vwx

    This is a VW thing. . .all my other applications still print pdf's like always. I just upgraded to SP3 this morning hoping that would fix the problem but no luck.

    Has anyone else had this happen and is there fix?

    I still can make a pdf but now it requires a few extra steps (finding the file on the C drive, renaming and moving to the correct folder.) So, I guess its not a huge problem but it sure slows things down.

  6. I still cannot find a way to map the earth image onto a sphere. For one thing, the Sphere mapping mode in VW appears to only map half a sphere so its not really spherical mapping. I thought the cylinder mode would work with my rectangular image but I couldn't find any way to control the height of the cylinder without also affecting how it wraps horizontally. This appears to me to be a problem like isometric dimensioning. It should be simple but in VW its a requires a long series of complicated steps. When I have time I guess I'll go back and find out how to map an image on to a hemisphere (which I think might work in VW). If that works I can divide my earth image in 2 and make 2 separate hemispheres and put them together. It just seems way more complex than it needs to be.

  7. I understand that. The problem is the "Final adjustments". I have tried using various mappings ( perimeter, sphere, cylinder, plane. You would think it would be sphere but you would be wrong.) and tried altering my earth image. The original image was a jpg rectangle, 2"w x 1"h. I have tried changing the image to different aspect ratios and altered the size and other parameters in the renderworks texture editor and the OIP. This should be a simple operation. If anyone has done this successfully I would really like to know how. If possible, supply details. Telling me to apply the texture, then adjust in OIP does not help much.

  8. I'm trying to map a globe image of the earth to a sphere with a hole in it. I have tried making the sphere in a couple of different ways but I cannot seem to get the map of the earth to wrap around the sphere. I have been working on this for well over an hour. This is literally a 30 second job in a couple of other 3d programs I use. What am I doing wrong?

    I'm using VW 2008

  9. I searched for something about this but couldn't find any other posts about this problem. Sometimes my saved views stop working. I save a file and then open it the next day and when I click on a saved view all I get is a small cross in the center of the work area. The cross stays the same size when I zoom in and out. This will happen to all the save views in that file. I have not been able to find a way to get them back. Fortunately many of the Saved Views get used as Viewports on Sheetlayers so I can get them back by going back to the same view via the Viewport then making a new Saved View. I'm just wondering if anyone else has this problem and/or what the cause might be.

    VW 2008

    Windows XP

  10. Thanks, I didn't know I could do that. I added Create Layer Link to my View menu. Its difficult to select the Layer Link in anything other than Plan View (I have to use the alt key) and its not as easy to position it as in v12. It does not work as well as in v12 but at least its possible in 2008.

  11. In v12, set your object to top, left, right, or front view. Create a new layer and make sure its in Plan view. Make you objects layer visible and create dimensions on the new layer. Go back to your object layer and turn off visibility for the dimension layer. In the object layer add a layer link to the dimension layer. Unlock the layer link and it becomes a plane you can position and rotate on any axis. You just need to position it next to your object. I used to do this frequently in v12 but then I "upgraded" to v2008 (Lucky 13)and they removed layer links. . . a feature I used all the time. Now you can have Viewports on layers but you can't rotate the viewports on all axis like the layer links. Now I have to down save to v12 to do this. Why did they remove Layer Links? Good question.

  12. My previous post was written after a few frustrating days and long nights of trying to produce what should have been a simple rendering. After a couple of drinks with friends and a good nights sleep I regret writing at a time when I was not thinking clearly.

    My lack of CAD experience and basic drafting concepts and procedures makes learning VW look like an overwhelming task. If it can be used design homes, office buildings, factories, etc, it must be a pretty powerful tool in the right hands. In my hands it has been and exercise in frustration. In the past all I had to do was make a nice picture and everyone was happy. I'm now in the position of having to provide the details of how to construct a concept drawing in the real world. Clearly, I'm in over my head.

    As I said in that post I have used various graphics packages for 2d and 3d and have never had this much trouble getting comfortable with the interface. As several people pointed out, all software has its shortcomings and with use one gets accustomed to them and finds workarounds.

    I appreciate the comments of all those who replied. Some were attempts to pacify the obviously deranged individual who wrote the original post. Others put me in my place for each comment I made. All were fair in light of my outrageous tirade.

    I sincerely apologize for my comments.

  13. Yup, VW is amazing! I'm not a CAD person but I have been using 3d modeling & rendering software for 15 years. I'm designing trade show displays now and need to be able to supply accurate build drawings along with great renderings. I have been able to do the renderings with inexpensive 3d software. One of my favorites is Carrara. I can build a display to precise dimensions and using Photoshop and Illustrator for the textures, I can render the design in high resolution. This sometimes takes a couple of days to do.

    Since I now need to supply build drawings with my renderings I decided to get VW. I was thinking I would be able to design, dimension and render all with VW. As far as I'm concerned now, I don't think its very good for any of those things.

    Yup, VW is amazing! I have been using it for a few months now and it amazes me every day. They must have put a lot of time and effort into making VW as difficult and convoluted as possible. There is no way that software could be this bad by accident.

    I can't understand how anyone could use VW on a regular basis and not go insane. It takes forever to do the simplest thing. And rendering is incredibly slow. Its the 21st century for cryin' out loud. No 3d renderer should take this long for results this bad. The soft shadows are a joke. If you are adding lit fog, area lights (required if you want any kind of decent soft shadows) or any other special lighting effects, you might as well take the rest of the day off 'cause its gonna take a LONG tome to get a rendering of decent resolution.

    Yup, VW is amazing!

    The 2d tools are worse than any 2d program I have ever seen. Drawing even simple curves is maddening. Didn't these guys ever look at Illustrator? 2d drawing can be simple. Look at the scale tool (Scale from point). The only way to scale symmetrically is to click in the center of the object and drag a corner away at a 45 degree angle. In every other 2d drawing program you can click anywhere in the drawing and drag using a modifier key to scale any selected object proportionally. In VW there is no way to position the corner of a square where you need it then scale it symmetrically from that corner. A simple task in even the most rudimentary 2d vector software. I can't believe how many simple tasks are made into complex ordeals in VW. Even setting up the document or printing something takes going to 3, 4 or even more dialog boxes which are frequently buried in some item under what you would think is a completely unrelated main menu.

    Yup, VW is amazing. Working in 3d? Wouldn't it be nice to have a split screen so you have an orthogonal view of each different axis while you are moving things around in 3d? Seems like a pretty simple idea and it makes working in 3d pretty easy. No such luck in VW. How about having an easily rotated perspective view that updates in real time while you are working in another window in orthogonal view so you can see where things are going. No, in VW you have to switch views back and forth. Move a little bit, switch views, move a little bit in that view, switch again. Where is the hide command? Every other software I have used has an easy way to click on an object, use a keyboard command to hide it temporarily, then bring it back with another quick keyboard command.

    How about that manual? I got VW Fundamentals and Designer Series (I got the Spotlight module.) The manuals and CD's are a little help but not much. It's tough to write a decent manual for poorly designed software with a near worthless interface.

    There is so much wrong with VW it would take me days to come up with a list of the most obvious problems but the biggest problem for me is that as a rendering tool it isn't even mediocre, its absolutely awful.

    It looks like I need to do some research and find a better solution than VW. I was told that VW was as like Autocad but a lot cheaper. I guess you get what you pay for. I think I'll have to take a closer look at Autocad & 3D Studio and some other packages. There has to something better than this.

    If any of you people who rave about VW read this and need another license, keep checking eBay. I'm going to need to dump this piece of garbage before too long.

    I should also post this everywhere I possibly can and maybe prevent some other person from wasting their time and money on this.

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