jamesmise

Thanks!

With a design layer viewport it would be nice to be able to open a palette with both classes and layers. When I need to make an adjustment I go to the OIP and select layers. Turn layers on and off. Close that. Go back to the OIP and select classes. Turn those on and off. They should all appear as they do on the navigation palette. A tab for layers and a tab for classes. The navigation palette is awesome.

Is there a way to adjust the quality of Fast Renderworks? Especially the edges. It's much worse than 2015. Way worse then Open GL. I might be missing something. I can't see any use for it. Might as well turn on textures and shadows in Open GL. Jim

Hayden: I'm just getting back into Animation Works. I used it a few years ago. The new version has the option to save small portions of the animation separately and you can put them together later. Much like they do when rendering films. Did you get what you want when you did it in Open GL? Is it only Final Renderworks that is a problem? Have you tried it without lighting? I'll be able to offer more help in the coming weeks. Jim

The backup files are pretty much the same as saving the original file. If I crash, I first open the original file to see when I last did the manual save. If I see that I'm missing a lot of work because I didn't manually save for awhile, I just open up the most recent backup file. As soon as I crash, I note the time to see how recent the backup files are. And I quickly got into the habit of manually saving before any really complex operations. In addition I start a completely new version periodically. So I might start with Drawing1. But at the beginning of the next week, I might save it as Drawing2 and continue. This is good if you want to go back farther than the autobackup to fetch something. The Drawing1 files will never be overwritten. Jim

Fixed thanks to a thread elsewhere. The columns on the palette had gotten resized to 0. Have to slowly grab the top left corner of the first column and drag it to the right. Do this for each column. Rolled back to Windows 7 and Reinstalled VW for NOTHING!

Update to the above. I rolled back Windows 10 to Windows 7 which was easy. Took about 30 minutes. However my navigation palette is still blank. I should have heeded the Vectorworks warning to not upgrade in the middle of a project. Windows 10 looked really good. Just this annoying little problem. Does anyone know what little file I might delete so the Navigation palette would be rebuilt? Jim

Running VW 2015 fine on Windows 10 for 2 days. But now my navigation palette is blank. Classes - blank Layers - blank Sheet Layers - numbered but no titles Viewports - listed but with no titles Saved Views - Blank References - Blank

I wish that select similar would work for objects that are in groups. I use a lot of groups which makes the select similar tool not as useful. For simply counting the number of a particular object, I copy everything to a new file, ungroup all, and then use select similar. Then I can see how many of an object I have. I then dispose of that file. Jim

Patrick: See my post in this thread. You might check to see if the dimension class is active in the navigation palette. Even though it is active in your viewport, I have found that it needs to be active in the navigation palette also to use "select similar".

I was trying to use select similar during editing of viewport annotations. I have a plan of data cables each color coded by length and each length in its own class. So I was trying to figure out how many of each cable I needed. The classes for the different cables were not active in the Navigation Palette. So that prevented me selecting them. I can see them, I can click on them, I can edit them, I can move them, but I cannot "select similar" them. Evidently select similar is tied to the navigation palette. So even though those classes are active in my viewport, they need to be active in the navigation palette to use select similar.

Is anyone having a problem with the Select Similar tool after the 2015 upgrade? It's not working at all for me.

Is there a way to edit the field of view symbol that represents a Renderworks Camera in plan view. On the plan for our theatre, I would love to have a colored circle on various seats throughout the theatre. You just double click the circle to see the view from that seat. The way I'm doing it now isn't all that bad. I make the field of view symbol very small and use a large text size with the seat number or location. So you click on the text to see that view. See attached.

Kevin: That seems like an awful lot of layers. I haven't had any problems editing weirdly oriented objects. The set working plane tool works well as well as the rotate view tool. And once I have sheet layer viewports set up, I use them as "saved views". I can instantly go back to a useful orientation on the design layer. My current project has hundreds of walls with various d?cor. It was cumbersome to navigate until I got each wall set up on an elevations sheet layer. Now I can go to any wall in a view perpendicular to the wall. Love your tips! I use them all the time. Jim

Thanks for your help. I can't believe I haven't run into this problem in the first 15 years of using Vectorworks. Well I guess creating sections from viewports hasn't been available that long.

Here is one possible work around. I can make the wall into a symbol. Place a copy of the symbol on another design layer and rotate it. Then create the elevation from this design layer instead of the original one. Kind of weird but it would work and editing the symbol will update both design layers as well as the sections created. Any thoughts?

So I've attached a VW drawing as well as PDFs of the same. I rotated one wall so its not facing North, South, East, or West. It is impossible to create the same section views as I have for the unrotated wall. This is a pain, since we have many funky angled walls in our building. Don't ask why I would need those particular sections. I just created them to make the point.

Wow. Good Stuff. It would be great if objects had some sort of file size in the oip. I had a designer give me a huge file once, and after deleting objects one at a time and checking the resulting file size, I discovered a 50mb piece of trim!

Viewports created with a low smoothing angle did not update when the smoothing angle was raised on the design layer. This had to be adjusted in the background render settings of each viewport.

Answered my own question. In Line Render Options, increase the smoothing angle. Thanks. Your Welcome.

So to reduce file size I was converting some of my extrude along paths to meshes or generic solids. But the hidden line rendering shows all the lines in the mesh or generic solid which is not a clean look in my elevations. Is there any other way to render a mesh so it looks as clean as an extrude? The attached picture shows a mesh on the left and an extrude along path on the right. By the way, to convert an extrude along path to a generic solid. Convert to Mesh. Convert to Nurbs. Ungroup. 3d Power Pack - Stitch and Trim. Jim

So I have many angled walls in my drawing. I create viewports to show elevations of these walls on a sheet layer. However I cannot create section viewports using any of these sheet layer viewports because as the pop up message says "Section viewport could not be created because the viewport you are sectioning must be in one of the following views: top/plan, top, bottom, right, left, front, or back." So I can't create any section viewports for any of the walls in the building? None of my elevations have the views listed above because they are angled walls to begin with. Am I missing something here? How do you show detail sections in an object that is not facing North, South, East or West?

Thank you Peter. You solved it. There was a handle to a text box in the annotations that was way out to the side. My text box was way bigger than it needed to be. When I clicked on the text box I saw the handle appear on the other side of the page. Thank you so much! This has been bugging me for years. When you are done entering text, the box should resize to the text!

The area taken by my viewports on a sheet layer seem bigger than they need to be. In fact, when they aren't refreshed, the red lines go way beyond the objects in the viewport. I've tried turning off layers and classes within the viewport to see if that makes a difference. It might have been something invisible when I created the viewports. I tried adding a crop and that doesn't change the size of the actual viewport. When I create viewports, I don't use a crop. I have only the classes and layers active that I need, so there is nothing else to crop out. Attached is a screenshot of one of these. The orange highlighted area for the viewport of #5 is bigger than it needs to be. It extends over #4. This doesn't affect anything other than being really annoying when my viewports aren't refreshed and the lines are everywhere.