Chad McNeely

Was there something more to it than switching the doors to 1" thick, and a conventional blum hinge for a thick-door hinge?

If you want to create a class so that objects beyond the cutting plane use that class (for instance, a lighter lineweight so that the focus is on the sectioned items, and the background just provides non-distracting context), the latest version won't apply the "use class" setting to those objects beyond the cutting plane, and they all retain their own inappropriate lineweights.

Class overrides in viewports were made for this.

L-join the exterior walls, fix your drafting error/misaligned interior wall, then T-join the interior wall to the exterior wall. Do some component joining if you feel like it, it'll work in about half the cases (where there isn't some other Y-join if I recall). And the L/T-joined combo will likely need to be redone several times over the course of the drawing's lifespan, since it comes undone fairly easily.

...just remember that this will have no effect for "objects beyond cutting plane", due to a still unresolved SP2-introduced bug.

It is a little titillating to BE a forum topic though- you know, my name in lights sort of thing...

Hi Brent, I took a look at that file, and I'm pretty lost in it- you've got enough spare parts there to build a few houses with dormers, I think! Drilling into your dormer, there's extra extrudes left and right, and the final object is a generic solid, which I guess is what the loft with caps created? I think you're comfortable enough with the tools and geometry to do this work, but you may just have a file with so much baggage that it's hard to see what's going on. To get the texture to apply cleanly over the roof face+dormer, they need to be a single piece of 3d geometry, or a single surface. I haven't played as much as I should with the nurbs side of things- I find them very frustrating and non-intuitive- so I stick with adding solids and such because it better fits how I think and work. So for me, I'd be adding your dormer geometry to the roof surface geometry, and filleting between them. You dormer is in segments, which makes the fillet tough. Dunno how else I can help?

Sure, but use d, m, and s instead of the ˚,',".

This always seems to work best for me if starting from a design layer. Use the camera tool or the "Set 3d View" command to get the view you want, draw a rectangle (or whatever) that you will use as the cropping geometry. With the crop selected, select Create Viewport, it'll ask if you want to use the cropping object, say 'yes', then select the sheet layer you want. Once on the sheet layer, you can modify the view, the classes and layers visibilties, etc. You can also use the walkthrough and flyover tools inside the crop edit mode, which isn't necessarily intuitive. One caveat is that you can't adjust the crop while the scene is rendered, as this will kill the render cache.

Ooops, just saw your VW12.5 note. Here's a VW11 version of the soccer ball.

Tetrahedron is easy, just a 3-sided regular polygon, a 2d locus at its center, and multiple extrude where the height is about .816 [or (2/3)^.5] of one of the triangle's sides. Icosahedron is a bit trickier, and would likely involve folding up 3d triangles and adding them together. I recall going through this a few years back with a soccer ball (which is a truncated icosahedron) challenge. Ah, found it. Soccer ball file attached.

You sure? I don't like lots of the new wiz-bang snapping stuff, and was initially miffed that I had to dig for the non-intuitively renamed "nearest point on edge" setting to get the "along line" snap to work, but constraining perpendicular to 2d geometry works fine. Indeed my complaint might be that VW seems to strangely prioritize perpendicular above orthoganal sometimes (with the shift-key angle constraint), so that lines that could be quickly drawn in versions past must be more deliberately drawn today.

Specifically, if I understand the original problem correctly, after double-clicking one of the constraints buttons, select the "object" menu, and then check "nearest point on edge". Inexplicably, VW09 ships with this unchecked.

VW12 shows join lines between different geometries (wall/floor or wall/wall, for instance), even when they are perfectly flush. The ol' convert-copy-to-lines overlay is your friend in cases where the lines are a problem, since you can delete or modify the lines. I don't recall if VW12 had a stack-bond brick texture, but it's easy enough to create your own. Find a picture of one you like and follow the prompts. Right-click the resource browser, select "new resource in __", and you're off.

Do the walls show as a single red line at z=0 when in a 3d view, by chance? I've had a inserted plugin do that to me, while the wall appears fine in Top/Plan view.

Well, I figured it has to with , uh, updating the plugins somehow! I don't know what a "link" to a plug in object is though? There's lots o plugins in the files. I had one file I really wanted to bring into 2009. Basically by deleting about half of the drawing, saving-as, and then reopening the file deleting the other half and saving-as, I was able to get 2009 to open the two emasculated halves, and then I manually copied and pasted to reassemble them. It took a long time to get there. I don't want to hijack this thread into a diagnosis of my files necessarily, but I'd offer that if it's a problem for several of my files, it's not likely to be seamless for everybody else, either. Unless I alone have found the magic plugin that just won't update...

The files are too big (40 to 200 MB) to post- here's the screen shot of the point of failure. These files hang at the "updating plugins" phase. I've also seen the failed 3d geometry, but that doesn't prevent the file from opening.

But 2009 won't open several of my 2008 files. Haven't tried it with a wide range of older files though. Have you?

Did you report this? I don't have my pre-SP2 application laying around, and it's going to take a lot of work to manually fix my sections. I'm bummed!

Tapered extrude in that other case was for a 3d poly tracing of your roof's top surface (taper=0, extrude amount about an inch). Regular extrudes don't work on 3d polys, is all. Add this to the bit of geometry that defines your dormer, then you can fillet the "valley". I made the dormer out of a straight extrude, which I rotated to the slope needed. Do you see that vertically slicing the rotated extrude creates a different front profile than what you started with? Same idea as cutting a 2x4 at an angle- the width of the cut face is greater than the original object's width, by a factor of 1/cos(angle). Or the width of the original object needs to be reduced by a factor of cos(angle) before mitering, if the exposed shape is to be a particular size and shape. In the example you gave, assuming there is a particular shape you want the window to have, assuming sloping the dormer at 45deg, if you start by tracing the window shape, you need to reduce the height of that tracing by cos45 = .707, then extrude that tracing (closed, solid fill, right?), then tilt and split/subtract, etc.

Make sure the initial 2d poly has a solid fill. Extrude it from a front view, extra long. Turn to the side view, rotate to your desired angle (45deg.?). From the side view, either split, section, or subtract solids to get your plumb/vertical face. If needed, drill down into the original components to adjust for the skewed front shape, or remember at time of creation to vertically scale it by .707 for your 45deg. slope.

Is this the "Show aquisition hints" (from VW Preferences>Interactive) box, above and to the left as you hover over stuff?

Curved walls with opening symbols? Cased opening "windows" with zero jambs, modify the 3d opening geometry to flare radially? And the shelves sure look like curved walls, too...

I've gone back and forth a few times between demo-by-class and demo-by-layer, and I'm currently back in the demo-by-layer camp. I do keep existing to remain and new in a shared layer, seperated by class. Current reasons are: 1. It's easier to stack a section viewport with just the demo walls under my regular building sections, with the demo layer's section cut having different properties than the existing and new. I don't want to show demo stuff beyond the section plane, I don't want any solid fills, I want dashed lines, etc. And the demo VP rarely needs updating, reducing re-render times. Most of this can be achieved through overrides within a section viewport showing new, existing, and demo together, but not all, as easily. 2. VW still has problems with coincident wall ends, either breaking their joins or joining to infinity, even between grouped and locked walls. Seperating them by a layer fixes this. 3. I retain a copy of the entire as-built plan in the file since the demo walls are never deleted. This is often a quick and handy reference. Seperating the demo stuff by layer keeps "others" from accidently clipping, trimming, or corrupting the as-built.

In the attributes pallet, the part where you can set a line's thickness or dash style. Between those two is a "---XX---" line style. With a line or arc selected, selecting that line style will change the object into a dimension. An arc so converted has the angle as the reported value. I think Ray was really itching to ask for your computer specs, but was flummoxed that you already included them in your sig. ~