Roch Comeau

That would be most welcomed!

This is an old thread, and I am going off-topic. I have been a VW customer for a few years (I don't recall when I started, but probably 4-5 years ago) and while I hoped to use it to design my "dream cottage" one day, machine design is what paid the software bill. After years of trying to make this work, I bit the bullet and purchased SolidWorks and put it on my Windows VMWare. This was largely to be compatible with the machine shop that manufactures most of our stuff, but I was also tired of paying for a tool that was really destined for someone else. I have to say that once you get how to design in it, it is a whole new world. This makes VW little better than Google-sketch. I am more productive, the parts end up better and combined with my uPrint+ 3D printer, I can really prototype fast and make effective use of my time. Sorry to rag on VW on their own board, but I have been a paying customer for years and they should know why my upgrade revenue stopped coming. I was reluctant to adopt a Windows solution, and other than it being a Windows product, I have no regrets. Maybe I'll come back to the architect forums when I dust off VW to design that cottage... Regards.

Hi, Just an update. Using the "Map Line Weights to Colors" seems to have worked. Otherwise, VW does not seem to use any of the colors assigned to the objects as part of the export (all the primitives get assigned the same color, which has nothing to do with the colors used in Vectorworks). Kind of a hack I figure that was developed for earlier versions of DXF? Now I have to assign different line-widths as a hidden code to really mean color, then asign the colors to the line-widths on export. It would be nice if VW were smart enough to use the colors assigned to the primitives in the export, which should be an easy thing. Thanks for the help! rcomeau

Hi, We recently implemented DXF object import in our medical visualization to simplify importing objects created using CAD applications, including Vectorworks. I have found that the objects exported in Vectorworks do not have any color attributes. As a test, if I export something as DXF and re-import into Vectorworks, the colors have disappeared. I tried changing the DXF version in the export dialog, however that does not seem to work. There does not seem to be any color related settings to tweak either. Can someone tell me if this is supposed to work, and if so, is there an obvious setting that I amy be missing? Thanks in advance, Roch Comeau

Hi, I was hoping to avoid the PC but thanks to VMWare... I had tried Quick4D but it crashed loading my data. I tried something called Photo3DBrowser (or something like that, I don't have Windows running at the moment) and it was able to convert it and using PolygonSmasher reduced the 200k+ polygons to something manageable. The interface was really weird though. MeshToSolid looks interesting (maybe give me a nice NURBS in the end) so I'll give it a try before deciding which to purchase. Thanks for the pointers! Cheers,. rcomeau

The OS has 2 places to look for QL plug-ins (3 actually). /Library/QuickLook (both ~/LibraryQuickLook and /System/Library/QuickLook and in the Application/Contents/Library/QuickLook. It is generally a bad thing having 2 quicklook plug-ins for one file type as it is completely unpredictable which plug-in will get the call from the OS to generate the preview. Moving it out of the application bundle means that after the next update, you will likely end up with one QL plug-in in the app bundle (where it belongs as it was where the developer put it) and in whatever /Library you put it in. You'll forget that you did that in the week/months from now and will spend a lot of time pulling your hair our wondering why you are not getting the new functionality you were expecting. Cheers, rcomeau

Hi, Thanks for the idea, but unfortunately that is not really possible. It took me an hour to write an export function to my image segmentation software, but has no CAD features. What I want is to use VectorWorks to do all the mechanical design (what it was designed to do) and have some actual bone data extracted from MR images so I can design the interface between the two in VectorWorks as well as to have real medical models for illustrative purposes. Regards, Roch

Thats a question that will yield different answers from different people. I don't think it would make a difference for VectorWorks. If it is a new computer (they delivered it with Tiger installed?) then I'd go for the upgrade&install if you have already installed a bunch of programs on it (or have set up several users already), otherwise I'd do a clean install. Al always, back up your critical stuff first! Cheers, rcomeau

Hello, I would like to be able to import STL files into VectorWorks. Unless I am missing something, this does not look possible. If it is indeed possible, can someone point me to the right procedure? Otherwise, does anyone know of a free/inexpensive program that can convert STL to something importable to VectorWorks? I am generating the STL files myself using some medical visualization software to extract anatomical structures (e.g. bone) and want to use VectorWorks to add implant parts that we design. STL is handy because it is used in CAD/CAM to actually make the parts. Thanks for any info. Roch