Art V

+2 (though I think something similar has been requested before, last year, though I'm not sure if it was exactly the same request)

It's even worse... When you do a duplicate mirror and reverse the duplicated normals the numpad works, with or without changing the direction of the normal With a non-duplicate mirror it does not work as mentioned above. So I tried with a normal NURBS curve, without any mirroring and tried with original direction and reversed direction. It had trouble with the numpad too with a reversed direction. So I tried again with a rectangle converted to NURBS surface, again without mirroring but with normal and reversed direction. It appears if the direction is clockwise, the numpad will work for setting the view. Once the normal is counter-clockwise the numpad will fail for setting a view. However, if you move the objects a little when the normal is in a direction where the numpad does not work (i.e. counter-clockwise), then the numpad works again for setting a view direction after this move of those objects. (I've submitted the info from Bas and the above in a bug report)

Congratulations Jim, it is a promotion well deserved. Not to spoil the party, but we won't be bugging you any less now you got promoted :grin:

Nigel, thanks for the suggestion. I had mentioned meshlab in another thread for fixing (triangulated) meshes but didn't know it could be used for point clouds as well.

+1

What I would prefer instead is some tag for added classes and instead of a prompt to make it visible in all references that it will notify the referencing viewports that classes have been added to referenced files and that in the subscribing file you will be asked whether you want to make this new class visible or not. Sometimes you want the newly added class to be visible in all referencing viewports and sometimes only in a few so a more fine-grained control would be nice.

Just leaking features? Not flooding us with features? That doesn't bode well for new features to be added in the next few years. :eek:

I'm not familiar with Revit worksheets but if it is similar to splitting rows and columns in Excel then +10 from me. If you mean having a long worksheet split in multiple parts to show the columns/rows extending from the layout in another column, that can already be done manually but I agree having a one button solution would be very helpful too as it would save quite a bit of time.

Yes I would have expected SP4 not to be released so soon after SP3, I was a bit surprised about the SP4 mentioned in mk's signature, but it could have been an intermediate patch for a serious bug or something like that, so that is why I was wondering.

Oddly enough when I turn up the tolerance it removes plenty of points, but at the cost of a more or less disfigured shape depending on the amount of tolerance.

This sounds to me it might be a bit of a bug in the sense you you can select things you should not be able to select for creating a properly working section viewport. Maybe Jim can give a bit more definitive answer on this.

Does it actually have to be a roof object or would a a modelling of the roof do? Modelling this roof was not that difficult in VW and it may require some tweaking at the edges for a better result. (Two extrusions for the ground shape and the curved roof, intersect the solids and then shell solid to create the roof itself). I can upload my trial file if you want.

Yes, the text styles can use some improvement. Any change to text makes it apparently lose the attached text style but when updating the text style then that piece of text updates as well after all. It's a bit annoying as you can never be sure whether a text style has been applied or not and if yes whether it is still attached or not. Now that tech is going to look at this, I'd like to request that text styles assigned to a dimension style are honoured for all its settings, including text colour. That way it should hopefully be possible to have dimension text show in a different colour than the dimension lines.

Count me in for support on this one, I think it may have been requested before but it doesn't hurt to keep requesting it until it is implemented

Yes in this case I typed the elevation at the loci position, because this is a small site. There is another way to create a site model which is to create and ID,X,Y,Z delimited text file (basically the x,y and z coordinates and an ID label field in a tab or comma separated text file) eg. P1,0,0,10 P2,0,5,9 etc. In the text file there should preferably no header line (the line showing ID, X, Y, Z and Desc in the worksheet) P1 being the ID, 0,0,10 being x,y,z of point P1 Then choose Landmark>Survey Input>Import Survey File Select the text file and choose ID,Easting,Northing,Elevation,Description as the format and make sure it creates stake objects. (also set the delimiter, units etc) The stake objects can then be used to create a site model, but they can also show the X,Y,Z coordinates (and of course ID) or just e.g. the Z-coordinate. In the subsequent dialog for the stake object you can choose elevation as label reference Then duplicate the stakes and create a site model, move it to the back and then in 2D top/plan view you can see the locations of the elevations with the elevation of that point shown. This would be a bit more convenient for larger sites than your 5x5 grid site. See attached file for an example. (It uses the same coordinates as the previous example so that you can compare)

It probably cropped back up, as I noticed autobackups too sometimes when rendering viewports. Not related to the question, but is there already a SP4 for VW2016? A check updates does not show an available SP4 (I'm on SP3)

+1 But for that to work properly they would also need to fix the representation of wireframe geometry for some objects as that does not always show the correct outermost outline.

The simplify poly does work, but it takes experimenting with the settings and may still not generate what you would like depending on the polyline. Especially with contour polylines this gets a bit tricky, allowing too much deviation destroys the contour shape and when you want to keep the shape as closely as possible there is not enough reduction of nodes, so I'm all for improvement in that area. My guess is that the extract process tries to create bezier polylines where possible and as such generates the more user friendly shapes than the simplyfy command could as that only reduces points and does not convert to bezier. If the simplify polylines command could do that we might already be halfway with regard to the improvement of the tool.

I think that is what Jim was hinting at with his example. E.g. Visio has such functionality that when text is below a certain size and you try to edit it it automatically displays larger so that you can read what you are typing and when finished it shows at original size again. So yes, I'd like to have that option in Vectorworks as well.

It would be nice if the export would not generate overlapping redundancies. That being said, e.g vectorworks' use of filled shapes will generate two objects in dwg files, an outline and a hatch so it is not always possible to avoid issues when exporting to DWG. AutoCAD has an overkill command to get rid of overlapping lines. Vectorworks has a similar command that you could try before exporting in case the redundancies already exist in Vectorworks. (It's in the purge command in Vectorworks, there you can select to remove overlapping geometry)

Could it be that the section viewport is within the section area itself so that you get a kind of circular reference? i.e. it tries to generate a section view of (part of) the section viewport and results in an error. Not sure if that is even a possibility as I normally don't put section viewports on the same layer as from which the section view is generated, but your comment on no issues if the section viewport is on a different layer makes me consider the possibility of some kind of circular reference issue.

Jim, thanks for the reminder of this new feature. I had seen it in the what's new presentation on youtube (I think) but had forgotten about it and was still using the PDF route myself. One question, in case of wanting to export a lot of images would it be better to have only image exports in the publish from a performance perspective or does it not make much of a difference if you have a mix of e.g. PDF and images?

For off-the-shelf Windows based workstation laptops there are basically three brands to consider, Lenovo, HP and Dell (in random order) as they have been making these for years and have the experience and (hopefully) customer service to go with that. That being said, you do pay a premium for that, esp. with the Quadro videocards. An alternative would be to find a good build-to-order (BTO) laptop supplier and have it build to your specs and the performance will be close enough without having to pay that premium. Even though Quadro videocards are aimed it high performance 3D, they have little advantage over powerful GeForce cards if there are no drivers for your software. And as far as I know there are no Quadro drivers for Vectorworks. So I would go for a good BTO (gaming) laptop and use the savings for other things you need.

I've been told there will definitely be improvements to the Subdivision modeling as VW staff (local distributors and at Nemetschek) is running into shortcomings etc. That being said, and as much as I will appreciate any improvements in 3D as mentioned above, my main "gripes" are with DWG compatibility and GIS quality/features plus some more generic things. With Autodesk going the route it is taking and with possibly more changes coming due to activist investors (read shareholder value priority) it seems to me there is an opportunity for Vectorworks to attract new customers, but in order to do so it needs improved DWG compatibility to be a usable alternative, otherwise they'll go to the dwg based alternatives. Especially on Macs this could be crucial now that the DWG compatibles like Bricscad and Ares Commander are also on that platform. I hear from customers how they like the flexibility and features of Vectorworks, but without an improved DWG compatibility (and improved GIS functionality) Vectorworks is not good enough for their purposes to be considered as a viable alternative as it would break things too much in some areas (e.g. text style import/export etc.) or it lacks just that little bit of extra functionality.

If you mean the elevation values at the location at which it was taken you can put the text on the location in top plan view on a layer that is in layer plane mode, just like the layer on which the DTM is residing. If you then switch to 2D/plan view or 3D Top view the text should show up on top of the DTM. Make sure that the layer holding the text values has an elevation higher than the topmost elevation of the DTM. In other 3D views some of the text will be "floating up in the air" but I assume you won't need the text in those views. (it is possible to get that done but that would be more work than you probably want for now) See attached v2 of the example file.