Lighting Instrument Scale

[Slaterade]

Hi all,

 

Im trying to find a way to reliably scale Lighting Instruments so that their 2d symbols show larger on a plan. We regularly work on very large sites (museums, festivals - spaces over 30m square) and need to accurately show information on A3 sheets. In autocad, we often just scale the lighting block x3 so that it appears larger, but any form of scale command in VW seems to leave the device untouched. I realise it may be from a idealogical point of view that fixtures are drawn 1:1, or are expanded upon in viewports etc, but I need full ground plans on my sheets.

 

I know there is an option to create simply scaled up versions of our current symbols (go in, edit the 2d view, save it as a new symbol) but with the amount of instruments we have, this will be a nightmare. Also, its not a hard and fast rule that x3 is the correct scale factor. Surely theres a scale box like there is for normal items?

[Kevin Allen]

Create multiple viewports at different scales.

[Slaterade]

But this would scale the ground plan as well, no? Or is there a way to scale specific layers (and LX layer for example) differently within a viewport? If this happened, would the relative position change?

[Kevin Allen]

1 minute ago, Slaterade said:

But this would scale the ground plan as wel

yes, just change the crops, have one full position as a 'locator' plan and then detals as needed

[Slaterade]

If I understand your answer, then this is what Im trying to avoid. I have built plans before where there is a small mini 'locator' plan, and then a box that shows a blown out version, but this is not what Im looking for here.

 

Effectively, I want to display a ground plan at a 1:100 scale, but with the lighting instruments (and their label legends) at x2 scaling, and therefore producing a drawing where layers are different scales to each other but shown on top of each other.

Whether this is done by manually scaling the lighting objects (which is what we would have done in Autocad), or whether there's a way of displaying two layers in a viewport at different scales at the same time?

 

Ultimately, I need ground plan with oversized lighting symbols, because if they were true to scale at (sometimes 1:500) you just can't see them without producing zoomed in view ports.

[msharon]

You can't have a viewport with different layer scales. I typically use page based data tags in the annotations to show the data in the label legend.  There is a similar discussion in the thread below

 

[Mike Rock]

Could you share a picture of what the goal looks like? maybe one you have done in auto cad?

[JBenghiat]

7 hours ago, Slaterade said:

If I understand your answer, then this is what Im trying to avoid. I have built plans before where there is a small mini 'locator' plan, and then a box that shows a blown out version, but this is not what Im looking for here.

 

Effectively, I want to display a ground plan at a 1:100 scale, but with the lighting instruments (and their label legends) at x2 scaling, and therefore producing a drawing where layers are different scales to each other but shown on top of each other.

This is the answer — what you really want is two sets of viewports — one that shows the overall ground plan, and one for the lights. By best drawing practice, the "locator" plan would show a footprint of each light, with a larger version of the symbol and label legend. Having two scales in one viewport would violate the idea of drawing in scale — setting the lights to be 3x larger would also make them 3x farther apart. You CAN scale text and page-based symbols using the viewport's Advanced Properties towards the bottom of the OIP, though this applies to all text in the viewport and the symbols in Lighting Devices does not scale.

 

Many don't know that the clip tool works on viewports. To achieve the dual plans quickly, I would:

• Copy and paste-in-place the ground plan viewport
• Change the viewport's layer settings to turn on the lights and turn off the ground plan
• Set a class for the viewport to make it easily selectable later, e.g. VP-Lights
• With the viewport selected, use the Clip tool in the third, Split, mode to draw a marquee around each light or group of lights
• Delete the now empty, surrounding VP (it should have a bunch of holes in it where you clipped out the lights)
• Use the Select Similar tool to select all the VPs in the VP-Lights class
• Change the scale of the selected viewports

The example below shows the plan at scale, a scaled up VP with the border visible to show placement, and a third cropped VP at an even larger scale for the lights.

 

 

You could alternatively make a set of symbols and label legends with larger versions, and even toggle between sizes using classes. While you can set Vectorworks to scale a symbol in Object Info, Lighting Devices extract objects from symbols rather than insert them whole sale, so unfortunately you can't create two versions of the light that refer to the same geometry — you would have to edit the symbol, copy the 2D geometry, and scale.