Sections fills and colour

[TomDK]

Hi all. Me again...

 

I am having real difficulty creating sections in the style that I want. With the many different palettes and tabs it feels like Im sat at NASA's mission control and can't find the correct button.

 

I have a space that has an array of vaults which make up the ceiling. Due to this I have modelled it using the shapes, extrude, subtract solid commands - as per the Jonathan Reeves tutorial (found here).

 

When I try and take a section of this, for the life of me I cannot find a way to add a hatch fill. It just shows as a white fill with a thin boundary line. 

 

Another issue I am facing - I require a clean line drawing for the section. It looks like the best method to acheive this is to use the hidden line style. However, i can't seem to find a way to add colour to the section. I have added a brick hatch to the walls with a background fill colour. The lines of the hatch show, but the background colour does not. 

 

So to summarise:

1. How do I add a section cut fill to 'complex' solids
2. How can I add colour to a section cut without resorting to a rasterized image as the background. As per this forum post

 

Thanks for the help in advance

 

Cheers,

Tom

 

[Tom W.]

1. The section attributes can either come from the object or a class. You choose this in the advanced section properties. So either select the object/s on the Design Layer + set the attributes directly in the attributes palette or place them in a class + assign the attributes via the class settings. Then make sure the VP is set to display the section attributes by object. Alternatively you can override this + specify a new class that you want the attributes to come from in the advanced settings. VW by default uses a 'Section Style' class which has black pen + black fill but you can set it to whatever you want. I have a series of my own section style classes set up in my template files so are present in all projects.

2. If you are talking about colour beyond the cut plane (hidden line colour displays on the cut plane just fine) then maybe consider using Shaded or Cartoon instead. You can have one of these render modes as the background + hidden line as the foreground. Remember that on the cut plane you are seeing 2D geometry + beyond it 3D geometry.

[E|FA]

Re item 2:  You can also stack two Viewports on top of each other.  One for the section cut & one for the background.

[TomDK]

Hi both. Thanks for your help. 

 

I asked Vectorworks to give me a hand on the setup of these sections. They incorporated a Data Visualisation set into the works to make it show accordingly.

 

As per Tom W's suggestion, they changed the background to shaded and the foreground to hidden line. However, I have noticed that due to the background being a 'rendered' image, it is rasterised and therefore not fully accurate as a vector would be. This means that the coloured area is a bit fuzzy around the line work. Another kicker is that when exported as a DWG, the coloured area is exported as a separate PNG rather than being a incorporated shaded hatch as you would expect to find. 

 

Am I asking too much of a program whose name is specifically related to high accuracy file formats? All I want is a line drawing, that uses a coloured vector hatch that has been associated to it and therefore, upon exporting the file either in PDF or DWG, retains the high accuracy that we work to as Architects. 

[Tom W.]

14 minutes ago, TomDK said:

However, I have noticed that due to the background being a 'rendered' image, it is rasterised and therefore not fully accurate as a vector would be. This means that the coloured area is a bit fuzzy around the line work.

 

Make sure you disable 'Draw Edges' in the Shaded settings + increase the DPI for the Sheet Layer.

[Pat Stanford]

And if you are on a Sheet Layer, make sure the sheet layer resolution is set to something higher than the default 72 dpi. 150 or 300 will make a huge difference in image quality.

 

[Tom W.]

I would never go less than 300 for Shaded. Often 600.

[Pat Stanford]

That's why I am an engineer and you an architect.  My standard is communication of intent. Yours is communication of intent with artistry. 😉

 

[TomDK]

Thanks guys. But it still doesn't fix the issue whereby the background is not a true vector. 

 

Lets say we have two different types of brick, and we are using different fill colours to represent them in the elevation. Lets also say that the contractor wants to work from the DWG's (not unheard of) - the export of the DWG from Vectorworks does not include the brick fill as a full coloured hatch within the file, but produces a separate PNG file that is referenced into the DWG. This could become lost and/or move when the contractor opens the DWG, resulting in errors. 

 

My confusion is, why would Vectorworks include a surface hatch within the renderworks texture when it doesn't really use the hatch to produce a vector-based drawing? 

 

Perhaps I was spoilt in previous software 🫠

[Tom W.]

12 minutes ago, TomDK said:

Thanks guys. But it still doesn't fix the issue whereby the background is not a true vector. 

 

Lets say we have two different types of brick, and we are using different fill colours to represent them in the elevation. Lets also say that the contractor wants to work from the DWG's (not unheard of) - the export of the DWG from Vectorworks does not include the brick fill as a full coloured hatch within the file, but produces a separate PNG file that is referenced into the DWG. This could become lost and/or move when the contractor opens the DWG, resulting in errors. 

 

My confusion is, why would Vectorworks include a surface hatch within the renderworks texture when it doesn't really use the hatch to produce a vector-based drawing? 

 

Perhaps I was spoilt in previous software 🫠

 

Ok I reread your first post + checked the thread you linked to sorry I didn't immediately pick up on what you were after in your elevations. The issue is that Hidden Line is literally line only, it doesn't support fills. Hatch Fills can of course have a background colour + these show in 2D contexts (Top/Plan + section cuts) but are not shown in 3D contexts i.e. in Hidden Line as a Surface Hatch. I'm not sure how you'd go about achieving this kind of thing sorry, other than manually adding polygons in the annotations:

 

 

 

[TomDK]

Hi Tom. 

 

Thanks for re-looking at my original query. 

 

Its a real shame it can't be achieved when all of the fills, hatches etc are there to be used, but the software just hasn't been coded appropriately to generate what I would expect as a minimum of a 3D capable BIM software. The proverb 'learn to walk before you run' springs to mind...

 

Thanks for the help again - always appreciated

[Tom W.]

Be interested to know how it works in other softwares. The image I posted above that came from the other thread was I think generated in 2D not 3D hence the fill is vector based

[TomDK]

I can't say how the computational/coding works - however what I can say is that in Archicad you can do exactly what is trying to be achieved above without the "that bits in 2D, and that bits in 3D" issue. 

 

I have attached a video I have just recorded in a demo version of Archicad for you to see. Everything is default - so the colours are a bit... bright, but the premise is the same. The elevation, that is 3D can generate a proper 'hatched' elevation. 

 

Below is a screenshot to show that the wall is 3D - I forgot to switch to the 3D view at the end of the video. 

 

I'd be interested in what you think seeing this and referring back to the functionality of Vectorworks.

 

Cheers!

 

[Tom W.]

Sounds like something for the Wishlist!

 

You can get pretty close to this look (below) using Cartoon (Artistic Renderworks) + Hidden Line but that's using textures so isn't what you want. 

 

 

Most of my output is to PDF + when it's to DWG it is only ever vector-based geometry so the issue with the separate PNG files is not something that affects me but I can see why it's a problem for you. When I use Hidden Line it's generally because I want black/grey lines + nothing else. If VW added the functionality to allow Surface Hatches to display coloured backgrounds, unless there was a way to turn those backgrounds on + off I would opt to use Surface Hatches without backgrounds because I think 9 times out of 10 I wouldn't want to see them. Like I say, if I wanted that look I'd do it using Cartoon...

 

I'm sure others will be able to make more useful contributions to this discussion...!

[TomDK]

Hi Tom. I will add it to the wishlist items later. Though creating coloured 2D drawings from the 3D (via vectorial hatches not a rendered image) really shouldn't be a wish and should have been implemented over a decade ago.

 

Subsequently, I did the cheats way out since this can't be done properly in Vectorworks as default. The cheat way being that I added the colour fills in the annotation layer.  Not ideal, and very backwards in approach.

 

I had pretty much finished adding the colour - but made a change (turned off a class that was wrongly turned on) and the entirety of the annotation fills and lines disappeared. Having checked, the annotations were not in the class that was turned off. A bit odd and hopefully a little hiccup that wont happen again.

Edited August 29, 2024 by TomDK

[Tom W.]

4 minutes ago, TomDK said:

I had pretty much finished adding the colour - but made a change (turned off a class that was wrongly turned on) and the entirety of the annotation fills and lines disappeared - losing a mornings worth of work.

 

Don't understand what's happened here... unless you deleted a class...?

[jmcewen]

On 8/29/2024 at 7:07 AM, TomDK said:

I had pretty much finished adding the colour - but made a change (turned off a class that was wrongly turned on) and the entirety of the annotation fills and lines disappeared. Having checked, the annotations were not in the class that was turned off. A bit odd and hopefully a little hiccup that wont happen again.

I sometimes have this happen with containers where the container is one class, but items within the container are not the same class.  Typically I assume if any class in the of the object or the container that holds the object are set to invisible that the item will be invisible, and that both the contained object and the container must be visible for the item to be seen.  Sometimes it feels like it doesn't work this way though and items show that should not show. This can get pretty complicated if you have objects inside of groups inside of symbols.

 

 

So 2 takeaways--

1. are there any containers involved in your disappearing content that may have been assigned to the class you have turned off even though the contained objects are properly classed (possibly helpful)
2. sometimes things are screwy (not helpful at all)

[line-weight]

Did you turn off the class whilst within the annotations space? Or did you turn it off in the settings for the relevant viewport? It is possible to get confused between the two. Double check that all classes are turned on in the viewport's settings (in the viewport OIP) before deciding that they have vanished.

[line-weight]

By the way I agree with the OP that it's a bit weird that VW can't use colours within a hatch when it's displaying as a surface hatch in an elevation view. If you can set up a hatch with a background colour then it's entirely unintuitive that this background colour doesn't appear when you tell VW to use that hatch as a surface hatch.

 

Also in general the discrepancies between what you see in shaded/hidden line views are confusing. For example if I give an object a simple solid colour as a fill attribute, then that colour shows as the surface colour in shaded views, but in a section view it is what is used for the cut plane (if I choose "use object attributes") whilst no fill is used for the surfaces that are visible in elevation, even if I choose "use original" for the fill in "objects beyond cut plane" as below.

 

I have been using vectorworks for years and this still confuses me sometimes.

 

In fact the hint text that appears for that option (seen in my screenshot below) is very misleading, is it not?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 2, 2024 by line-weight