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Still hate door PIO's


Ken

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Draw a simple wall. Insert a simple door PIO. Make jamb thickness zero. Use wall depth. It measures clean in plan view at 3'-0". So good so far.

1ie8.gif

In elevation view it may look okay, too. But zoom in real tight at the corner. Get really close.

2fn4.gif

It's a double line all around! WTF?!

3bo0.gif

Now convert copy to lines with hidden line rendering. Select the door only. It should be composed of four lines. In previous Vectorworks versions it was four lines.

4zn0.gif

But now it's 7 lines even when the door PIO has "low" 3D detail level (it has 12 lines at "high!"). WTF?!

5cc1.gif

This concerns me because:

1. It's messy editing in 2D when deleting, extending to, snapping to, etc.

2. Exporting file reveals silly/ stupid/ imprecise double and triple lines occupying the same location or separated by a nudge.

3. In a file with many doors like this (I dread perhaps all PIO's are like this), extra lines are extraneous, unnecessary and bloats the file size.

4. It's just not right in principle -- the K.I.S.S. principle.

It's another reason why I still hate door PIO's. Any solution?

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Arch.Ken and Robert

The situation with the lines on the door and window elevations kind of stumped me until I really saw the scale of how far apart the lines were from each other.

amazing.jpg

Now if I were really pickin' at VW I might have a case but if i'm not mistaken the zoom factor is at 100,000,000,000%

!! is that billion?

Well I'm not going to split hairs here because I don't have much to split but I think that might be close enough....maybe....OK

Let's all get to work.

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The lines are 1/100 th of an inch apart. Not a problem visually but it does mean there are additional lines created at the top and sides. Not the bottom of doors though. On windows they are on all 4 sides.

An interesting anomoly I have noticed though is that if your door is contained wholly within the wall (for example 4" above the bottom of the wall) you will not get a line across the bottom of the door opening when you convert to lines. Therefore if you want the correct appearance you have to manually add these lines.

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Robert, is any separation supposed to be okay? Even if duplicate/triplicate lines occupy the same precise location it's still silly. I'm not splitting hairs. I think it's worse than silly. It potentially bloats file size, takes extra work when repetitively deleting, looks and feels sloppy, embarrassing when exported, etc.

In fact, I think any kind of miniscule extraneous entity in a digital drawing should be avoided. Otherwise, it's like sweeping dirt under a carpet -- if nobody notices, then it's clean??

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I've looked at this situation, and Arch.Ken is trying to do something here that doesn't exist in construction, and that is a door with a zero jamb. The "true" KISS is to draw it like it's built. which is to have an actual jamb (of some reasonable kind and thickness) and to wrap the finishes past the face of the jamb. The problem is that the door doesn't let you wrap the wall finishes past the face of the jamb (It's probably just trying to make life simpler..) So for the moment, you can draw the jamb at zero (an upcoming release has made the increment smaller, to 1/100,000 of an inch, just to make sure there is no problem of inaccuracy). And if that's still too big an increment, feel free to submit a bug. But I think a proper bug statement should be something like, 'I can't wrap finishes past the face of the wall', not 'I can't draw a zero jamb', which is something that doesn't practically exist in construction.

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Robert,

I beg to differ, Garage doors are drawn without a jamb.... on masonry construction, the only item installed to mount the door is on the interior surface of the wall.... the stucco goes on the block on the interior face, and is not shown in plan.

I also agree w/ Arch.Ken about extraneous lines being a nusance and bloating the file... It is like convert to line, and finding dozens of hidden no color lines on the drawing, that cant be seen, eminating from the corners of the doors and windows, but are still there....

thanks for all the good work.

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The Hole Assembly , Jamb Assembly and the Door Assembly set into the Wall Assembly are essentially each separate parametric objects.

First, the size of the 'HoleObject' container is determined based on various User defined criteria like Jamb & Door width-height-depth, then the 'JambObject' and 'DoorObject' are calculated to fill the area within the 'HoleObject' container boundary.

Set Theory requires that a differential boundary condition exist separating not only the 'HoleObject' from the other objects within it's container but each object from the others, as well. The Set of Boundaries has attributes which may or may not be visible but which must exist as discreet elements of Containers regardless of the assignment of values to those attributes.

And amazingly this is how Reality seems to work. A Door Container is not molecularly bonded to the Hole-In-The-Wall Container it occupies thus allowing for the door to swing freely.

The way I see it ... the existence of these "non-essential" lines ( & blotted code ) is proof positive that VW is built on a firm foundation and that the Engineers are not willing to recursively edit-over these essential boundary objects.

Postscript:

The original Minicad used QuickDraw routines which did not offer this level of Object&Container sophistication & power. With QD there would not only be the boundary lines as shown but also lines connecting the boundaries of each of the containers within a container. But QD allowed programmers to recursively 'mask' this multitude of lines giving the WYSIWG appearance of no boundaries resulting in none shown or printed. A very inefficient and limited arrangement, indeed.

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I've looked at this situation, and Arch.Ken is trying to do something here that doesn't exist in construction, and that is a door with a zero jamb. The "true" KISS is to draw it like it's built...

In practice, the reality is that there are many situations where door trim and jamb should NOT be shown, either in plan view or elevation. One example is when the focus of the drawing needs to be in the area of renovation and everything else (existing) is shown only for context. The contrast should be clear. In elevation view, wall openings should stay equally simple and clean, while the "scope of work" part of the drawing, correspondingly, should be shown with all its necessary information. Michael_E mentioned some other situations. It takes some creativity to imagine yet other possibilities.

Now, there's already the problem of not being able to insert simple doors at its hinge or latch point. Showing trim forces you to insert existing doors at the edge of trim if you have only opening size and want to draft quickly! Or it's some arithmetic with insert at center. This is the reason I started using zero jamb to begin with.

Don't we all wish we had only new custom homes to design --- these "problems" would be irrelevant.

It seems with every new "improvement" and expansion of features, I must create drawings to suit the way that Vectorworks is supposed to be used.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Every one seems to be giving examples of why one might want to use a door with no jamb. But I think the point is that a computer programe should never be able to dictate what designer wants to do. There are millions of designers out there in a multitude of differing fields, so there is just no way that any of us (nemetschek included) can possibly begin to guess at how every one might want to use this programe, or the tools that it provides.

There for I think it's Nemetschek responsibility to provide an application with the absolute minimum of these little bugs that could either dictate design to us, or make it difficult to produce that which we can imagine.

That's my pennies worth...

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