Creating a Seating Layout

[gym1339]

More and more my clients want me to create seating layouts with my lighting plots. I simply cannot get it to work 100% all the time. I have wasted countless hours trying to get the seating to align towards the stage and fit within the bounding box that I create with the rectangle tool. For ex: I create a rectangle 22' wide by 22' high, focus the point of the the layout and the seats are skewed slightly. I try and edit the focus point to 11' (the center of the rectangle) in the object info pallette, and another numerical value is automatically entered. I cannot input 11' it enters -1081 and rotateds the layout. I have read the manual countless times and cannot get this to work.

On my last plot I created 1 row of chairs and duplicate arrayed the rest, but there must be an easier way.

any help?

thanks

[klinzey]

I think I have duplicated the problem. You have probably moved your user origin, that's why when you enter 11' it changes to -1081. You have two options.

1) move the user origin back, and enter 11'.

2) Move the control point manually.

Grab the control point and move it along the edge of the seating layout poly till you see the smart cursor cue change to center, then use the smart cursor cue to move vertically (or horz) a few inches and set the focus point.