Class visibility settings gone wacky?

[jointer]

We're having a problem with one of our VW2008 files.

Typically, we set up our files with various classes for different building components and use the class visibility settings to toggle the classes on and off; sometimes selecting 'active only' etc., to view parts of the building model in isolation and then going back to show/snap others or show/snap/modify others to view the model as a whole.

Usually, we have no issues with this and find VW to be an excellent tool for building our 3D models; however, we have a file that has developed a strange problem where the model view will not update when the class visibility settings are changed. For example, we might be looking at our model in an isometric view with open GL rendering, we select our 'roofing' class as the active class to view our roof faces in isolation. When the visibility settings are changed to 'active only', ordinarily, everything disappears except our roof faces, and we go about our work. For some reason we cannot figure out, what we end up seeing is instead the very same view that we had before the visibility setting was changed. The really odd thing is that the setting has changed, only the screen has not been 'refreshed' or 'updated'; that is, when we try to render the screen again with open GL, nothing changes; however, when we render the screen with a different rendering method (say final vectorworks), the screen updates, and voila, there are our roof faces in isolation. None of this seems to happen in wireframe, which leads us to believe it is a rendering problem.

Our current workaround is to simply re-render the view with a different rendering method, but it is frustrating and we would like to correct this issue.

We've looked at other VW files with 3D models in our office and find that they are behaving normally with no rendering issues, so it does not appear to be our application installation that is causing the issue. The issue seems to be isolated to this particular file and copies of it.

Has anyone else experienced this problem or have a suggestion or remedy? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Scratching our heads,

j

[islandmon]

Simple trick ... use the '3d Rotate Tool' to nudge the screen view and force a VRAM refresh.

[jointer]

Islandmon,

Thanks for the idea.

I'm wondering, however, why the refresh isn't happening on its own (as it usually does)?

j

[M.CH]

.............

Has anyone else experienced this problem or have a suggestion or remedy? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Scratching our heads,

j

I always click on the pan tool for a force video refresh, if a graphic element has decided not to update.

Has one of your classes/layers and symbols managed to get the same name?

Edited July 26, 2008 by MCH

[jointer]

MCH & islandmon,

Thanks for the replies.

After more problem solving, we think the problem is not a video refresh issue, so using either the pan tool or the 3d rotate tool to force a refresh doesn't seem to address our problem. Also, doing a 3d rotate as islandmon suggested wasn't a good option for us since we're often trying to zero in on a particular part of the model and we need to preserve orientation.

After some experimenting we've discovered that part of the issue seems to stem from a particular object group that was created by one of our newer staff members. It seems that the group was created within another group and then classed in a way which created conflicts when using the 'active only' or 'gray others' class visibility settings. Our workaround solution has been to take the group causing the issue and create a unique class for the objects in it, and then ungroup it.

Problem solved (hopefully).

Thanks again for your responses--it's all greatly appreciated.