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Elliptical walls?


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Don't blame the Vectorworks community for the noventa y neuve centavos mindset.

The culprits start with "i."

I don't blame anyone, just make the point that there is a reason for unavailability of alternative and additional tools: without demand, there's no supply. Why would anyone have a stall in an empty marketplace?

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I've never met a good salesperson who spent much time expecting others to facilitate their sales.

After reading their policies and looking at their page, I don't see Vectordepot as highly developer friendly.

Generally, I think the pricing for Vectorworks add ons is above the optimum for maximizing revenue.

Right or wrong, I believe people expect a $100 ad-in to provide 10% additional capablility to a $1000 CAD package.

Even at $20, 2% is a lot of ground to cover compared with Vectorworks Fundimentals.

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That is exactly the problem. There is not good/easy place to sell third party stuff.

People who are good at writing code are in moat cases not that good at selling it.

NNA needs to do a better job of supporting third party stuff scripts/training/manuals/whatever so that not everyone ends up trying to build their own little store that has no exposure.

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Even at $20, 2% is a lot of ground to cover compared with Vectorworks Fundimentals.

Maybe, but that is based on false economy and false logic. That huge sum equals to half an hour's pay* at a normal rate, 20 minutes overtime and less than 15 minutes as charge rate in Finland. (Pay including superannuation, leave loading etc.)

So, an add-on costing 100 pesos only needs to save an hour and a half of overtime to pay for itself.

It is not any cheaper to develop add-ons for a cheap program than for an expensive one ? unless one assumes that half-baked add-ons are good enough for owners of cheap and cheerful programs.

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K,

As I said, right or wrong, that's my take on people's perception. Just as programmers will value their program based on how much value they think it has to the user.

My toggle black background icon driven program would probably save the firm of the person who requsted it several hundred dollars a year. At $50 it probably would have covered the time he spent writing the post and following the thread.

But there ain't no way it was worth $50 as a product.

P,

I wouldn't be surprised if the national distributor agreements played a role in what sort of resources NNA can provide to third parties.

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K,

As I said, right or wrong, that's my take on people's perception.

And I fully agree: the VW community is not willing to pay for better functionality ? not to NNA, not to independent developers. The good old ?Money for Nothing? in reverse: Everything for No Money...

With low productivity, it's no wonder so many users seem to be in dire straits.

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Anyone know if it's possible to create elliptical/oval walls?

OK, back to the subject, which started to interest yours truly.

It seems that with the VectorScript ?ellipses? it is not, at least not easily. I created an "ellipse" of given height & width, then a series of "ellipses" based on stepping the dimensions with wall thickness and slant (yes, I user the round slanting wall as the basis.)

The distances between the "ellipses" are not what they should be and vary ? just as I had anticipated. So, I can't, but maybe someone else can.

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And I fully agree: the VW community is not willing to pay for better functionality ? not to NNA, not to independent developers. The good old ?Money for Nothing? in reverse: Everything for No Money...

With low productivity, it's no wonder so many users seem to be in dire straits.

If the chicks are free, why would anyone expect to pay for code?

Dem guys ain't dumb.

Edited by brudgers
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Anyone know if it's possible to create elliptical/oval walls?

OK, back to the subject, which started to interest yours truly.

Yours truly, a.k.a. Inspector Cadarno, has continued his investigations. Now, snapping to an "elliptical" polyline is vague and aligning to one impossible, so Cadarno has played Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

The thickness of my "elliptical" wall here is defined to be 200 mm, so the "ellipses" are created using that value. Why is it then 204 mm? I am here giving the benefit of doubt to Mr. A.: without accurate snapping/aligning facilities to his famous "ellipses", I placed the eyeballed reference lines closer to each other than they seem to be.

Why do I think that some people confuse a conic section with a comic strip section?

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well, it must be more than 30 years since I last did maths that involved more than my fingers and toes, but I seem to recall that 2 ellipses with the same centres but major and minor axes reduced by an equal amount can never be "parallel" around the circumference except at the location of the axes.

IE a curve parallel to a given ellipse will not be itself a true ellipse.

(x^2/something)+(y^2/something)= something..........

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Well, Vincent - in interactive mode the offset result is the same, ie. wrong.

There is another technique for offsets in VS; somewhat problematic and error-prone in extreme situations, but maybe I'll try that (with another 200 lines of code?)

I use that in eg. my free-form wall (actually I call it a "muuri" (mur, Mauer) since it is not a "true" wall), but sometimes the results are totally unacceptable as the algorithm (VS function) can't handle the situation. But on a good day, when it is not full moon?

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If you reduce the major and minor axes by 200 at each end you get a new ellipse with a new set of foci.

My recollection is that the 2 ellipses cannot be parallel.

If you exactly offset an ellipse so that it is parallel, the new curve will not be a true ellipse but will resemble an ellipse.

I just looked at wikitopia and it seems there are many ellipse formulae........

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My recollection is that the 2 ellipses cannot be parallel.

Goes against my instinct, which is the only knowledge of math I possess. Ditched the text books in 1971, after high school matriculation.

Be it as it may, it should still be possible to have an ellipse (not possible in VW) and then even an oval (the Anderson ellipse, a.k.a. the Dutch ellipse) with a constant offset from the ellipse.

It may just be in the eye of the beholder, but

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CirclesAndEllipses/

seems to justify my position.

(Wolfram Research is the author of Mathematica, a fairly sophisticated mathematical program.)

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This is way out my league and I know nothing of programming but what happens to the foci when you offset an ellips by 200? Is it possible to define the wall object thickness through offset somehow?

Not surprisingly, using the other method produced identically bad results.

I'm quite disappointed and hope that someone else can actually crack this coconut. The ellipse is a hugely powerful architectural element. Spiritual, so to say.

A circular space always has at least a degree of totalitarian or otherwise religious quality, whereas an elliptical space is open to interpretation and experience.

Let's go to Rome, shall we? Pantheon or Colosseum: which one is more invigorating, intriguing and dynamic? But I digress?

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Not surprisingly, using the other method produced identically bad results.

I'm quite disappointed and hope that someone else can actually crack this coconut. The ellipse is a hugely powerful architectural element. Spiritual, so to say.

It looks like you have used ellipses with fairly small axes?! Somehow it feels like the deviations could be smaller when using larger ellipses?! Mind it's just a feeling! Why I say this is because even though one searches for perfection constantly, we are still blissfully far away from perfection on the building site, so if the deviations are under 10mm it is (still)acceptable and therefore usable.

Edited by Vincent C
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we are still blissfully far away from perfection on the building site, so if the deviations are under 10mm it is (still)acceptable and therefore usable.

"Blissful Imperfection"

you should copyright that one, although I suspect Shakespear might have beaten you to the concept.

A total (cumulated) error of 10mm might be OK but with the rapidly increasing use of pre-fab steel components for complex geometric buildings the individual components would need a much higher level of fidelity.

A 1000mm steel beam will not fit into a 990mm hole. {:-O

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Converted the "ellipse" segment into a polygon first. The said segment has nothing to do with an ellipse: it is a polyline with Bezier-vertices.

The result has nothing to do with the angles given. In the picture the blue lines are at angles -75? and 45?. The red line is the elipse segment created with these values.

ARC(-2000, 1000, 2000, -1000, -75, 120);

MOVETO(0, 0); LINE(2000, #-75);

MOVETO(0, 0); LINE(2000, #45);

RECT(-2000, 1000, 2000, -1000);

Should I proceed, I'd probably need to create the ellipses from lines. Ugly.

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Look at this

ARC(-2000, 1000, 2000, -1000, 0,360);

OVAL(-2000, 1000, 2000, -1000);

After runnig script enter zoom about 50000% ..

These objects are not geometrically identical.

I belive that math behind an oval object is true ellipse formula, but the ARC object defined by values entered above is just asymetrically scaled circle ..( try to create circle, make group from it and then change scale of the group using grips along the x axis... the circle inside group will change into closed b-spline resemblant ellipse...)

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