A membrane detailing tool

[Christiaan]

I'm not sure what the state of play is with the latest version of VW but as of v2009 we use the Wall Tool, coupled with some esoteric hatches, to draw various membranes (damp proof course, vapour control layer, etc.).

This isn't ideal because the hatches are resource hungry, unintuitive to create and sometimes don't display or print as expected. Using the Wall Tool to draw membranes is also unintuitive in itself.

Perhaps we need a specialised membrane tool. Or maybe the Double-Line Polygon tool can be adapted to suit?

What we'd like is something that's:

• Intuitive to use
  
• Intuitive to create dash styles
  
• Resource efficient
  
• Dash styles that follow/rotate with the direction of the membrane (as hatches can in walls and symbols)
  

[Chris D]

With you on this one.

I complained about the "Linear Material' tool at our meeting in London - this is the object that should be capable of representing things like membranes (in section). The trouble with the tool is that it's half-baked though, and is based on polyline technology, when it should have been based on the wall tool.

We also use the wall tool, with hatches, to represent membranes....the beauty is that hatches follow the 'wall' alignment, plus you can do wall joins, control the thickness, and number of layers etc. The downside is that adjacent symbols want to embed themselves in it because they think it's a wall. It also annoys me that it is identified as wall for the purposes of the Custom Selection tool, for DWG export etc etc.

If the Linear Material tool could be re-written as a variation of the Wall tool, with linear-hatches to control fill style, it would do the job instead.

Edited October 29, 2010 by Chris D

[Dieter @ DWorks]

With you on this one.

The downside is that adjacent symbols want to embed themselves in it because they think it's a wall.

Symbols have the option to not go into a wall from VW2010. And you have an option to prevent it.

With you on this one.

It also annoys me that it is identified as wall for the purposes of the Custom Selection tool, for DWG export etc etc.

Use the custom selection tool with type and class. I suppose that those membrames will be in another class than the walls.

But I do agree that the liniar material tool is not good and unfinished. It's nearly unusable; So does the the other one that uses symbols (I can't get the name right now). You can't get what you really want.

Maybe NV should by such tool from our distributer Design Express? We get such a tool in our version, and it's working well, although it's very old.

[Christiaan]

Looks like this is finally solved with custom line types in v2013! My details are going to look a lot better for it.

[Chris D]

Great tool...takes the AutoCAD tool from 1982 and improves it a little

[Christiaan]

LOL