2D Drafting tools and tricks

[Chris Rogers]

I have been doing a lot of Interior Elevations of traditional rooms this week and quickly came to the realization that VW needs a tool that operates like the stretch command in Autocad. I frequently have an elevation drawing of a wood panel that needs to be stretched a couple of inches one direction or the other. My current workflow is to move the set of lines at one end, then manually pick the handles on each of the dozens of lines and move them to a new endpoint.

In autoCAD I simply windowed around the grips I wanted to move and moved them all in unison....or I used the extend command, selected a boundary or series of boundaries, the using the fence command, strike a line across the ends of all the lines to be extended and done.

VW is several times slower for this type of work, but I assume it is because I don't know the trick yet.

[mike m oz]

Chris the 2D Reshape tool will do what you want:

- Select your objects.

- Activate the 2D Reshape tool making sure it is on the Move mode.

- Draw a marquee around the object handles you want to move.

- You can then move (ie. stretch) these objects by either dragging the marquee (tab into the floating data bar to enter values) or use the Move command or drag from one point to another.

[_c_]

The fence would be the "connect combine tool"

- select your objects

- activate the "connect combine tool" in the first modus

- while pressing the Alt key, click on one of the objects to be connected, if the option "tool highlights" is activated in your application preference, the selection should become red.

- drag the selection to a boundary object. They will all extend/crop to the chosen boundary.

If you don't press the Alt key, you need to click each object singularly until it highlights for it to connect.

While using this tool you can read the mode bar, which will lead you through the expected steps.

orso

[starling75]

I have been doing a lot of Interior Elevations of traditional rooms this week and quickly came to the realization that VW needs a tool that operates like the stretch command in Autocad. I frequently have an elevation drawing of a wood panel that needs to be stretched a couple of inches one direction or the other. My current workflow is to move the set of lines at one end, then manually pick the handles on each of the dozens of lines and move them to a new endpoint.

In autoCAD I simply windowed around the grips I wanted to move and moved them all in unison....or I used the extend command, selected a boundary or series of boundaries, the using the fence command, strike a line across the ends of all the lines to be extended and done.

VW is several times slower for this type of work, but I assume it is because I don't know the trick yet.

Chris, I use often this Vectorbits plugin:

http://www.vectorbits.com/VectorBits_2011/vectorbits/Entradas/2008/4/24_Stretch.html

And the VW 2D reshape tool works quite well too.

[Bob Holtzmann]

I don't think VB Stretch works with Vw2011, unless there is an updated version.

[rsa]

I use the 2d reshape tool all the time to do just what is described and to re size door elevations with panel moldings, complicated window elevations, etc. It works very well for that kind of thing.

If there are too many overlapping or adjacent objects that make selecting the handles difficult I select what I want to modify, group them, modify, and then ungroup...

[Chris Rogers]

I can't get the 2D reshape to tool to act as described. I will try again today.

[mike m oz]

Chris, the description in the image below from the Help system might explain it a little better.

[Chris Rogers]

Thanks to all who are helping me learn this tool set.

I figured out how to do the extension of multiple lines to a single border, and Mike graciously sent me a quick video showing me how to do the stretch functions.

Is it possible to extend multiple lines at the same time and have them intersect multiple boundaries, meaning each line stops at the first selected object it comes to?