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elevation technique


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I find that drawing elevations from plans is very much like 2 D drafting. In fact, the ACAD people in the office work that way line by line, except for their window creation, which is very usuful. Also ACAD has a very powerful hatch tool which works with line and unlike what we need to do... if I am correct... is to create a polygon and then fill it. It seems that ACAD has a distinct advantage when it comes to dreating elvations... Or am I missing something?

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Yes I am asking how to draw elevations. Of course I know how to construct them from plan views.. which is hown the ACAD people in my office do. However, they seem to have some powerful window creation tools... I think add ons, not part of ACAD.. and their hatching seems to be much better. Also I notice that ACAD people are able to stech whole bits of drawings in a way I cant seem to do in VW. Am I right?

On the other hand, in plan views, the VW wall tools, doors and windows are very powerful and creating plans in VW seems more efficient. Am I right? Not working in ACAD it is hard to evaluate the 2, but on the other hand I dont want to learn ACAD, because it is not a WYSIWYG program and that is a very regressive way to work on a computer. THE WYSIWYG aspect of VW is the most user friendly aspect of the program... I think.

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You can generate elevations by giving your walls an appropriate Z+/- value, and constructing your roof in 3D. Then, when viewing this 3D model from the side, convert a copy the objects to lines and paste the result into a new layer. There is a ton of clean-up to do (i.e., removing extraneous lines), which others in the past have asked NNA to automate, but it is dimensionally accurate. If some things were automated, this could work like automatic updating. But as it is, if you change something in your plan, you have to go through all or part of the procedure all over again.

Try this: draw a wall with 8' height, insert a window or door, change your view to look at it from the side or front, select it and "convert copy to lines." Move the resulting group of lines to one side to see what you have. The details of how you create the window or door affect how it will look in elevation.

You can stretch parts of a drawing by grouping the objects. Then you can use the stretch cursor on the group. I often use this technique with VW 8.5 to distribute a group of lines equally over a given space. VW 9 has a tool for that function. You can also select the objects and scale en masse.

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I understand how to select several objects and stretch them. Let me give you an example of what THEY do and WE cant.. when they have complex cornice in elevation view with a complex provide... gutter, cove etcs.. and you want to move the over hang outr from the bldg. The select the line of the profile and offset them the required distance... then they select the horzontal line and simply extemd them ALL to the profile. When I do that the OTHER end of the line extend in a proportinal amount to the length of the line. THEIR other ends stay put... WHat gives? AM I using the wrong command? I select and drag.

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Instead of using the resize ability of the 2D selection tool, you should explore the options of the more heavy duty 2D reshape tool on the editing pallet.

With this tool you can select the lines you want to reshape, draw a marquee around the points to grab a hold of, and drag those points all at once while maintaining how they are related to one another.

You can use this on most 2D objects, lines, rectangles, polylines, polygons etc...

Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

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From VectorDepot.com you can get simple windows plug ins

to use directly in elevation view. They work very well. For the complicated ones, just convert the 3d view of the VW ones to hidden lines rendering.

About stretching and hatching. Forget lines.

I always use rectangles and polygons.

It's faster to draw, you can resize/reshape individual portion with the 2d polygon editing tool, you can automatically assign hatches and fillers or patterns by class and edit a lot of this finishes just modifying the classes. You can achieve complex shapes by intersecting surfaces or adding or clipping them instead of drawing every single segment of them.

Also using polygons you can give visual hierarchy to the objects so that what's in front covers what is beyond. I even have a class called shadow with a proper transparent (no background color) hatch; then I draw those polygons on top of the architectural elements and the end result can be very nice.

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Careful folks. I just tried the elevation to model txt file and I got a sheet with four copies of my floor plans in elevation views. Made for an enormous drawing and I still have to redraw the elevations.

Maybe I am missing something but when I was in the elevation model layer that the script creates, I went to plan view and got just that, 4 plans of my entire building with all floors.

Not NNA's poblem of course. But the 3rd party script doesn't seem to do what is required. I thought it would erase all the extraneous lines and crap as if you had a hidden line rendering of the elevation of the model. But it doesn't. I guess when you think about it, this is asking a lot anyway.

I generated elevations of my building this way incidently. Making a model and then going to the front, back, left and right side views and doing a hidden line or 'shaded with lines' rendering and printing that. Works pretty good for a base for design sketches but I think in my lo-tech way I am still going to have to draw them long hand.

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Hey!!!! smile.gif" border="0 I got it.

Use the elevation script as obtained from the sites shown above. once you have your four elevations, select each elevation (or all of them together) and perform a convert to lines (as found under tools on the menu bar).

Select the hidden line render option and sit back with a beer.

Once it's done ungroup the image that is left and you have your clean elevations with no extraneous lines

Voila!!

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