Guest BillV Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 I have been making great use of shapefiles and the modify by record command. Import a Shapefile and then use Records>Modify by record>and then Extrude an elevation (on a building footprint) works well. Until that is you want to use any of Vectorworks 3D functionality. You cannot use push pull, extract surface or set a layer plane on the surface of the building. If you copy and paste the buildings to a new file these functions can then become useable. But this then means that you lose the ability to update the new drawing directly from any updated shapefiles. Quote Link to comment
bcd Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 The strangest thing. As you say - once you produce extrudes using the Modify by Record many of the 3d editing tools are broken - Quote Link to comment
Jonathan Pickup Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 I have had this happen with a client of mine. The answer from Vectorworks technical support was that this is caused by the objects being so far away from the origin. But these are shape files, and the position from the origin is determined by the shape file. You can extrude, but you can't use push/pull, you can't extract, can't shell solid, can't set working plane, can't insert symbol near these objects. Quote Link to comment
Jonathan Pickup Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 If you move the objects closer to the origin, it makes a non-sense of using shape files Quote Link to comment
Dillon Posted April 16, 2012 Share Posted April 16, 2012 Has anyone made any progress on this issue? I'm not getting useful results even when I use the modify by record command described by BillV above. Even if I move the shp file to the origin. What happens is that when I do the Modify by Record, the extrude appears in the Object Info Pallete, but disappears on the screen. (Also it moves the extrude to 0", 0", 0" which is annoying. And if I attempt to zoom to the selection, nothing happens. The extrude appears to be somewhere in the file, but not visible. Any hints on how to make this work? Dillon Quote Link to comment
Guest BillV Posted April 17, 2012 Share Posted April 17, 2012 This is the response from NNA: It turns out that all CAD systems have undefined behavior when processing objects at the limits of the coordinate space, and Vectorworks is no exception. Quote Link to comment
Dillon Posted April 18, 2012 Share Posted April 18, 2012 it makes you wonder if they ever tested any actual shp file data before they shipped the product. The new geo-referencing feature in 2012 doesn't seem to work either. VW puts my layers all over the place with no logic that I can figure out. Also, both VW 2011 and VW 2012 consistently assume that geo-referenced tiffs are in meters. So if you import a georeferenced tiff that is actually in feet, then VW will multiply the location and the scale by 3.280839. And VW 2012 doesn't do anything when I attempt to import georeferenced jpg 2s. No warning, no action, just a blank stare. Quote Link to comment
Dillon Posted April 23, 2012 Share Posted April 23, 2012 Tech support was able to find a solution to the geo tiff issue. If the tiff is in feet, you need to set the document setting to feet (decimal), feet and inches will throw off the location and scale by a factor of 12. Quote Link to comment
Guest BillV Posted April 23, 2012 Share Posted April 23, 2012 What is particularly irritating is that the reply suggests that this is an issue with all CAD programmes. The file in question opens perfectly in both Draft Sight and Autocad. The issue would seem perhaps to be in VW itself. Quote Link to comment
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