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Setting a viewport within a model


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Thanks V, the goal is to produce a black and white line drawing that won't degrade in fidelity as its photocopied or as the paper gets old and worn. Printing is also cheaper (and faster) for drawings that don't require greyscale.

The contractor I'm working with on my next project does, however, laminate their drawings so it might be chance to try out greyscale drawings, although we may be working on A0 and they can't laminate A0. Also I'll have to send a test to our printers to see how they come out on the non-greyscale printer.

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I use grayscale throughout my construction drawings as you can impart so much more information. Once you start, you'll never want to give up this advantage which is a strong point of Vectorworks' 2D tools. (I don't know if Apple's Quartz 2D plays a part in this.) I actually use most of my grayscale textural fills on the framing and foundation pages and less on the exteriors.

I set my grayscale print level in the printer dialog box (Mac) to 65% but this is a function of printer quality or lack thereof. If you send your work out to be printed offsite, you must make sure that the printer tech doesn't do a fast run and burn your grays off. The printer tech is your friend.

Since we issue PDF's along with paper, if the print gets worn, the GC can print him or herself up a new set or page.

Tom

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If it was up to me I'd do them in colour, but it's just not the way it works here. Much of the time we're not in control of the prints/copy process. We do a first set x2 but after that the main contractor either copies them or prints their own. When they have 20 or so A0 drawings to print off each revision they're not going to appreciate being told they need to make sure they use a more expensive option to get the greyscale tones to print correctly. Then you have main contractors and subbies photocopying bits of drawing and then photocopying bits of photocopies. You can point out that this isn't a good process but we're not in control of it. Our job is to make sure that subbie ends up with clear documentation. Tones will get lost in this process.

You're right that it's less of an issue these days with PDF distribution, and I'm tempted to try it with this new contractor we're working with, but my main priority should be to make sure the building gets built the way it was designed rather than something else because our pretty drawings weren't man enough for the task.

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Here's an elevation that Alan's been working on, using the extract planar object method for the hatching. The hoops he had to jump through to get this to work were excruciating but we're quite pleased with the output, at least on screen. We haven't printed yet and there's no line weight differentiation so I'm interested to see how it prints.

I think I'll still try the Texture method (because of all the hassle Alan had to go through) but the attached is a good example of the type of robust line elevations that our building contractors like. (right click to open image full size)

Any recommendations for line-weight differentiation? I guess the only route there is the annotations layer?

ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=7375&filename=block-a.png

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Another problem with rendering elevations instead of line elevations: the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to then export the elevations to DWG format: http://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=167600

Edit: actually it's worse than that. If I use textures to differentiate materials then I just can't export them to DWG.

Nemetschek has completely neglected the ability to extract traditional 2D data from a 3D model despite many of us banging on about it for years. Really p'd off.

#BIMfail

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Dieter, the advantages of getting the hatches into the model are:

1. The hatches will show correctly skewed on roof faces and walls that aren't straight on to the view.

2. You don't have to draw/edit them every time you create/edit a viewport.

3. You don't have to draw them around rainwater pipes etc.

4. 3D views.

5. Correct and complete dwg export!!!

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Dieter, the advantages of getting the hatches into the model are:

1. The hatches will show correctly skewed on roof faces and walls that aren't straight on to the view.

2. You don't have to draw/edit them every time you create/edit a viewport.

3. You don't have to draw them around rainwater pipes etc.

4. 3D views.

5. Correct and complete dwg export!!!

6. No rendering time.

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Attached is a scan of the printed version of the elevations as above.

The main two problems are:

1. General loss of definition due to black and white printing of greyscale drawing, especially the brickwork texture.

2. Lack of definition between foreground and background parts of the building. All line thicknesses are the same.

With regard to the first item I will talk to printer to see if they can improve this by slowing down their prints and using a higher resolution or something. However I think at least the brick texture will still be problematic.

With regard to the second item, how do I resolve this? Is the only option to manually add lines to the Annotations layer of the viewport?

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The main two problems are:

1. General loss of definition due to black and white printing of greyscale drawing, especially the brickwork texture.

2. Lack of definition between foreground and background parts of the building. All line thicknesses are the same.

Are you printing from the pdf our from VW? Because we never have these issues. Line thicknesses are always fine and we have no loss of definition. I would think this is a printer issue.

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This is outsourced to a commerical printer. It's done with a laser printer. Printing in-house on an ink-jet may well help but we don't have the time nor the budget for printing our construction phase drawings in this way. This is why we need line drawings rather than greyscale drawings.

Are you saying your elevations have different line-thicknesses? Or are you saying you don't see the lack of line-thickness differentiation as a problem?

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Any ideas why I'm getting such inconsistent results? Everything is set to use Classes. I'm using viewport class overrides to thicken the lines but not only is it not working with the brickwork wall (don't know why, it's on the same Class) but the rendered white wall on the right is showing as thicker on one layer but not another.

ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=7658&filename=line-thickness-inconsistent.png

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Dieter, what I actually meant was do your walls have different line thicknesses based on whether they're in the foreground or background (an old drafting technique to help create depth).

No, just the overall wall thickness.

I have never learned/used that technique. We learned to use shadows to show the depth of things, and I find shadows much better to show it. If you change your render settings, you will get a better result of that. I see you have it now, but you can get it better to really show the depth. Play with the lightning.

Edited by DWorks
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