Hatches, Tiles, and Elusive Productivity...

[willofmaine]

I don't want to waste time trying to predict which way the Linear Material Tool is going to draw plywood (particularly since I've yet to encounter a piece of continuous plywood that makes a 90? bend...) or wading through the tools many options. I just want to make simple pieces of plywood saved in my Library that I can place in details and modify as necessary. So...

I made a veneer hatch (vertical lines 1/8" apart, World units). I made a 1/2" x 6" rectangle and applied the hatch. I gave the hatch local mapping (so that it will rotate with the rectangle). I saved the rectangle as my 1/2" plywood symbol, "Convert to Group." As soon as I save the symbol, the veneers become excessively fine; no longer the 1/8" spacing I'd assigned them. Why? Useless.

So I try to make a Tile for the veneers. But lines can't be used as the geometry for Tiles? Why? Useless.

It seems ridiculous to be going on an hour or two trying to do something so simple as a veneer hatch. I recently finished a large project in VW 2008, and while there weren't all the great new "time saving" features of more recent versions, things pretty much worked as expected. Now, achieving productivity in 2013 seems an entirely elusive goal. With all its new features, I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of great productivity, yet its just not happening. It seems like one thing after another: old features that no longer work as they used to, and new features that don't work as expected, or at all.

[Jonathan Pickup]

So I try to make a Tile for the veneers. But lines can't be used as the geometry for Tiles? Why? Useless.

I'm surprised that you can't use lines in tiles. When I tried to use lines and tiles Vectorworks gave me an error message to say that there would remove all illegal objects (which effectively removed all of my lines). My guess is that Vectorworks is working as designed and is designed not to have lines as part of the tile. I agree that this is surprising.

I thought of a workaround which is to use a polygon, with no lines on each end of the polygon. This seems to work for me, and I was able to make a symbol that allowed me to reuse the plywood. However, as soon as you rotate the plywood, the tile does not rotate to match the plywood.

You could perhaps leave the object is a symbol and then interactively scale the symbol to suit. Tiles can rotate with the symbol.

[willofmaine]

Hi Jonathan,

Yes, I came to the same conclusion as you that a polygon with lines turned off works. But it took a lot more time to get to that conclusion than it did to actually create the tile itself!

Did you try setting the Tile Settings, in the Attributes palette, to "Use Local Mapping?" Doing that worked for me to keep the veneers parallel to the long faces of my plywood (a rectangle after placement, since I have my symbol set to "Convert to Group").

Will

[VectorGeek]

Dear will 'o maine,

We use walls (and wall styles) for drawing linear materials such as plywood, mdf, gwb etc. in our architectural details. We have a server-side library of every thickness, and material, with hatches in most. Hatches can be setup to rotate in walls so it works great. You also have the flexibility of end conditions such as closed joins, open joins etc.

Works great, less filling.

V-G.

[willofmaine]

Thanks V-G, that sounds like a great idea, and I'll definitely give it a try, though I might use Tiles instead of Hatches. I'm not sure what hatches have to offer over tiles (other than extreme complexity in their creation!). Anyway, thanks again,

Will