Rotating Hybrid Symbols e.g. cars on a terrain model

[Bo Cook]

Hi,

I have a terrain model where the land slopes up to the house from the road, and also slopes down from left to right as you face the property from the road.

If I send a car - a hybrid object - to the surface, one wheel sits on the surface, and the others are sunken into the site model. The cars are also rotated on the 2D. Making it hard to look at them exactly face on or side on in 3D.

I need to rotate these cars so they sit with all four wheels on the surface but I cannot do this with the rotate tool.

Any suggestions?

VW Landmark 2014 on MAC IOS 8.2.5

[PVA - Admin]

If you edit the 3D component of the symbol, copy out the 3D geometry, exit the symbol and then paste, you can make a 3D-only version of the car symbol that will allow the rotation you're looking for. You can then put a 2D only symbol on top of it if you need to keep a top/plan view as well.

Otherwise, you would have to edit the symbols 3D component to get your desired rotation and have a different iteration of the symbol for each instance of the car that needed a different rotation, which I think would be a lot more work.

[bcd]

This is one of the excellent applications of the Auto-Hybrid object.

Delete the 2d drawing for the car.

Select the 3d object

Landmark>Architectural>Create Auto Hybrid

Now

Double click the car in a 3d view and rotate to suit.

It would be nice if you could simply rotate the AutoHybrid directly - c'est la vie until then.

Suggestion - direct rotation of auto-hybrids.

[Monadnoc]

How about direct rotation of ALL hybrid symbols, auto or not. Long overdue.

[bcd]

What's great about AutoHybrid is that the 2d component changes to match the 3d.

There are some symbols (e.g. lighting instruments) where this isn't useful.

I do think a case can be made to integrate hybrid & auto hybrid objects /(symbols) - and have an 'retain representational 2d / auto-create 2d' button.

rotating current hybrids without something like this doesn't seem like a great idea.

[Benson Shaw]

I have heard that a Vectorworks file with many AutoHybrid objects can get laggy, or crashy. Is this common experience?

-B

[mike m oz]

Benson I haven't seen that problem. It shouldn't do because the auto hybrid process only has to do calculation wok when it initially creates the auto hybrid object.

[Kevin McAllister]

In my experience they get very laggy unless the shapes in the auto hybrid are very simple. I've tried to use it for complex shapes and it works for one or two per file but after that I tend to try it and revert back to hybrid symbols instead.

Kevin

[mike m oz]

Kevin, Benson et al if you have instances that are causing problems please submit them as bugs. That will help NV make the process better.

[Bo Cook]

Thanks everyone. Copying out the 3D data worked, as did deleting the 2D, copying and pasting the 3D out and creating an Auto Hybrid. The latter was easier to work with as the former was a mesh and I had to group it to work on it (should I have?)

Really fiddley still trying to get the car to sit nicely on a complex slope! It would be great if there was a simpler way! i.e when you send to surface it sits all four wheels on the ground!

But that has worked. So thanks for your help.

[bcd]

This is very interesting... An insertion plane centered on the insertion point.

I can imagine a great confluence of the Auto-AutoHybrid - Align to plane and Send to surface commands. Well wothy of discussion.