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referenced layers spontaneously move origin


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@gfp38Try this. each of your exrefs have the same reference point i presume. Push 0 on num pad to reset each reference original. Re set the reference point 0,0 point to each referenced original and close each one. do this one at a time till all have been done. Then open the drawing with all the references attached and they (hopefully) will all be in the correct location.

HTH

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  • 2 weeks later...

Than prior to updating the references, set the rotation to '0', than update reference, and re-set to the normal rotation, this should solve the issue of the skipping around viewports, at least it did for us. we found this solution by coincidence.

 

kind regards a

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  • 4 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

We also suffered from this issue recently - a colleague told me about it just after updated to SP2. I was convinced it must be something we had done - some sort of reference screwup changing between new and old referencing styles or some such - but we never worked it out.

 

After reading these posts, I'm inclined to say it must be the same issue. Can it really be true that this has been occurring since 2013 and is still not resolved??

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Just now, gfp38 said:

Scratching our heads, we've been wondering if it's because we have Macs and PCs working with these referenced files. Maybe the references behave themselves with a Mac only or PC only VW team? Nonetheless, it's unacceptable.

 

@gfp38- I can confirm we use a Mac only environment in our office, so mixing windows and OSX machines doesn't appear to the cause of the issue (in our case anyway).

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  • 4 weeks later...

just experienced this problem for the first time with VWX 2017 SP5. Never experienced this problem before other than sometimes when Workgroup References get erroneously selected to 'Ignore source user origin'. This is occurring while Workgroup Referencing layers from a Shared Project base plan file into individual sheets and I confirmed none of the referenced files selected the 'Ignore source user origin' option.

 

I have no idea how the origin shifted from internal origin on the referenced file but the problem is that fixing that on the referenced file does not automatically fix the issue on all the other drawing sheet files. I still need to go into all those other files and do the same.

 

Vectorworks: once again I have no idea how this happened - whether "user error" or a bug but in any case even if due to user error there need to be significantly better safeguards to prevent a single miskey or typo from having such a significant impact on the organization and structure of a drawing set. Things like this need to be "bullet proof" and not at "mercy of a sneeze".

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something else I noticed is that when you go to Tools / Origin / User Origin... (or just Command+9) the default selection if you hit 'OK' is 'Set User Origin to next mouse click'. Unless you immediately select 'Cancel' wherever you happen to click next is you new User Origin location.

 

I think that is an absolutely horrible arrangement for a default setting. Usually when I hit 'OK' at a window like this and have not changed any of the settings I assume no change to any of the settings. If someone were to inadvertently hit the Command+9 shortcut and didn't notice otherwise that can easily become a very costly mistake. If the 'Disable dragging for the User Origin button' is supposed to prevent that from happening it definitely does not work.

 

I think this is the software equivalent of bad ergonomic design and Vectorworks should seriously re-think it. Hitting 'OK' at a selection like this should always maintain the current default whether origin set to Internal Origin or different User Origin. At the very least there should be a Confirmation prompt before allowing this change. Considering the impact this is not a change you would want to make on a whim.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm new here, but signed up as I finally found this thread which has reassured me that I'm not doing this to my own project files!

 

I recently isolated the problem to referenced files, where these are saved in a rotated position in the source file. When you return to the target file and this updates, the referenced drawing ends up somewhere else. I wonder whether this has anything to do with Vectorworks trying to provide a different set of coordinates when in a rotated view (highlight in blue along the viewport boundaries). I run a small practice and we pay a large annual fee to Nemetschek to remain up to date. I have experienced these problems for over 2 years on a number of jobs, losing countless man hours opening and closing files, unrotating viewports, moving references back to their original positions and re-setting the user origin. I frankly can't believe that such a basic flaw in the Vectorworks software architecture can exist, and that it has done so for 5 years! Does anyone from Nemetschek even have the courtesy to read the forums and find out about user experiences and respond from a developer perspective? - I can't see any official response to any of the previous posts.

 

I'm not going to waste our time learning to use any enriched BIM features when you can't even trust the file coordinates! If they don't solve this by 2019 I'm taking the whole office over to another platform. Is it too much to ask for a system that can reference and rotate as well as Microstation could 15 years ago?!

 

You may be able to tell that I've just ended another afternoon of wrangling with this deficiency...

 

[VWorks 2018 SP2, Mac OSX High Sierra]

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@1608chrisHi We had this problem ages ago but not since. Cause appeared to be the model too far from the internal origin of the program

How we fixed the broken files was NOT to rotate design layers or viewports as they will revert back .

Try this. each of your exrefs have the same reference point i presume. Push 0 on num pad to reset each reference original. Re set the reference point 0,0 point to each referenced original and close each one. do this one at a time till all have been done. Then open the drawing with all the references attached and they (hopefully) will all be in the correct location.

HTH

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Alan,

 

Thanks for the advice. After much frustration I have discovered how to reset things through trial and error in the past, but I really don't think I should have to. Rotating a view should have zero impact on world coordinates and this still needs a big fix for the software to be fit for purpose.

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28 minutes ago, 1608chris said:

Alan,

 

Thanks for the advice. After much frustration I have discovered how to reset things through trial and error in the past, but I really don't think I should have to. Rotating a view should have zero impact on world coordinates and this still needs a big fix for the software to be fit for purpose.

In the File>Document Settings>Document Setup select Drawing Grids and then the Angle category. There you can set an angle for your grid to match the rotated view and then you will see you have X/Y showing the world coordinates and Screen X and Screen Y showing the coordinates as they would be if you had not rotated the grid.

But you would have to repeat this step for every time you rotate the view to a different angle, otherwise you will get incorrect coordinate readouts.

In Autocad it works exactly the same when you are in the model space, you will always need to align your coordinate system with the rotated view.

Edited by Art V
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Art V,

 

A useful tip, but we don't need to move the original coordinates. We would simply like to use the rotate view facility to work on source files without worrying about inadvertently breaking the references to every target file. We'd also like Vectorworks to reference reliably. These are two very basic functions that every user should demand. 

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  • 1 year later...

We had this happen on our 2019 release. 

We we're able to realign the references using the process below.

  1. Firstly we checked the location of the origin point in both files and found they had moved. 
  2. We moved the geometry back so the origin locations matched between the files.
  3. The we did the same for the user origin, we checked the user origin locations and found these has also been adjusted.
  4. We use the align user origin to origin to ensure these also aligned 

While we are unsure why the origin, geometry and user origin points moved, (we are sure we didn't manually, knowingly or willingly move them) this process worked to realign all the files back to their original locations.

If you had moved your user origin I am sure this process would still work but you would need to ensure both users origin point locations matched.

 

Hope this helps

 

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19 minutes ago, Laura Smagin said:

We had this happen on our 2019 release. 

We we're able to realign the references using the process below.

  1. Firstly we checked the location of the origin point in both files and found they had moved. 
  2. We moved the geometry back so the origin locations matched between the files.
  3. The we did the same for the user origin, we checked the user origin locations and found these has also been adjusted.
  4. We use the align user origin to origin to ensure these also aligned 

While we are unsure why the origin, geometry and user origin points moved, (we are sure we didn't manually, knowingly or willingly move them) this process worked to realign all the files back to their original locations.

If you had moved your user origin I am sure this process would still work but you would need to ensure both users origin point locations matched.

 

Hope this helps

 

Laura,

Thanks very much for your advice.

My team hadn't moved the origins either and it's a bit of a worry that this can happen no matter what size of project. I've not suffered the problem since, so fingers crossed it was a glitch. Having said that, you experienced it on 2019.

Garth

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Hi both,

 

Thanks for your input. We believe the problems we experienced were related to the saving of files in a rotated view. If a file (A) , referenced in another elsewhere (B) , was saved in a rotated view the world references get mapped incorrectly. The process can be reversed by run rotating the view in A and updating the references in B. I believe that the process you describe effectively does as much. It’s annoying and I don’t know why the world coordinates change when you rotate the viewport. Our office now avoids rotating views to prevent these issues. Netmetschek have had ages to resolve this very basic problem. 

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16 hours ago, 1608chris said:

It’s annoying and I don’t know why the world coordinates change when you rotate the viewport. Our office now avoids rotating views to prevent these issues. Netmetschek have had ages to resolve this very basic problem. 

The coordinates change because the coordinate grid (X/Y axes) does not rotate along with your drawing. Rotating your grid to align it with the rotated view should solve that issue.

 

What might help is to have an option to rotate the coordinate system including origin relative to your rotation point with the view within that drawing.

This should in my opinion be an option and not the default because I do use rotated view quite often when setting out objects so that it is easier to have "normal" horizonalt/vertical distances without having to mess with the georeferenced coordinate system itself.

 

The same applies to e.g. AutoCAD/DWG files, if the drawing is rotated but the UCS (User Coordinate System) has not and you then try to import the drawing you will get the same issue as during import of the DWG file VW looks at the WCS (World Coordinate System) which is the DWG equivalent of the VW's internal origin as its reference point.

Even within AutoCAD it can happen during a copy/paste between drawings that things do seem to paste incorrectly until you look at the UCS and see it is oriented differently from the drawing you copied it from. It did paste correctly but it realigns with the coordinate system of the receiving drawing (e.g. same direction of the Z-axis) so visually it may at first not be what you expected to see.

 

18 hours ago, Laura Smagin said:

While we are unsure why the origin, geometry and user origin points moved, (we are sure we didn't manually, knowingly or willingly move them) this process worked to realign all the files back to their original locations.

 

17 hours ago, gfp38 said:

My team hadn't moved the origins either and it's a bit of a worry that this can happen no matter what size of project. I've not suffered the problem since, so fingers crossed it was a glitch. Having said that, you experienced it on 2019.

Did people experiencing this perhaps import DWG files or have a colleague do this before they opened the file? If yes it could be that the import setting caused the user origin to shift relative to the internal origin. Or someone may have rotated a view in one of the referenced drawings, as described above. It may then look as if the origin spontaneously shifted but that might not be the case after all.

 

Most of the time shifting origins are caused by subsequent imports of DWG or other files, rotated views in referenced files or changed user origins in the referenced file (whether through import or manual change or otherwise).

If you are absolutely sure none of these apply then you could reasonably assume you ran into a bug within VW and then you would need to contact VW support to have a look at it.

 

In short, align user origin with internal origin and reset rotated views to unrotated state should avoid most of the issues with coordinate/referenced file shifts.

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  • 2 years later...
  • 5 months later...

I'm having the problems described here, viewports moving / disappearing and the reference resetting to origin after being moved, when it is updated. 

 

We have the building model on it's own grid coordinate system. Site has it's own datum, when we overlay the reference we can't move it, when we set up a design layer view port we can move that but it either then disappears or relocates. Our site model is currently unusable. Anyone find any work arounds or solutions?

 

Steve. 

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  • 2 years later...

Hi There, so after 10 years we are still here discussing this issue... I imported some CAD plans as an external ref, these were originally rotated to suit a certain angle, but nothing else has been touched. If we close the file then reopen it, the reference start travelling here and there ans we need to make all the viewports anew. Any suggestion to solve this problem please?

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  • 8 months later...

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