Steroidal Snapping

[willofmaine]

In hidden line drawings, such as Section Viewports, and even in Plan Viewports, it seems that snapping is available for ALL geometry in the 3D model, rather than just for the geometry that's visible in a particular viewport. Having an endless number of snap points for invisible geometry near a visible point that one's trying to snap to seems to pretty much defeat the purpose of snapping... I'm pretty sure in older versions of Vectorworks you could only snap to visible geometry... Luckily there's the Snap Loupe, but, having to use it constantly is far from ideal...

Or is there a setting that I'm missing for turning off snapping to invisible geometry?

[Kevin McAllister]

I'm not sure if there is. I agree it can be problematic. I often have trouble when a viewport is a rendered background and a hidden line foreground. VW always wants to snap to the edges of the rendered bitmap it creates instead of actual geometry.

Kevin

[Tobias Kern]

hi will,

1+

much needed feature.

some viewports have thousands of snappingpoints.

a admin could bring this topic to the wishlist area

cheers

[PVA - Admin]

I don't think there is a direct setting for this. What I have found in rendered viewports is that there is an "edge" of the viewport itself, an "edge" of the rendered bitmap image and if the viewport is cropped, then that can introduce a third "edge" when one would expect that to be the same exact perimeter for all three. In my experience it has only been a pixel or two off in most cases, but that is enough to seriously affect a design in some situations.

Submitting now.

[Kevin McAllister]

Jim,

There's already a wish list item submitted about the bitmap/edges issue here which you may want to link to - https://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=198808&Searchpage=1&Main=40000&Words=snap+bitmap&Search=true#Post198808

I think the issue willofmaine is grappling with occurs when you're editing the annotations of a sheet layer viewport rendered in hidden line. VW looks for snapping points on everything, including structure and other elements that are technically hidden. In some instances, especially if Snap to Distance and Smart Points are turned on, it can result in the screen lighting up light a Christmas tree of snap points....

Cheers,

Kevin

[PVA - Admin]

For Hidden Line specifically I would mostly expect any user to ONLY want snapping to work on the generated lines in the render. Is that reasonable, or would there be some motivation to want to snap to hidden geometry?

[Kevin McAllister]

That's definitely what I would prefer myself. I also wish that if the bitmaps generated by rendering sheet layer viewports need to be snap-able this is automatically disabled when you're editing annotations.

KM

[VincentCuclair]

Well if you want to see and snap other geometry in hidden line the obvious solution would be the b key - xray, right?

[willofmaine]

For Hidden Line specifically I would mostly expect any user to ONLY want snapping to work on the generated lines in the render. Is that reasonable, or would there be some motivation to want to snap to hidden geometry?

That's very reasonable; it's what I'm looking for. I DON'T want to snap to hidden geometry in a hidden line drawing; there's usually way too much and there's no way to know what's what. The problem is that, currently, you can: snapping seems to be available for all geometry in the 3D model, regardless of whether or not that geometry is represented (visible) in the hidden line render. To snap to what appears to be a clear and obvious point in the drawing can be impossible without having to zoom way in to isolate that point among a bunch of other points that represent geometry that can't even be seen...

I've also experienced this problem with regular Top/Plan (wireframe) viewports.

In design layers the ability to snap to hidden geometry is very useful. BUT it's limited only to geometry that's on visible Layers and Classes, and there's a temporary dashed "ghost" image of the geometry that's being snapped to.

-Will