Add Spotlight to Designer Workspace 2018

[LJ TMS]

For future Vectorworks releases, please add the Spotlight menus and toolset to the Designer workspace (or make a seperate Everything Workspace).

 

Here's a request from 2010

Add the Spotlight Toolset to the Designer Workspace

 

And 2014

Everything Workspace

 

And 2015 (and bumped again in 2017)

VW Designer 2015 - Still no complete workspace with all toolsets

 

 

In the meantime, here's how to build a Designer + Spotlight workspace.

 

1. Create a duplicate of the default Designer workspace and name it.

2. Add the Spotlight menus & commands. Here is a compare of the default Designer workspace vs Spotlight workspace. Add the green hightlighted commands on the right side to your workspace (except the Architectural submenu (right side, lines 512-532) which I believe is already included under AEC (left side, lines 445-536).

3. Goto the Tools / Palettes, and add the Dim tools to your Basic toolset. The list of tools to add is in the compare link (right side, lines 918-924).

4. Add a new tool set and name it Spotlight. The list of tools to add is in the compare link (right side, lines 928-963).

5. Add the icon your newly created Spotlight toolset using the attached icon. (This was a quick and dirty screengrab + cleanup until they allow us to select from the builtin icons).

 

OR, if you want to save a bunch of time, I've attached a workspace file which is just all the above steps completed (no other customizations).

Place the file in C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Nemetschek\Vectorworks\2018\Workspaces

Re-open VW and select it under Tools / Workspaces

 

Designer+Spotlight_2018.vww

Edited September 13, 2017 by LJ TMS

[Andy Broomell]

It's always driven me crazy that Designer doesn't come with a workspace that includes all the tools you've paid for.

 

Thanks for sharing your work!!

[LJ TMS]

No problem!

 

Yea I really can't understand how this feature request isn't fulfilled by now. It requires 0% engineering considering the user can fix this with the workspace editor. The only hack job is having to sceengrab the spotlight toolset icon, since the builtin icon can't be selected in the editor (and cannot be found in the Vectorworks.vwr as suggested here). 

 

In the 2014/2015 discussions,  it's mentioned there may be a hard limit on how many commands can be added to a single workspace. But this obviously isn't a problem (at least not in VW2017/2018) considering you can add all the missing Spotlight commands to the Designer workspace without any errors.

 

Heck, they can grab my shared Designer+Spotlight_2018.vww above, swap out the my Spotlight icon with the real icon, bundle the vww in VW, and wish granted!

Edited September 13, 2017 by LJ TMS

[Andy Broomell]

7 hours ago, LJ TMS said:

Heck, they can grab my shared Designer+Spotlight_2018.vww above, swap out the my Spotlight icon with the real icon, bundle the vww in VW, and wish granted!

 

Yes please!

[Andy Broomell]

On 9/12/2017 at 1:51 PM, LJ TMS said:

5. Add the icon your newly created Spotlight toolset using the attached icon. (This was a quick and dirty screengrab + cleanup until they allow us to select from the builtin icons).

 

As I'm finally rebuilding my workspace in 2018, I've taken a moment to extract the Spotlight toolset icon in a higher resolution. The attached zip has two icons; direct the workspace editor to the  "spotlight.png" file. It will automatically pull in the "spotlight@2x.png" icon as well for retina displays.

 

Perhaps in 2019 they'll add Spotlight to the Designer workspace, as we've requested over the years...

 

Spotlight-Icons.zip

Edited December 30, 2017 by Andy Broomell

[LJ TMS]

Awesome, thanks Andy! This is better than my hacky screenshoted icon.

 

Where did you extract the Spotlight toolset icon from? I remember searching through all the resources a few years ago and couldn't locate it.

[Andy Broomell]

I couldn't find the real thing either, unfortunately (not sure why they can't share the icons with us given the Workspace Editor's shortcomings).

 

So I took a screenshot while on my Macbook Pro, then jumped into Photoshop to crop the image and recreate the transparency, then exported the two icon sizes.

 

(To get a bit more detailed, I actually took screenshots of the original icon once while highlighted and again while not highlighted, which allowed me to utilize the Difference between the two images to extract info about the original transparency.)

[PVA - Admin]

On Mac you can get them by going to Show Package Contents on the application itself, then Contents/Resources and Show Package Contents of Vectorworks.vwr and in the Images folder are the original icons for pretty much everything.

There might be some with @2x in the name, those are the 4k/retina res high quality icons.

I think this can be done on Windows as well but I forget the steps off the top of my head.

[Andy Broomell]

10 hours ago, JimW said:

On Mac you can get them by going to Show Package Contents on the application itself, then Contents/Resources and Show Package Contents of Vectorworks.vwr and in the Images folder are the original icons for pretty much everything.

There might be some with @2x in the name, those are the 4k/retina res high quality icons.

I think this can be done on Windows as well but I forget the steps off the top of my head.

 

Thanks Jim! I can't seem to find the images for toolset icons there though... I may very well be missing something?

[PVA - Admin]

Im told they're all vaguely nearby that folder, but I have not gone looking recently and I have not confirmed this for sure. You might try searching the name of the palette as well as files that have the .png extension within that area to see if that brings them up faster. 

[Kevin McAllister]

I don't think they are accessible. I remember trying this before and just tried again. If you look within Vectorworks.vwr to Images>Tools it only seems to contain part of the toolset. Searching using key words like Light, Soft (from softgoods) or Truss doesn't turn up anything. Ironically it does contain some long discontinued tools like NURBSArc and NURBSCircle. They were some of my favourite tools and predated the Screen Plane Layer Plane situation.

 

I have wish listed this same wish and bumped it many times.

 

Kevin

 

 

[LJ TMS]

Not sure if the correct way is to create a new topic each year or add on to this one? Here's my request again to have an Spotlight menus & tools added to the Designer workspace (since Spotlight is part of Designer?) or create an "Everything Workspace" in VW2020.

 

This is my first year on JIRA since I had this request, so added there as well.

VE-99189 - Add Spotlight menus & tools to Designer workspace

VE-99190 - Allow selecting built-in Tool Set icons for custom Tool Sets in the Workspace Editor

 

How to build a Designer + Spotlight workspace in VW 2019

 

1. Create a duplicate of the default Designer workspace and name it.

2. Add the Spotlight menus & commands. Here is a compare of the default Designer workspace vs Spotlight workspace in VW2019. Add the green highlighted commands on the right side of the compare window to your workspace (except the Architectural submenu which I believe is already included under AEC).

3. Go to the Tools / Palettes, and add the Dimension tools to your Basic toolset. The list of tools to add is in the compare link (right side, lines 939-945).

4. Add a new tool set and name it Lighting. The list of tools to add is in the compare link (right side, lines 949-962).

5. Add a new tool set and name it Rigging. The list of tools to add is in the compare link (right side, lines 963-978).

6. Add a new tool set and name it Event Design. The list of tools to add is in the compare link (right side, lines 979-991).

 

For icons, use Andy's spotlight icon from his post above.

 

I've also attached a "Designer+Spotlight.vww" with the above changes already made. I did not have time to make a clean with transparency version of the Rigging and Event Design icons, so they are pretty crappy. Hopefully I or someone else can post some better icons to use (or even better we can get the actual icons from VW?)

 

If you use the attached VWW, for Windows place in C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Nemetschek\Vectorworks\2019\Workspaces

Re-open VW and select it under Tools / Workspaces

 

Designer+Spotlight.vww

Edited October 9, 2018 by LJ TMS