VW 2018 (and VW2021 and VW2022): Push-pull tool problems continue

[line-weight]

This is a continuation of an issue that I was already having in 2017. Mentioned in a couple of threads by me and others previously without much response.

 

Essentially: the push pull tool (a) struggles to select faces, (b) fails completely to select faces, or (c) causes a freeze with spinning beachball when there are moderately complex objects in the drawing.

 

As far as I can work out, it happens as soon as one of those objects is behind whatever face you are trying to select.

 

This has been a big problem in a drawing where I had a few imported symbols (from BIMobject and elsewhere). It became impossible to use the push-pull tool to edit simple objects in the drawings, unless I hid all of those complex objects. To make sure this isn't a problem specific to that drawing file, I've created a new and fairly simple one in VW2018. If anyone would like to see if they can replicate this, here is what I did:

- new blank file.

- go to BIMobject download. I downloaded fairly much at random a server unit casing, in SKP format. If you type "sr25ub" into the BIMobject search bar you should find it.

- I placed two of these units next to each other

- then I drew a simple extruded rectangle, sitting next to them. See screenshots below.

- one of the screenshots has a viewpoint with the extruded block to the left. using this viewpoint, the push-pull tool will select any face on the white block easily and correctly, and function as expected.

- however - the other screenshot has a viewpoint with the server units hiding behind the white block. using this viewpoint, the push pull tool struggles to select the face of the white block at all, and I get freezes and spinning beachballs.

 

This doesn't seem like an overly complex drawing. My machine specs are posted down below. It's a refurbed/upgraded mac pro.

 

I've attached the drawing file too.

 

 

pptest.vwx

Edited September 22, 2021 by line-weight

[zoomer]

CMD+F has ALWAYS worked for me in previous versions !?

 

I just tried in SP4 again, I can't see any Selection Problems in my

File now. But I only have PIOs like Walls, Columns and Slabs so far

which I don't want to destroy now.

In case it would need several PushPull operations before, to force

that Selection Problem.

 

And the last time I remember the issue, it was about modifying

Generic Solids (maybe also Extrudes ?) though.

 

Second, this file started from VW 2018, while my problematic Files

in the past may have been migrated from a previous version.

(I am not 100% sure for the file template I used !?)

Is your file a clean VW 2018 ?

 

 

EDIT :

BTW, I tried your file example.

It is definitely not working correct - but it works for me.

It is just totally lagging and it needs about 10 seconds before doing

a Selection and Highlight + same amount to do a PushPull.

Edited July 17, 2018 by zoomer

[zoomer]

Boahhhhh,

those BIM Objects are terrible. deeply hierarched in nested Symbols and

at the end a Mesh Geometry. No wonder they don't work well and  may

have influence on other tasks like Selection Calculation.

(from OpenGL ?)

[line-weight]

40 minutes ago, zoomer said:

 

Second, this file started from VW 2018, while my problematic Files

in the past may have been migrated from a previous version.

(I am not 100% sure for the file template I used !?)

Is your file a clean VW 2018 ?

 

 

 

The one that I posted at the beginning of the thread was a clean 2018 example. And it seems to be the BIM objects that are causing the problems, as you say.

 

The example I posted the video of yesterday is not a clean 2018 example, it was converted from an earlier version of VW. I tried turning off all classes except the basic wall ones, in case there were funny symbols in the background but it didn't make any difference.

 

I have not yet tried copying the objects into a clean file to see if that makes any difference. That's not really an option for me to solve the problems with the 'real' file though, in the short term.

[zoomer]

Yes, no solution or help.

 

The BIM Object example works well as long as your cursor does not

hover over a place where occluded Bim Objects are behind the Face

you want.

I don't think it needs or should work like this.

 

I opened a few files where I had PPT issues but couldn't reproduce

Selection Problems in SP4 with PIOs or Solids.

But I notice also that as soon as even a standard Mesh is hovered,

even when occluded, the same lagging happens,

as with your BIMOs.

[line-weight]

Here's another recording of the typical push-pull tool problems I'm having.

 

- This file was created from scratch in 2018. Not converted from an earlier version (unlike the recording I posted further up)

- The PP tool has mostly been behaving itself in this file until now. Has it reached some level of complexity that triggers the problems?

- You can see that for some reason it works ok when 'outside' of the building, but not inside.

- This file contains no imported bim objects or complicated symbols. In the recording I've shown one symbol that's in view, and you can see it's not a complex one.

- Even if I delete that symbol, and the door and window objects visible, the problem remains

- You can see that the only way I can edit that object with the PP tool is by making it a group, and then going into the group.

- Doing a cmd-F to bring the object to the 'front' has no effect.

 

This problem seriously hinders the ease with which I can work on 3D models.

 

[Kevin McAllister]

49 minutes ago, line-weight said:

Here's another recording of the typical push-pull tool problems I'm having.

 

- This file was created from scratch in 2018. Not converted from an earlier version (unlike the recording I posted further up)

- The PP tool has mostly been behaving itself in this file until now. Has it reached some level of complexity that triggers the problems?

- You can see that for some reason it works ok when 'outside' of the building, but not inside.

- This file contains no imported bim objects or complicated symbols. In the recording I've shown one symbol that's in view, and you can see it's not a complex one.

- Even if I delete that symbol, and the door and window objects visible, the problem remains

- You can see that the only way I can edit that object with the PP tool is by making it a group, and then going into the group.

- Doing a cmd-F to bring the object to the 'front' has no effect.

 

This problem seriously hinders the ease with which I can work on 3D models.

 

I've had some of those same issues myself recently. They occur with both the Push/Pull tool and the Extract tool, which seem to share the same surface selection system. It fails all to easily. I was also surprised to discover you can't use the Push/Pull tool on auto-hybrid geometry without entering the auto-hybrid which I feel is a huge user interface fail.

 

Hopefully this gets an overhaul soon.

 

Kevin

 

[line-weight]

4 minutes ago, Kevin McAllister said:

 

I've had some of those same issues myself recently. They occur with both the Push/Pull tool and the Extract tool, which seem to share the same surface selection system. It fails all to easily. I was also surprised to discover you can't use the Push/Pull tool on auto-hybrid geometry without entering the auto-hybrid which I feel is a huge user interface fail.

 

Hopefully this gets an overhaul soon.

 

Kevin

 

Yup, I've had the issues with the extract tool too, as mentioned in an earlier post on this thread.

 

 

[bcd]

Try pressing & holding B for the X-Ray mode while using the tool

[line-weight]

Can anyone who has been brave enough to start using 2019 comment on whether the push-pull tool situation seems to be any different/better/worse?

[Markvl]

Well @line-weight  I started a new file downloaded the same object and file type made a second copy of the object and drew a rectangle and extruded it so that I had the same setup as you have shown.  No trouble making it work.  There is some lag but I was able to highlight all surfaces and drag them in or out and set them.  I even push pulled parts of the server model.

 

Don't know what to say.  Could be a 2018 thing.  I could test it there as well.  This test was on 2019.

[line-weight]

41 minutes ago, Markvl said:

Well @line-weight  I started a new file downloaded the same object and file type made a second copy of the object and drew a rectangle and extruded it so that I had the same setup as you have shown.  No trouble making it work.  There is some lag but I was able to highlight all surfaces and drag them in or out and set them.  I even push pulled parts of the server model.

 

Don't know what to say.  Could be a 2018 thing.  I could test it there as well.  This test was on 2019.

 

Thanks for taking the time to try this. Interesting that you have found it to be ok in 2019, although it seems that not everyone had the problem in 2018. I might try downloading the demo version of 2019 to see what happens on my machine.

[Wesley Burrows]

On 11/19/2018 at 6:31 AM, line-weight said:

Can anyone who has been brave enough to start using 2019 comment on whether the push-pull tool situation seems to be any different/better/worse?

 

I just tried a 2018 file in 2019 that was giving me all sorts of problems with push-pull and to me it feels like there is some improvement,  but it's still quite laggy/beach-bally.

[line-weight]

So... I downloaded 2019 as a demo version. Opened a clean new file and followed the steps I list in my own OP at the beginning of this thread. The screen recording below shows what happens trying to use the push-pull tool. It sort-of works when the BIMobject objects aren't in the background, and when they are, it's unusable. The points in the video where nothing happens for several seconds - that's not because I'm not doing anything, it's because everything has seized up and I can't even shift my viewpoint. For some reason my screen recorder doesn't seem to have recorded the spinning beachballs I was getting throughout.

 

@Jim Wilson or anyone else from VW - can you give us any report on the progress that has been made in fixing this major bug since it was reported 1 year and 2 months ago?

 

 

[Markvl]

@line-weight would you be able to post that file here so I could poke at it myself?

 

Just watched your video.  Man... there is some serious lag there.  This was not my experience.

Edited November 21, 2018 by Markvl

[line-weight]

1 minute ago, Markvl said:

@line-weight would you be able to post that file here so I could poke at it myself?

Sure

 

pptool19.vwx

[Markvl]

You're not going to like this...I had no serious trouble with it.  Now as I don't have a video thingy to post what I was doing I'll try to type it out here.  Upon opening the file I can see the two bim objects and the extruded box.  I flew around a bit and went back to the general initial view and chose the push/pull tool.  I had no issues choosing any faces I could see and pull or pushing them and setting them.  I experienced not a hint of lag.  Now when I did shift the view so that the bim objects were hidden behind the box there was a slight lag in highlighting a given side but I was able to pull them out or push them back in.  Some of the trouble I had had more to do with screen room to get my mouse cursor out to a position that would translate into a 3D move whether pushing or pulling.

 

Again I watched your video and you are experiencing a real problem.  I couldn't duplicate it.

[Markvl]

When ever I'm using the push/pull tool in proximity to the bim object there is a visible sign that the program is trying to determine what surface to highlight but I'm still able to make a move.

 

Looking at your specs it doesn't seem like you should have any troubles.  I am using a windows machine vs your mac but that should make a difference.  Video card issue?  Maybe?  I don't know.

Edited November 21, 2018 by Markvl

[line-weight]

2 minutes ago, Markvl said:

You're not going to like this...I had no serious trouble with it.  Now as I don't have a video thingy to post what I was doing I'll try to type it out here.  Upon opening the file I can see the two bim objects and the extruded box.  I flew around a bit and went back to the general initial view and chose the push/pull tool.  I had no issues choosing any faces I could see and pull or pushing them and setting them.  I experienced not a hint of lag.  Now when I did shift the view so that the bim objects were hidden behind the box there was a slight lag in highlighting a given side but I was able to pull them out or push them back in.  Some of the trouble I had had more to do with screen room to get my mouse cursor out to a position that would translate into a 3D move whether pushing or pulling.

 

Again I watched your video and you are experiencing a real problem.  I couldn't duplicate it.

 

Thanks for taking the time to test though.

 

Not everyone could duplicate it in 2018 either - but quite a few could, including @Jim Wilson on his machine which I assume not to be outside of VW's recommended specs. So it seems it may be in some way hardware dependent, but given that it can be reproduced on a machine at VW HQ, why has it been allowed to persist into 2019 without any recommendation as how to mitigate it?

 

If there's something I could do to my hardware here to make this issue go away, I'd do it. Probably even including buying a new machine if I could be confident that it would solve the issue. It's that costly to me in terms of productivity. At least I know that shelling out for VW2019 isn't going to solve things.

[Markvl]

I totally get your frustration.  When we have a job to do  I expect the software to do what I want it to do within the limits of my understanding what the software has expressed that it can do.  These kind of bugs it seems get in the way of getting the job done.  It just takes time to do a work around that shouldn't have happened in the first place.

[PVA - Admin]

48 minutes ago, line-weight said:

given that it can be reproduced on a machine at VW HQ, why has it been allowed to persist into 2019 without any recommendation as how to mitigate it?

Simply because we have not yet found a way to solve the problem. However, this issue was already pulled and listed as a usability priority and engineering is very aware of it. Last I heard there were a few different methods that might possibly solve it, but the bug was not listed as fixed for SP2.

I am still able to replicate it here. The problem doesn't always appear right away, and gets more and more obvious the twitchier you are with the mouse (I am VERY twitchy with my mouse) as the face selection tries too hard to find all the small facets in BIMObjects (or in some cases, other mesh containers) before moving on to highlighting the faces the user wants. The original thought was that we could simply have push/pull ignore BimObjects since they dont really need to be push/pulled anyway, but it was not as easy as first expected to exclude that geometry from the tool's awareness.

[line-weight]

As usual not directed at you personally Jim W, but I don't feel this is being taken seriously.

 

Over a year, and still no solution found?

 

As I've shown in other examples above, again now provided some time back, the problems with the push-pull tool don't seem to be limited to situations where complex meshes are involved. It's made it literally impossible for me to complete work on certain drawings. It's not a minor inconvenience, it's a fundamental dysfunctionality.

 

 

[line-weight]

Well, it's disappointing to find that this is still a problem in VW2021. The push pull tool is regularly failing to 'find' surfaces unless I do various workarounds like changing viewpoint, making the object selected, and so on.

 

This is not in a complex file. No weird imports. Mainly just solids and some standard PIOs like walls and slabs.

[line-weight]

Am I alone in this problem? Or is it that most people don't use the push-pull tool a lot?

 

I feel like it's actually worse in 2021 than in 2018, and combined with various other glitches makes working in 3d completely infuriating at times. 50% of my time is spent adjusting the viewing angle until the **** push-pull tool will recognise the face I'm after.

 

Edited March 5, 2021 by line-weight

[Jesse Cogswell]

@line-weight I generally do not use the push/pull feature.  Scratch that.  I never use the push/pull feature.  My biggest problem is that it doesn't do resize operations, it just adds or subtracts a solid.  For example, let's say that you have a simple 3'x3'x3' cube, created as an Extrude.  Then you decide to make it a 3'x4'x3' cube, so you grab your Push/Pull tool and pull out one of the sides.  Now the object is a Solid Addition consisting of the original Extrude and a Tapered Extrude.  Now you want it to be a 3'x4'x4' cube, so you pull out the top.  Now you have a Solid Addition with a Tapered Extrude and another Solid Addition.  It's far better to just edit the original Extrude.  I run into this all the time with exhibit designers and scenic designers.  They use the Push/Pull tool to resize any 3D geometry, but when I start trying to texture things for rendering, it's a nightmare since everything is a Solid Addition or Solid Subtraction.

 

The other big problem I have with it is that if you use it to model a complex shape, you end up with an endless amount of nested Solid Addition or Solid Subtraction objects.  This used to cause file sizes to balloon to incredible sizes, though I think this has been better optimized in recent versions, and I admit I haven't delved too deep into the recent Model History feature to navigate through the nesting, but I find it to be much simpler to create the necessary extrudes and sweeps first and then to add or subtract everything at once.  Much simpler to edit later even if it takes longer to model initially.

[line-weight]

2 minutes ago, Jesse Cogswell said:

@line-weight I generally do not use the push/pull feature.  Scratch that.  I never use the push/pull feature.  My biggest problem is that it doesn't do resize operations, it just adds or subtracts a solid.  For example, let's say that you have a simple 3'x3'x3' cube, created as an Extrude.  Then you decide to make it a 3'x4'x3' cube, so you grab your Push/Pull tool and pull out one of the sides.  Now the object is a Solid Addition consisting of the original Extrude and a Tapered Extrude.  Now you want it to be a 3'x4'x4' cube, so you pull out the top.  Now you have a Solid Addition with a Tapered Extrude and another Solid Addition.  It's far better to just edit the original Extrude.  I run into this all the time with exhibit designers and scenic designers.  They use the Push/Pull tool to resize any 3D geometry, but when I start trying to texture things for rendering, it's a nightmare since everything is a Solid Addition or Solid Subtraction.

 

The other big problem I have with it is that if you use it to model a complex shape, you end up with an endless amount of nested Solid Addition or Solid Subtraction objects.  This used to cause file sizes to balloon to incredible sizes, though I think this has been better optimized in recent versions, and I admit I haven't delved too deep into the recent Model History feature to navigate through the nesting, but I find it to be much simpler to create the necessary extrudes and sweeps first and then to add or subtract everything at once.  Much simpler to edit later even if it takes longer to model initially.

 

Yes, these are issues with it. However, I'm quite often using it for "quick and dirty" modelling just to try stuff out quickly - stuff that will likely be redrawn at a later date more carefully. So, I'm not not necessarily worrying too much about edit history. I just want to be able to do stuff fluently and easily. Previously I'd use Sketchup for this kind of modelling but the duplication of modelling was very inefficient. So when VW introduced the push-pull tool it was great and I could do that kind of thing directly in VW. It's part of what persuaded me to switch to drawing fully in 3d.

 

And in 2021 some quite good additions were made, allowing you to do push-pull type modifications on the fly. In principle these are great too - but it's massively frustrating that there's this block to fluency which is this simple matter of the tool not being able to do one of its most basic tasks: highlight the face you want to manipulate.