Why you no put chairs there?

[Chris_W]

Hello all...

 

Working with the seating section tool and am struggling to get it to fill a particular corner. Help? 

 

I've tried playing with the focal point, different alignments, etc... and nothing. I figured adding a few extra inches beyond the boundary box would do the trick...

 

At this point, I'll probably just plop the chairs in myself, but...

 

The white polygon is the boundary box. The red dots are where I think I could get two more chairs. 

[klinzey]

@Chris_W Remember the bounding boxes are square so you would need significant space to fit the last one in the first row because of the angles and it's intersection the right side. The other seat is probably being eliminated because it's crossing the line. If you look at the row you can see the far left seat is behind the line, the next seat is touching the line, the next seat is overlapping the line which means the next seat is probably even further over the line.

[Chris_W]

@klinzeyRight. But wouldn't increasing the Distance Past Boundry a bit solve that? Maybe I don't understand how that number works, because the more I add to it, the more out of whack the seating gets, but it doesn't seem to add chairs there...

 

this is Distance Past Boundry set at 12"

[Andrew Davies]

I find myself in this position often.  Wish I had a good solution!

 

I tend to use the reshape tool until I get it to where I want it (or give up completely and plot manually)

[EAlexander]

You will spend more time troubleshooting this tool then if you just manually plot your chairs. 

[scottmoore]

What Evan said. Then you know it’s right as opposed to assuming the tool did it right. 

 

My experience is that seating is often just “another thing we do” in the design process. Once you get on site, it can often become “the most important thing” when either your drawing is wrong or the facility crew did not follow the plan. Once that happens, everyone starts asking questions when you have something more important to be doing. Spending a few minutes to get the drawing right can be crucial. 

[Chris_W]

Great advice, guys. Thank you. 

 

I'm picking up what you're putting down... the amount of finesse time in the boundary box is about equal to amount of time it would take to just draw it. 

 

BTW, totally different topic... you guys know of a way to automatically the count the number of objects in a given area and drop it in a text box? 😛

 

Just kidding, I can do some research on the report features. Thank you all for the help!

[Andrew Davies]

We are happy to help so don’t worry about asking!

 

But yes, I normally use the count() function in a worksheet. Worksheets are clunky and don’t look pretty at first but can be easily formatted with a little work. 

 

If if you want to count chairs / symbols in a specific area - draw a rectangle and name it. Then you can refer to that name in a formula. I’m not in front of my Mac but let us know if you need an example and I can send you something. 

Edited September 3, 2019 by Andrew Davies

[swcreative]

Generally when I find the bounding box just isn't adding those last few chairs where I want I just do it manually, but instead of adding individual chairs outside of the seating area I right click on the seating section and choose Edit and then copy and paste/position the chairs I need.  When you exit the seating section edit the tool will then redraw the boundary box  and the object info palette will include these new chairs in the count for the section.

[Chris_W]

@swcreative - Yeah, that's my move as well. Interesting that you let it redraw the boundary box though. I typically don't - by the time I'm adding one or two more chairs, I've finessed it quite a bit and don't want it to undo what I've done elsewhere... I also refrain doing any refilling, for the same reason...

 

This project was a particular suck - the client wanted four different types of chairs modelled around three different stages, so 12 drawings. Each drawing had three seating sections (LCR, so sometimes you could mirror L/R, but not all the time....)... Hence my push to learn the seating tool and become as efficient as possible and reduce as much tweaky/manual work as possible... turns out the seating tool isn't about that life...

 

I see where it would be a pain to write an algorithm to do it. It's a great example of 'what we see is apparent, but very hard to describe within a programmable rule set.' I do a few shows a year that center around artificial intelligence programming... I'd be curious what would happen if...

 

 

[Andrew Davies]

Wonder if this is easier / better in VWX 2020?

[Chris_W]

15 hours ago, Andrew Davies said:

Wonder if this is easier / better in VWX 2020?

 

I had about 30 seconds to try VWX 2020...and couldn't find where they put the dang seating tool! 

 

Will report back later. 😛

[Andrew Davies]

It's in the same place I believe!  There is an aisle tool now to save you clipping the seating section which is none / less destructive.

 

Oh - and your earlier question about counting chairs - a data tag is a good way of doing that

 

HTH
Andrew

[zoomer]

19 minutes ago, Chris_W said:

 

I had about 30 seconds to try VWX 2020...and couldn't find where they put the dang seating tool! 

 

Will report back later. 😛

 

If you use a custom migrated workspace, like I do,

you might need to add some of the new tools manually.

 

AFAIK especially that tool came over but has a new,

slightly different name (?)