Just starting in Vectorworks Architect, problems with doors and snaps

[FrankMcGahon]

I'm just starting to learn vectorworks/architect and have a problem with doors, when I insert a door and screen, in the 3-d view there are large overlapping boxes around the door and screen that render solid, I have no idea why this is happening and can't see how to get rid of them, also when inserting doors a stile appears about 900mm away from the door, just floating in space??? another thing was, by adjusting the number of panels to try and get a "flush door" I ended up with my door leaf being hung half ways up the doorframe and extending below the floor, I couldn't see any way to adjust the height of the door relative to the door frame??? any idea why these things are happening?

Also I'm wondering is there a way to "force" a snap to a particular object when there are a many that the smart cursor finds? I have used Microstation before and you could keep alt-clicking on a point until it selected the one you want, is there something similar with Vectorworks or do you have to move the cursor around hoping to pick up, I'm concerned that as drawings get more cluttered it will be difficult to get the right snap point

I'm using VA 9 on G4 powerbook, OS9.1

[A. PETER SHERMAN]

Frank-The boxes you see may be the door jambs which seem to render correctly the trim however does not (I was told by tech support that this is a known bug) before I went back to 8 I was importing doors from 8 into 9. If you set panels,verticle stiles and horizontal stiles (actually called rails in the industry) to 0 you will get a flat panel door. Without setting up specific classes to isolate what you are trying to snap I believe snap constraints are the best way to solve your snap problem (I could be wrong about this) good luck.

[FrankMcGahon]

Thanks for your quick reply

Actually the "boxes" problem seems to be just with doors that have side screens, they get completely obscured by these largeboxes in any view other than top/plan, it doesn't seem to be possible to alter their size in the object info palette which suggests they aren't one of those items (jambs, trims etc.)

As for the "displacement" problem this happens, in different ways, in either flush door (values set to 0) or panelled doors, in panelled doors the second from bottom stile is shown projected off plane from the door leaf at a distance approximately the same as the width of the door, when you switch to a flush door, the whole door leaf ends up being projected that distance away and also projected down in the Z direction about half the height of the door,

In each of these cases it shows ok on top/plan but not in any other view, It really is perplexing, as I am new to VWA I was wondering whether it was something I was doing wrong or whether it was a common problem, It really is slowing down the learning process for me. It seems to me that VWA is a very versatile and useful application (which is why I chose it) once you get the buidling drawn but so far it seems diffiult to get to that stage.

My situation is that I am trying to learn it in enough detail to be able to teach the others at this firm, in a condensed format, the aspects of VWA that we will use and be able to answer any problems that come up, stuff like this can really snag you....