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Extrude along path not working 'as expected'


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Hi,

Then main thing when using EAP is not to try to move the line move the profile as the extrude runs down the centre of the profile. moving the profile moves the profile to the side of the line. hope this helps. Just use a polyline of 3d poly.

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6 hours ago, ford519 said:

Hello! Does anyone know how to make this POS EAP tool work yet


Yes, the answer can be found earlier in this thread.  I posted a tutorial on it.

It is far from the most intuitive of tools, but once you understand how it operates, you can do pretty cool stuff with it.

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12 hours ago, Pat Stanford said:

Many people are using the Extrude Along Path tool succesfully. 

 

I'm interested to know what this is based on - I'd put my money on the majority of VW users not managing to use the EAP tool successfully.

 

The documentation for EAP remains incomplete and misleading in VW2022.

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  • 9 months later...

Whilst using the Extrude Along Path tool....I was editing the path. Causing the profile to reverse. So instead of my cornice facing outward over the wall face it faced inward. But I had not edited the profile. This problem was solved by editing the profile which was still located in the orginal path position. So by moving the profile to follow the new path vertex...just sayin'. But then I still haven't started to use 2023.

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Lots of info here.  Although extrude along a path with most users begins with a poly line or just a open polygon and planer profile, the moment you hit "OK", it becomes a NURBS curve.  If you edit the path, you will see it has become a NURBS curve, curiously not the profile unless you started with a NURBS profile.

Everything in Vectorworks is NURBS based as I understand it.  Extrude along a path is just loft with one rail, only much better.  I only use loft with one rail when accuracy is not required.

It has been my experience that simply beginning with a NURBS curve eliminates a lot of unforeseen problems if the path is tricky.  The problem is how VW's decides to change your curve into a NURBS curve.  For example, if your path Is a polygon, after you do the EAP, go to edit path and then look at "rebuild nurbs" in the 3D power pack mamu.  You will only have a few points.  It may be sufficient, but it may not.

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  • 1 month later...
On 7/19/2021 at 2:15 PM, line-weight said:

 

Thing is, in this case, the missing info documentation has been highlighted to VW multiple times since at least 2017, and they choose simply to ignore it.

 

Someone at VW spending a few of hours adding some info to the relevant section would save countless hours/days of frustration on the part of many many users. They don't have to reprint a manual - it's online, and the lack of info persists through each new release of VW.

 

So. It's 2023 now, and VW still can't be bothered to update or improve the documentation for the EAP tool.

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7 minutes ago, line-weight said:

 

So. It's 2023 now, and VW still can't be bothered to update or improve the documentation for the EAP tool.

 

Have you made this point via the 'Was this page helpful?' link on Help or just via the Forum? Couldn't find your original post to see

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On 3/9/2023 at 6:07 PM, VIRTUALENVIRONS said:

Lots of info here.  Although extrude along a path with most users begins with a poly line or just a open polygon and planer profile, the moment you hit "OK", it becomes a NURBS curve.  If you edit the path, you will see it has become a NURBS curve, curiously not the profile unless you started with a NURBS profile.

Everything in Vectorworks is NURBS based as I understand it.  Extrude along a path is just loft with one rail, only much better.  I only use loft with one rail when accuracy is not required.

It has been my experience that simply beginning with a NURBS curve eliminates a lot of unforeseen problems if the path is tricky.  The problem is how VW's decides to change your curve into a NURBS curve.  For example, if your path Is a polygon, after you do the EAP, go to edit path and then look at "rebuild nurbs" in the 3D power pack mamu.  You will only have a few points.  It may be sufficient, but it may not.

 

This is probably very important info, and something that is missing from any guidance I've seen up until now. I wonder how many of my EAP problems can be explained by this. I will quite commonly have a path line that is made up of, say, several polygons and straight lines, which I then "compose" into one.

 

It's not always practical or possible to draw as NURBS from scratch though. Or, where it is, it's an awkward and unintuitive route to getting what you want.

 

In fact the shapes in your tutorial provide a good example. The path line looks like this:

 

1812918714_Screenshot2023-05-04at10_53_50.jpg.ce9e5578258415081b239e24846740eb.jpg

 

The curved section in the middle - it's a kind of parabolic type curve, because that's what the NURBS tool creates. What if I want this to be a curve with a constant and fixed radius though? Very commonly that's what is wanted, because it's what's needed for certain things to be defined or machined. If I wanted that curve to be a constant radius I don't think I could do it with the NURBS tool - I'd need to draw an arch and two straight lines and then compose them together.

 

The same applies to all the curves on the "profile"

 

214397907_Screenshot2023-05-04at10_54_43.jpg.6aab6d299a910f9e05d4453c654fb20c.jpg

 

None of these are precise, constant radius curves.

 

Given that (as far as I can see) there are certain shapes I can't make with the NURBS tool, is there some kind of error-proof workflow that starts out with things like arcs and lines, and composes them into a polyline that can then be used by the EAP tool without problems?

 

Another consequence of all this is that for many things, it's not possible to make post-hoc edits to the path or profile lines of an EAP object. Because I can't do things like adjust fillet radii, without pretty much going back to the beginning and drawing again from the elements that I used before "composing" into one polyline/NURBS.

 

NURBS are good for blobby type geometry that you don't want to edit after the event. They are not much good at all for more precise stuff, or things you want to be able to tweak without going back to the beginning.

 

 

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19 minutes ago, Tom W. said:

 

Have you made this point via the 'Was this page helpful?' link on Help or just via the Forum? Couldn't find your original post to see

 

Here is the lack of documentation being mentioned & discussed back in 2017:

 

https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/52320-extrude-along-path-rotation/

 

Here's me moaning about it again in 2019:

 

https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/66403-extrude-along-path-whys-my-wall-leaning-over/&do=findComment&comment=329716

 

I don't think I've tried the "was this page helpful" link for this particular issue. I've tried that approach with a few things recently, not with great results, as described here:

 

https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/104945-please-stop-telling-us-to-re-report-problems-via-black-hole-webforms/&do=findComment&comment=466182

 

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Thanks. I made one 'was this page helpful' submission + got a response very quickly but I can't remember what it was about + can't find the email so can't check whether page was updated yet or not... It's bugging me now. I wonder what search term I need to use in my emails...

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I guess one of the problems with this topic is, "what is each of us using EAP for".  That makes it easier to deal with the question.  But, in the final analysis, there is little documentation. 

I have my own set of tricks that seem to always work for me, but may not for someone else. To each his own.

 

 

 

 

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The issue of subsequent editing often gets glossed over in tutorials. Not just EAP, other things too.

 

It's possible to follow a tutorial that shows you exactly how to make something quite elaborate, and in a very tidy way. However, while this is certainly useful in gaining an understanding of how the tools work, it doesn't match up very well with how things happen in real use.

 

To take the example of the gear cogwheel created using EAP, in the video posted above... what if, once I've drawn it all, I realise I want to reduce the overall diameter slightly, or maybe adjust the shape of the tooth notch? It's not just that I have to go and fight the EAP tool, perhaps attempting to paste a new profile in place of the old one, within "edit profile" mode. I also have to re-build the duplicate array, and so on. So, maybe I would want to make a symbol and array that. But then I'd have problems making a solid addition. Maybe I could try and build a "path" for the whole of the cog. But then I'd have to have a closed loop NURBS and VW doesn't like that. And I'd have to manually edit each notch in that path. It would be nice if I could build the path out of an array of symbols but VW won't allow that.

 

I'm not sure that EAP in VW would be of any practical use to a mechanical designer, in the design process of an object like that, unless you were simply building a model of a finalised design.

 

This is not meant as a criticism of the turorial video. But in response to "what is each of us using EAP for" - I think in practice, it's mainly for very simple things, because you run into so many difficulties when trying to do more complex stuff. Partly because of limitations of the tool itself, partly because of absent documentation.

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1 hour ago, line-weight said:

This is not meant as a criticism of the turorial video.

I don't take your comments as criticism.  I think this kind of discussion only enhances the knowledge base and your comments are valid.

I made this tutorial at the request of Vectorworks.  It is what they wanted to see.  I made this one and the other one (chair) for general population use, but in the end, I realized I probably made them for Vectorworks only.

 

 

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1 hour ago, line-weight said:

 

The issue of subsequent editing often gets glossed over in tutorials. Not just EAP, other things too.

 


Vectorworks is the wrong tool for the job.  This is geared towards true parametric modelers such as Rhino, Solidworks, etc

 

 

1 hour ago, line-weight said:

To take the example of the gear cogwheel created using EAP, in the video posted above...

 

 

.

 @VIRTUALENVIRONS makes some nice demonstrations of how he uses Vectorworks to make cool looking stuff, but that’s not how it’s done in practice.   A company would go broke or miss deadlines using those methods to design different iterations.  And then the 3D printing or machining of such would probably be a nightmare.

 

Each time I see one of those video thumbnails posted all I can think is how much easier it was in Rhino a dozen or so years ago 😉   I recently downloaded Rhino and started modeling things for giggles.   I’m thinking about doing Virtual Paul’s chair as a single SubD this weekend in Rhino because it would be really challenging for me, like making that stealth bomber with Vectorworks SubD I did a while back.  If a landscape architect with a hobbyist curiosity about these types of projects is doing this, imagine what real pros are doing and using.
 

Rhino has a 90 day trial and Vectorworks went to 7 days this year…. The kids in school for Arch, LA, and Industrial Design all seem to be using Rhino for the past decade and it’s starting to show in the professional world as creatives are given more freedom to use the tools of their choice and new leaders raised on different tools have been emerging.  When I came to industry, no architect would specify what markers you had to use to make a rendering, but they would insist on their CAD.

 

That is changing too as different nimble pipelines are being developed to move geometry made in one place to documentation done somewhere else.  The Rhino to Revit workflow is big time popular these days.  When I was in Kuwait, all the big international architects were doing their stadiums, skyscrapers, and airports in Rhino and delivering them in that format to be ingested into BIM.  This decade is going to be very interesting as AEC BIM further homogenizes with more advanced form giving softwares.

 

Meanwhile, we will all still be complaining about EAP and stairs 😉

Visit a FormZ or Lightwave forum to see what our future will be… a handful of holdouts using a dying software and pining about the glory days.

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A lot of the simpler models I show are printable or machinable.  The jets are a different story as they have to be animated, landing gears, etc.  NURBS are NURBS, simple as that.  Whether it's Rhino NURBS or VW NURBS, all the same.

 

The two large tutorials recently released were directed by Vectorworks as a teaching tool.  Not sure exactly who for, but a teaching tutorial.

 

I have been in conversation with Rhino on SubD.  I sent them some models and asked some questions.   I always saw Subdivsion modelling as part of a tool box and that is the way they see it.  

 

So, they commented on two models, both are below.  The mouse they would build the body with SubD only and then convert to NURBS to finish.  The Jet would be be built with NURBS Surfaces only.  Now, some other Rhino designers might change that up, but I don't see why.

 

Just caught your last post Jeff.  Again, it wasn't so much about the end product as showing as many methods as possible in two twenty five minute tutorials.  It is what theY asked for and that is what I delivered.  They viewed each step of the way.  They could have had the mouse or jet below, but they wanted the pulley wheel system for some reason.  I can understand the chair.

 

 

 

432014684_MXMOUSEFORUPLOAD2.thumb.jpg.e42db5bc3d315d4a5ab47586f9ef9bf5.jpg

 

2047128562_SU-33AO0000.thumb.jpg.1494b424b392ca11b7369fdfc36ced29.jpg

 

 

 

Edited by VIRTUALENVIRONS
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5 hours ago, jeff prince said:

Visit a FormZ or Lightwave forum to see what our future will be… a handful of holdouts using a dying software and pining about the glory days.

 

Speak of the devil, check out the lightwave news dropped today...

 

I think crypto might be a better investment.

But if you get in on this... you'll get a hoodie until Disney sues them for infringement.

 

1357279350_ScreenShot2023-05-04at13_39_39.thumb.png.aa3a57e4a5d63f060971726629a36033.png

 

So many of my former lightwave people have moved to Blender, I can't see how these guys are going to make it work.

Really, check it out, their website has a password and everything.  Uber exclusive.

Edited by jeff prince
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