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minor drawing inaccuracies


rexwexford

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hi all. 

 

ive been using vectorworks for a few years now. one thing i never seem to get right however is the precision of drawing. I generally find that whatever level of precision im working to will display ok and appear correct dimensionally, but if i set it the precision to another decimal point i find out what i thought was straight isnt actually bang on. 

for example if i was drawing at 1mm precision, and later set it to 0.0mm i would find lots of odd numbers 0.3, 0.7 etc. I havent entered these manually and am pretty vigorous at moving by selecting the snap points of objects so i never know how these odd dims find my way into my drawings. especially when i am working on straight buildings over a grid which has been drawn by offsetting  straight lines. 

 

I thought i had solved this by working at 0.1mm decimal precision, but then setting it to 0.00 shows up similar errors.  Whilst in the real world this has no consequence (as they are so small you'd never notice) it does bother me that the drawing never feels quite bang on. especially when i am mirroring and duplicating something along a length, these small errors can add up. 

 

for now i feel that i have to draw, measure, move, measure etc and it gets quite tiresome.  I know its not just me, as when i look at other peoples files its quite common


does anyone else experience this? I have never had it in other cad programs so wonder if its something i'm doing, or something thats easier to do in vectorworks for some reason. what would be good is if you are working to a 0.0 precision, it wouldnt physically let you put something at 0.02 for example 

 

 

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I use about 6 digits in VW Settings with hide trailing zeros option.

(0.000000 or more)

 

So normally you will see e.g. a short number input of

4.32

If something went wrong, you would see e.g.

4.319999999 or

4.320000100

 

Which makes it pretty obvious to recognize in OIP number fields.

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What @zoomersaid.

 

Another tip is to get in the habit of using the shift key to help constrain line work to vert horiz and snap angles. If you have the floating coordinates set to be visible then with the higher precision tolerance you can see if line work is slightly off the correct angle as you draw.

 

Also if your work is mostly rectalinear then activating the snap grid set to say 5mm helps to keep everything tight. For detail drawing I set the snap grid to 1mm.

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i religiously use the shift key yeah but i never use the snap grid. i found it really annoying so always turn it off but i never thought to customise it , thats a great tip. i've just set up a whole project and i'd be willing to bet i've drawn it at something like 0.03 off the grid! 

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Additional snap tips:

You can create some custom tool scripts from the custom tool dialogue. I have one to set snap settings for detailing and another to set them back to my preferred defaults. One click trick!

 

Also if you hold the ctrl+shift while pressing the arrow key the selected items will nudge to whatever your current snap distance is. This is set in the preferences under nudge settings. Using this you can rapidly nudge stuff around your page set distances without having to type in any measurements.

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On 5/14/2021 at 4:17 AM, Boh said:

Additional snap tips:

You can create some custom tool scripts from the custom tool dialogue. I have one to set snap settings for detailing and another to set them back to my preferred defaults. One click trick!

 

Also if you hold the ctrl+shift while pressing the arrow key the selected items will nudge to whatever your current snap distance is. This is set in the preferences under nudge settings. Using this you can rapidly nudge stuff around your page set distances without having to type in any measurements.

@bbudzon yup, I do that grid snap nudge all the time, works flawlessly

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