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Texture Beds Applying to Whole Site Model


Will M

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I'm trying to quickly use texture beds to get a trail roughly draped onto a 77acre site for an aerial perspective. The linework to create the geometry was imported from a Civil 3D .dwg but I cleaned up and closed the polygons. They are 2D with no elevation. After converting the polygon to a texture bed, the linework drapes onto the site model properly but updating the site model sometimes results in changing the texture of the whole site model. Some segments of the trail work just fine, but longer segments tend to have issues. I'm in Vectorworks 2022. Any thoughts?

 

Will 

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Might be some overlapping segments because snaps were missed.  So, even if closed, the texture tries to go back and forth over the same line, or some other problem with overlaps, coincident segments, etc. or

 

Wild idea - That dwg gave you a stack arrangement of elements.  Process to Compose/Close the poly assembly might yield an element that looks like a single thing, but is actually still a stack of several items some of which are closed. Applying the whole as a texture bed confuses the Site Model update.  But that's total conjecture. Alternately, long ago in a really old version of vwx, some segments of some imported dwg contours just did not act like polygons.  Unclear why - I had to trace. Doesn't matter.

 

One way to trouble shoot:

  • import the dwg into a new blank vwx file
  • in vwx, determine the class of the pathway polys - click one and note class designation in OIP
  • apply Select Similar tool, with pref set for Class, to select all the relevant polys
  • Copy, then Paste in Place to a new layer, or even another file.
  • Now that they are isolated, examine - look for gaps, overlaps, missed snaps, etc.  zoom to end points, or drag away then snap back.
  • Select All to note the count.
  • If corrections are made, try Select All>Compose>Close and note the object count again.
  • If more than 1, apply the Purge command
  • or Move the keeper, eg 100mx100m, select/delete everything else, Move the keeper back to orig location.

Another way:

  • How was the dwg created? Did they trace an aerial view? Or just draw to suit an imagined figure on the map?  Probably not many points of the path directly measured by survey, sooooo ---
  • Just trace the dwg with as few points as necessary.  Use the Cubic Spline mode of the Polygon tool. Add a few points with Edit as needed.
  • Select/Copy the trace in the isolated file, then Paste in Place into new layer in project file.
  • Check that the new layer closely follows the project dwg
  • Create texture from the trace instead of from the dwg vectors.

 

-B

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49 minutes ago, Benson Shaw said:

Might be some overlapping segments because snaps were missed.  So, even if closed, the texture tries to go back and forth over the same line, or some other problem with overlaps, coincident segments, etc. or

 

Wild idea - That dwg gave you a stack arrangement of elements.  Process to Compose/Close the poly assembly might yield an element that looks like a single thing, but is actually still a stack of several items some of which are closed. Applying the whole as a texture bed confuses the Site Model update.  But that's total conjecture. Alternately, long ago in a really old version of vwx, some segments of some imported dwg contours just did not act like polygons.  Unclear why - I had to trace. Doesn't matter.

 

One way to trouble shoot:

  • import the dwg into a new blank vwx file
  • in vwx, determine the class of the pathway polys - click one and note class designation in OIP
  • apply Select Similar tool, with pref set for Class, to select all the relevant polys
  • Copy, then Paste in Place to a new layer, or even another file.
  • Now that they are isolated, examine - look for gaps, overlaps, missed snaps, etc.  zoom to end points, or drag away then snap back.
  • Select All to note the count.
  • If corrections are made, try Select All>Compose>Close and note the object count again.
  • If more than 1, apply the Purge command
  • or Move the keeper, eg 100mx100m, select/delete everything else, Move the keeper back to orig location.

Another way:

  • How was the dwg created? Did they trace an aerial view? Or just draw to suit an imagined figure on the map?  Probably not many points of the path directly measured by survey, sooooo ---
  • Just trace the dwg with as few points as necessary.  Use the Cubic Spline mode of the Polygon tool. Add a few points with Edit as needed.
  • Select/Copy the trace in the isolated file, then Paste in Place into new layer in project file.
  • Check that the new layer closely follows the project dwg
  • Create texture from the trace instead of from the dwg vectors.

 

-B

 

Thanks Benson. The paths were drafted in CAD as a proposed condition so I need to keep it pretty close. With that all that being said, there were lots of tiny segments to deal with so I probably missed some in my initial cleanup. Someone may have used the spline command in CAD at some point which we try to avoid... Fortunately by now I have identified some focus areas where this problem may be occurring. I will come back to this tomorrow and see if simplifying the number of segments and vertices does the trick.

 

Could you explain a bit more about the purge tool? Basically I've been looking for an equivalent to AutoCAD's Overkill, and what I've read about the Purge tool makes it seem like it's for unused drawing elements rather than for something like overlapping geometry.

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@Will M

 

Purge Command, as you say, is typically for removing unused items.  The command was expanded in some recent version (2020?) to include the section of options for deleting coincident duplicates. Note that this command option deletes only actual duplicate geometry.  Eg a circle with no fill on stacked on a duplicate circle with fill does not comprise duplicate objects, or if the classes are different, or the layers. Likewise, a stack of lines with same center point and at same angle but with varied lengths, or lines of same length but slightly different angles are not treated as dupes, and will not be affected by Purge.  

 

I think safest to work on a copy of the pathway source objects in a separate file to prevent unintended Purge or other deletion.

 

Anyway, problem may not be duplicated objects. Post again if this isn't working to contain the texture bed. Or better yet, post the solution. Good luck tracking this down!

 

-B

 

image.thumb.png.bf1757ac7947c6ccc3ddbff3495ab3e5.png

 

 

 

Edited by Benson Shaw
Layer tests
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On 1/10/2022 at 1:12 PM, Will M said:

I'm trying to quickly use texture beds to get a trail roughly draped onto a 77acre site for an aerial perspective. The linework to create the geometry was imported from a Civil 3D .dwg but I cleaned up and closed the polygons. They are 2D with no elevation. After converting the polygon to a texture bed, the linework drapes onto the site model properly but updating the site model sometimes results in changing the texture of the whole site model. Some segments of the trail work just fine, but longer segments tend to have issues. I'm in Vectorworks 2022. Any thoughts?

 

Will 

Do any of your trails touch the edge of the site model?  I have seen this seem to cause the texture of the site model to change when my planting areas are coincidental with the edge of the model. Moving the plant area edge to just inside the edge of the model seemed to cure the problem.  Not sure if this is an actual cause or coincidence.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/11/2022 at 6:21 PM, jeff prince said:

Do any of your trails touch the edge of the site model?  I have seen this seem to cause the texture of the site model to change when my planting areas are coincidental with the edge of the model. Moving the plant area edge to just inside the edge of the model seemed to cure the problem.  Not sure if this is an actual cause or coincidence.

 

Finally back... some things came up per usual. Thanks for this suggestion. In this case, there was a lot of trail linework located well within the site model but I have read of this issue before. The solution I came up with doesn't feel optimal, but it will work as a base for our aerial perspective rendering (which is going into Twinmotion). Here's what I did:

 

  • For the 2D trail linework that wasn't translating well as a site modifier, instead of redrawing or correcting the vertices with Reshape (sometimes there were thousands because of the import from AutoCAD), I closed the linework manually and used the inner boundary tool to generate a new polygon. There were still a lot of vertices, but it seemed to fix most overlap issues and near-perfectly replicated the geometry of the paths. The new geometry created a texture bed with no visual issues.
  • Some texture beds (typically long trail segments) still didn't work after performing the above step. At that point, I broke the long segments into several polygons before converting them to a site modifier. Once it was broken up into pieces the site modifier applied properly for each. When it is rendered natively within Vectorworks or translated to Twinmotion, it displays seamlessly. Since this is a conceptual rendering at the master plan phase and we doubt we'll move into SDs or CDs for some time, we were fine with this approach. This may not be suitable for others trying to use the same geometry for visualization and documentation.
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