Architect Special Interest Group January 2018 (am)

In this session, we made a pivoted door, demonstrated how to make changes to a worksheet, discussed the Downspout and Baseboard plug-ins from A|F Design, looked at the advantage of using Window’s Character Map, and designated the angles of lines to make boundary lines without using the Property Line tool.

Topics Covered:

• 00:19    We began by looking at how to make a pivoted door. The challenge is that the Door tool in Vectorworks does not offer this option. Looking at WinDoor, which is available to Vectorworks users in New Zealand and Australia, we saw that it has a pivoted door. As quickly as you can select Pivot Left Door from the drop-down menu, you have one! Turning back to the typical Vectorworks bundle, we explored changing one of the custom leaf doors. These are presented in the old system, not in the Resource Manager. So, to modify any of them, you need to find the default content folder—or user or application folder—on your computer. Even though we were able to modify our custom door, it was still a hinged door. We decided to go about it a different way. We chose a hinged door that was closest to what we needed and then converted it into to two groups that we made into a 2D/3D object, a symbol that we could modify further. Once we had our symbol, we could go into the Door tool, click on the Use Symbol Geometry option, and change a regular door into our symbol. You have to be careful to change the height and width to match your symbol, as it won’t do it automatically. It is possible to use Vectorworks to make custom doors such as barn doors, bar doors and residence gates. I show how to do this in my “Custom Door Leaves” post on my website (epodcast192; January 28, 2017).
• 22:21    Next, we looked at making changes to a worksheet in Vectorworks. We created a report that found numerous bracing symbols that we had in a file. We next looked at moving the data columns around and making other changes to the look of the report. With Vectorworks 2018, there is a drop-down menu at the top of the column where you can choose to sort the names in ascending or descending order. You can drag the columns when the cursor changes into a four-way arrow. Through the worksheet, you can actually make changes to the object information and update the objects.
• 29:39    We discussed using the Downspouts plug-in from A|F Design (www.andreafacchinello.it) and also the Baseboard plug-in. If you want the realism in your files, this is a quick and easy way to do it!
• 36:23    Windows computers have something called a Character Map that you can use to find the keystroke shortcuts for adding symbols, such as the degree symbol (keystroke: Alt+0176), in Vectorworks. This brought us to a discussion about how you can designate the angle or degree of a single line in Vectorworks, which can be a handy way of tackling a project with complicated boundaries.

Architect January 2018 am
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