Architect Special Interest Group December 2018

In this session, we covered placing comments on drawings, working with interior elevations, including the extents beyond and before the cut plane, using object styles instead of symbols for creating door and window elevation drawings, and placing tags with the Data Tag tool.

Topics Covered:

• 00:07    We started with a discussion of ways to show your comments on drawings. I use Adobe Acrobat Reader. With a traditional screen, you can use your mouse to circle areas and type in comments. However, I like to handwrite my comments, so I have a Google Chrome book that has a pen with it and a Microsoft Surface computer. You could also use an iPad Pro, which uses a pencil, or the smallest iPad—the one they make for schools—which also allows you to use a pen with it. The Microsoft Surface screen is touch sensitive so that I can move around and highlight with just my finger and make comments with a red pen, marking up and annotating the drawings.
• 06:03    Using the Create Interior Elevation Viewport command, we set up views for a bathroom on a project. We looked at the Extents beyond Cut Plane and Extents before Cut Plane options. Someone was having a problem performing all of the Vectorworks 2018 functions in the 2019 version, but we found that the settings had simply been moved around. We demonstrated setting up the Merge Cross Section option with your own section fill on a separate class. The 2019 version allows elevations to show what is behind you, so you could, for example, show the windows where the light is coming in behind you. We played around quite a bit with getting the graphic qualities that we wanted. We demonstrated how to make things appear or disappear using the Object Display and Hidden Object Display settings. Although we got somewhat lost in the complexity of the options, we finally got a stair behind us to show up as a dashed line in our section viewport.
• 29:16    Some architects need to show door and window elevation drawings for a project, and I used to tell people that this was most easily accomplished by making their doors and windows into symbols. However, that was before we could make object styles for them—now I just use object styles. We went over how to set up a window style, which is similar to the dialogue box for setting up a window. We used the Data Tag tool to create the window tags on our elevation drawings. Next, we went through the steps for creating an object style for an unstyled window. On some projects, I keep all of my windows unstyled to being with, changing them only after the design decisions have been finalized, then on other projects, I know that an architect always uses specific window models and I can set up object styles for them right away. If you like to use certain doors and windows on your projects, you can keep the object styles for them in your template file!
• 46:58    We finished the session talking about how using object styles instead of symbols can affect your worksheets. The sneaky way of accommodating the change is to attach a tag to your objects and have the worksheet search for the tag.

Architect December 2018

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