SOME TIPS I made to a new VC/VCP user (#4278) - Tips and Tutorials

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SOME TIPS I made to a new VC/VCP user (#4278)

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ZeroLengthCurve		#1 Posted : Monday, April 2, 2012 3:03:00 PM(UTC)
Rank: Senior Member Joined: 5/15/2008(UTC) Posts: 1,001 Thanks: 33 times Was thanked: 47 time(s) in 30 post(s)		Recently, a frustrated CAD user picked up on some of my posts (and tomes) about Punch! ViacAD. He decided to check out VC, and now I think he's already bought VCP. He appreciated some of my initial tips/comments. I decided expand on his new intro, since we both are using VCP for hull modeling purposes. WARNING! This is LONG (2665 words!), but I tried my best to break it down into chunks or topic/topical areas. Hi *******, You're welcome. I can be verbose, too! Welcome to ViaCAD. I think that you'll like ViaCAD Pro better. However, as time goes by, you will take for granted and forget why you upgraded. In any case, VCP is still very worth the upgrade. Here are some more tips to make your VC 2D/3D and VCP experience fun or easier compared to (the other CAD app we had in common). BTW, I, too, found (THE OTHER CAD APP WE HAVE HAD IN COMMON) to be hugely powerful in some ways (layers features and an interface commonality to typical windows apps), but the "games" and kludgy workarounds that could only be found by sheer luck, and then find they are short-lived, to be maddening and torturous. I once managed to get a "solid" or a "surface" made in (THE OTHER CAD APP WE HAVE HAD IN COMMON), but it failed to be a repeatable thing. It is fortuitous that CompUSA had a few copies of each, at reduced price in their waning days. I bought (THE OTHER CAD APP WE HAVE HAD IN COMMON) 12 or 14 for $89 and ViaCAD 2D/3D for $89. I gave (THE OTHER CAD APP WE HAVE HAD IN COMMON) maybe 3 months of my time and could take NO MORE. I grew weary of the huge install, too. vc's install would be equally large, but it installed fairly fast, despite SEEMING to take long. I tepidly installed it. The first thing I went for was surfaces and solids. I was so impressed I could almost have a heart attack in wonder. I almost cried, I think, wishing I'd found VC 2 years earlier, but then recalled that I hadn't had the money to even replace my dead Vaio and my aged, Celer(y)on desktop which maxed out at some 800 MB of RAM and was architecturally too old for VD 2D/3D. Anyway.... These tips will be "INTERFACE" and "MENUS/PREFS" oriented. MOUSE: First off, if your mouse has a tilt-wheel, and it's Logitec, it might drive you nuts because VCP (I don't know about VC 2D/3D since I haven't fired it up in years) not only will orbit/pan when you click, but it will also enter a jiggly-wiggly incremental zoom mode. Regular, non-tilt-wheel mice do not give me this grief. If your hand is steady, it's not much of a problem. CONTROL KEY: The control key is hard-wired to change the pan/zoom/orbit mode. If you use the Ctrl key to skip around selection options in the Select Mask (say, to avoid selecting entities of a given color, on a certain layer, or of a certain type), but forget to "tap" on the Ctrl key when back in mental drawing mode, you will find that shortcuts don't work in the mode the Ctrl key invokes. INTERFACE: HIDE THE PALETTES AWAY: To reduce screen clutter with tear-off tools and floating tools palettes, right-click on the "handle" and choose whether you want the palette to line up vertically or horizontally. Also, select which way the visible tools should "roll up" or hide away. You can even reduce the palette to a small strip. BUT, be careful if you have two displays and one is a laptop and you disconnect. You'll sometimes have to "hunt" for them if your video card has odd behavior towards scrunching down docks, palettes, and panels. POSITION YOUR TEAR-OFF PALETTES: At first, I sorely missed the (THE OTHER CAD APP WE HAVE HAD IN COMMON)/(THE BIG CAD APP WE MAY HAVE HAD IN COMMON)-like buttons strewn about the borders. Honestly, it really was about gadgetry. But, all the psychological comfort in power presumed to be in all those buttons fell in a heaping whimper once I got into VC 2D/3D and wanted all the screen real estate I could have. (I assigned Shift+K to hide and unhide tools palettes.) In VC 2D/3D, you don't enjoy having multiple tools on a self-designed floating tool palette -- you have many. And, if VCP crashes, it doesn't always recall where to put them. So, position them, then close VCP/VC 2D/3D and THEN reopen and resume work. I line up the Tear-Off palettes this way in the user interface window: Upper Left of screen, set to collapse to left, layout horizontal: -- Lines/curves/etc and shapes/entity creation -- 2D features/modifications/creation -- 3D features/modifications/creation Lower Left of Screen: -- Select Mask, set to collapse to bottom Upper Middle, in ML, MM, MR positioning: -- Default Pen \| Snaps \| Navigator Right Middle edge of screen: -- Inspector Lower Right, width suitable for long layer names: -- Concept Explorer ==================== MENUS/PREFS In Preferences: SNAPS -- Snaps -> hit radius 12 (just a random number to not be at 5 or 10) -- Alignment -> 0 deg, -90 deg -- Creation angle -> 90 deg, -90 deg -- Display Snap Text (checked, as opposed to not checked) Note: Having many snap settings on while having lots of tightly-packed or displayed geometry or entities can slow down scrolling; experiment and adjust per project or your own mindset/likes. ------------ FILINGS I checked the fol: -- Clear Undo on Save (this, for me, takes extra RAM and slows things down since my models are HUGE, like 40+ to 100+ MB) -- Save Pen Text Settings with file (useful in case you share a file with others or move between machines you own) -- Save Unit Settings with file (same as above) -- Show full paths in menu (what file did I just work on? I set it for a max of 20. If you crash VC or VCP, the list is not updated, only displays files known and remembered during/after a normal closing, not a crash. Unfortunate...) GENERAL -- Aero ... (depending on how you view models, Auto or Aero, this can reduce frustration. I design bow to left, and in ortho, I want the bow pointing down and to left, not up and to right, hehehe) UNITS -- Units -> Metric (I hate futzing around with 1/4 and 1/32 fractions. Metric is so much cleaner (and, possibly easier on the CPU), though I still have to refer to conversion utilities...) Arrow Nudge 0.01 --------- SELECT -- Box size to 6 -- Enable Ambiguity Popup (THIS is very useful when you have lots of geometry cluttering the view but you refuse to hide (via keyboard) or turn off things (via layers in Concept Explorer). This is something (the BIG CAD app we may have had in common) year, year, and maybe 10 never had, and drove me NUTS in the office. USER INTERFACE -- Dialog expansion: 3, Collapse: 15 -- Use Small Palette Icons (saves screen space) -- Reverse Mouse Wheel Zoom (set per your liking) CUSTOM RESOLUTON -- VERY FINE (I want the best display my CPU/GPU and VCP can give me.) -- 8.0 -- 7.0 ============== Something about (THE BIG CAD APP WE MAY HAVE HAD IN COMMON) (year/year/maybe 10) that utterly irritates me is that when you change view orientation of a model, you lose any selections or in-stream clicks you made. Quite insane and infuriating. In (THE BIG CAD APP WE MAY HAVE HAD IN COMMON), I felt crippled, less productive-capable when compared to VC/VCP in this regard. To see what I mean, to this. -- Create any kind of geometry (surface, curve, solid, as long as you can snap to it). -- Hit a shortcut key or use a button to draw a line -- Snap to the entity, but DO NOT release or exit that mode yet... -- Hit a shortcut key to change the view... ----- Notice that your screen shows you still snapped to the entity, and any panning/orbiting/rotating/zooming still shows the " in-stream construction line" -- Complete your panning/view changing, and terminate your line where needed, or hit the back-tick key (if you chose that as your) shortcut to exit the cursor's current mode. ===============


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ZeroLengthCurve		#2 Posted : Monday, April 2, 2012 3:03:54 PM(UTC)
Rank: Senior Member Joined: 5/15/2008(UTC) Posts: 1,001 Thanks: 33 times Was thanked: 47 time(s) in 30 post(s)		The rest: This may possibly make your mouse zoom experience less frustrating in VCP/VC 2D/3D: SELECT MASK: -- Maximize use of the Select Mask to avoid the need to turn off layers you visually or mentally NEED to see or have constantly in the view. Too much selectable geometry in the background can hamper working speed if your select sensitivity is too fine. Select Mask can alleviate some of the stress CONCEPT EXPLORER: -- Concept Explorer Make prodigious use of layers creation as you need, but logically before your begin a project. Regrettably, it is not possible to grab a layer and drag it to any external branch you feel like, and importing a layer from another file can (depending on how you import or what copy/paste options settings you make) cause the pasted entities to all go to one selected layer or to a whole, new, nested sub-branch that retains the entire layer structure of the parent of some entity. This could be useful if you modeled a ship, spent a year fine-tuning the layer structure, but now are looking at a new file which you did some work on. You can import either into the other, but it's a personal choice. --- LAYERS IMPORTATION -- Before importing a model, if it is to be for a new project, and you need no pre-existing entities to be in it, completely strip it of entities. Press Shift +! to show all items. Press CTRL + A to select. hit DEL to nuke anything selected. Collapes the layer tree structure. Look to see that the entities count is zero. -- Save the file as a new name. -- Inspect it in the file explorer of windows to make sure the file size indeed dropped to some few kb in size. If it is empty, but still several MB in size, some orphaned cruft is there and may cause a problem later. WONKY ZOOMS/PANS/ORBITS -- Sometimes, certain solids or mesh entities -- even when turned off-- may inject "gravity" into a model view (I don't know whether this is VC/VCP/Shark or my model, or the geometry from FreeShip). When this happens, you get counterintuitive response to your Mouse Wheel+Drag inputs. The model may nudge and jerk around like Frankenstein with a brown-out instead of his expected ngyu-ngyu jolt. But, if you wheel-zoom out and go maybe 30 model feet to port or starbord (in my case since my ship is some 570' or 177.383 m long), and then middle-click-pan, the model moves. It's annoying. I figured out that by turning off some of the weird geometry in the C/E, some of this nonsense stops. It's random, not always present. So, when it happens, it's easy to forget what to do to nix it. SOLIDS: Measuring Mass/Weight Progress: -- Create or import some curves: Stations, from a Nav Arch app (or -- In ortho or bodyplan/front view, create two lines: one for the web and one for the flange. Run the web inboard, and at some 30 degrees upward (so that later when you create a surface, it sweeps better than trying to use a web that is parallel to the baseline) from a station and use the midpoint line tool to create the flange perpendicular to it. -- Repeat that for adjacent stations -- Using the one-rail sweep tool, select first the web, then the station. Repeat this for the Flange -- If your model is huge or complex, make webs of one color for one compartment, and flanges maybe ALL YELLOW. This makes the model look and cooler when in ortho. But, from practicality reasons, it is much easier to select and hide geometry from the whole view or just a compartment for the moment. -- Using the Solids tools, thicken the surface -- While the solid is still in selection, tap the Ctrl key to toggle the displacement (positioning) of the new solid relative to the parent surface. This is useful for centering up the solid on the station (the surface is, so the solid should be, too). But, if you need to "throw" the thickness outboard, then, regrettably, there is a triangular section of mass not created as flush with the deck nor parallel to the baseline. If it is a huge ship, this is not critical, since for a 570' long ship, you're talking about some 7,000 lbs, or 3,500 on each side at the gunwhale. To overcome this on SHIPS, throw the thickness inboard. When you create decks and bulkheads, they will trim off at the inboard thickness. But, if you MUST terminate internal geometry at the surface of the surface (or throw plate thickness outboard), then use the model surface, not solid. This may be tentatively ok if you do not need to model a perfect closing-up/fit-up of the sideshell to the upper deck. Now, select solids of interest -- hit the "1" (number one) key to get solids information. Select the material type. (Note that you can add customer materials and mass info, but you have to be careful of the units.) Looking at the info, use your scroll wheel to move up and down between "ASSEMBLY" and "Part1" and "Part2", noticing that you'll see either CGs and moments if you select single parts, or if you select more than one (ASSEMBLY), you'll see only centers. But, if you export this info or use the BOM feature, you'll have details fairly ready to stick into a spreadsheet. It's all columnar, not some mish-mash of columnar and non-columnar stuff. UNHIDE! One of THE BEST keys assignments I had but failed to use for maybe 2 years was the Unhide (U, in my case) key! -- After clearing out a lot of geometry, you may want to restore some but not want to restore ALL geometry. Hit the (your assigned ) key. -- VC/VCP will be your best friend in this: altering the select mask lets you click or lasso geometry you need or want to bring out of hiding. And, nicely, the available-to-be-unmasked geometry is in a semi-transparent mode so you can distinguish what is what and reduce the amount of geometry you need to unhide. QUITE a time saver when you use it carefully and regularly. CREATING STATIONS IN BODYPLAN VIEW AND WATERLINES OR DECK EDGES IN PLAN VIEW: If you are skilled enough to model a hull's stations and plan view edges in VC/VCP, say, how you may have in (the BIG CAD app we may have had in common) or (the other CAD app we had in common), but make smoothed lines and not chined lines, you'll want to use the Polyline button, not "line" and not "multi segment line". It is on the tools buttons palette. After years of playing around, i just noticed it. I pretty much never needed it before because I always imported and used DXF lines exported from FreeShip and Delftship. Recently, I began using the "Change Object Type" feature to convert polylines into interpolated and control-point splines. IS/CPS pretty much eliminated problems I had when trying to make surfaces for curves in the bow region and where there is high sheer in the bow. When you create surfaces for dozens of webs and flanges, I (using aerospace ortho mode) find it is vastly easier to create webs in ortho and flanges in body plan. If there is little clutter, but speed is important and there is sufficient curvature in the stations, work about 5-15 at a time in view, creating the webs in aft view and the flanges next. Use the Pen Color palette to set your webs colors and create all webs in a shot. Switch colors for the flanges, and start from aft to forward, or whichever order generates the least amount of surfacing in the way. Choosing opposing (non-blending/non-hiding) line and surface colors will help immensely when you want to work fast. When creating compartment, consider how you want to break down and eventually decompose the model. It can be a time-saver. My way, however, is tedious and for the moment too intricate.


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