Thursday, April 20, 2006

Eureka with VidCAD

Example 1

At Vector Sketch we use VidCAD as part of our CAD and documentation work. As much as I love using it, but like all software there are always things you wish it did better or differently. One of the things that drive’s me nuts is the way VidCAD deals with crossing lines especially how it is displayed on the screen. In the average CAD program when two lines cross over each other, one sits on top of the other. See Example 1.


Example 2

I’ve always wanted to have the lines display an Arc when they cross like you’d see in a manual draft or in an electrical drawing See Example 2.


Normally that would be an easy task if VidCAD didn’t use polylines that have a database connected to them. My easy course of action was to trim or if I was lazy explode the polylines and then add the arc for the crossing paths. The only problem with that was the polyline lost its database relationship, and would not transmutate. Then I had that "eureka" moment. Why don’t I just trim the polyline, put in the arc and then use the pedit command to join the two. Now all I needed was to test my theory.



  • Draw an arc

  • Trim the line that the arc needs to attach too

  • Edit the polyline and use the join command

  • Select the line and segment then close the command

  • Transmutate the cable.


Example 3

Then the moment of truth did it work. To my amazement, yes it did. It was one of those man, I love making stuff do something it’s not supposed to. See Example 3.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Adrian!
Good show actually.
Can I pass this method up the chain of comand and see what happens?
SteveC