Vectorworks Power-Ups: 02 Line Styles

foreign hi everybody welcome back to another vet to its power up video and today we're going to be taking a look at line Styles and it's a tool that you may have used many times before but I bet there's a lot that I can teach you about how to use lines in a new way and speed up your workflow dramatically so let's get started with this video on everything you've ever wanted to know about lines and line Styles in your favorite CAD software Factor works okay so the very first thing to note with that Twix is it actually has a very sophisticated line type style command that you can use to create lots of different types of line styles from dot dash through to things like water and fill lines as well now I've made up a little page and I'm happy to share with this with some of you if you're interested so drop me a drop me a contact basically these are actually line Styles so if I kind of zoom into some of these on the drawing you'll notice that this is a brake line and it just looks like a regular line which it is so basically draw it as a regular line I can always change the thickness of that line as well and if I turn on the line weights you'll begin to see that a little bit more this button here basically what happens is the line style takes care of the actual kind of style of the line itself so there's quite a wide variety of these so just sort of pan around and you can see a really nice one there for sort of cold water line there's like a double line fence lines with circles Square fence all sorts of here I've also created a few blank spaces so that you can add your own into this particular file as well now obviously the most common type of line that Architects need to use to represent things that are dotted above or below you would be things like the dotted lines and factors has a really good range of the iso British standard sort of dotted line Styles built in as well and again all of these available if you do want to change those pens or thicknesses as well that's fine so if you haven't seen these line types before what you're going to want to do is go to command R and basically find the file that they're located in now I'll just show you where these are in the standard file so basically go into your veterans Library so let's just hide down those open files and favorites for a second so I'm going to go to the vector it's liabies to attributes and there's a file here called line types so if you open up this file you're in the resource manager you will see all the line Types on screen okay and you do get a bit of a preview that you can kind of look at in this dialog here however there is a bit of a limit to the size the preview will go okay so what I quite like to do is actually make a sort of visual Library file which is what I've done here and basically just so it means that I can actually experiment with all these different line types live on screen another really nice element to this if I want to I can actually copy and paste these into my drawing and start using them okay so how do we actually apply these line Styles in real life so let me go on to My Demo file here and I think for this I'll pop into a normal light mode rather than dark mode so I'm going to go ahead and draw some lines so click number two which is the keyboard shortcut for the line tool and one really super duper tip is if I want to draw a line five meters long basically I can type in 5m to draw my line and then return so that's quite a bit quicker than typing in 5000. let's beef up the line weight on that line just so you can see a little bit more clearly okay now this time I'm going to do the same thing but I'm actually going to type in using American feet in inches which I do quite a bit 10 the sign for feet and then six and watch what happens when I click return that will immediately convert millimeters for me so again there's no need to do the conversion on a calculator so basically the really nice little tip here that you can use is basically to apply in any unit so if I type 450 CM you've guessed it that'll be 450 centimeters and the final one just to show you let's do one at km okay and you can see I've got a line that's literally a kilometer long so pretty amazing that you can type in the different units okay so how do we apply the line Styles so what we can do is just pop open our resource manager with a shortcut command r um and if you do have the line types available you can basically just drag and drop to apply them so let's just drag and drop a few of those line styles on here and see how they work so you can see it just drag and drop onto the line now of course what you could also do is set this up by class okay so if I wanted to create a breakline class a really nice little tip in that Twix is to right click and actually just go create class using object attributes let's go ahead and we'll just call this line hyphen break okay and basically what that means is you can edit the properties of this class it will automatically give you the line weights and the weight and the different line type that I've chosen here when I click OK basically the next line I draw if I do want to I can go to my classes and basically I can actually right click and assign to selection this is one of my favorite ways to assign a class to an object now what's kind of cool here is let's say I decide to change the color or the line weight let's go and make it a slightly thinner line okay if I put the lime weights on you'll begin to see that a bit more clearly what's really cool though is if I basically right click I can now update my class definition using that line style and you'll notice that both of those brake lines are now the same line weight because I updated the class so it's a very neat way to create classes and basically update them as you go as well okay so how about we tunnel a little bit deeper and understand how these lines were actually made in the first place so in order to do that the best thing to do is right click on your line type and actually find it so down at the bottom you're going to see a locate command so what that will do is locate that particular line type so in here I've got lots of choices if I do want to I could for example duplicate okay so we'll just make another alternative let's click OK and let's go ahead and right click and edit this line type so this kind of line is what they call a complex line okay and you can either edit the settings of the line okay or you can edit the geometry so if we go ahead and edit the geometry this time let's click ok just trying to look for the dialog okay so yeah just sorry just behind the resource manager was my dialogue so here is actually the line style now the way this works in veterans is really quite neat basically it repeats this element will repeat and what you can do is actually drag different spacings and you can see I've got a gap let's say a one to five mil Gap okay um so let me add something else into this line type let's just get a little square here I don't know what I'm creating or why I'm creating it like this but I just really want to show you how you can understand how to create these different line types okay so I've done some little changes here let's just right click and add surface into there okay so when I exit you'll notice if I now apply my new line Style dragging and dropping from the resource manager now that is the particular line style that I have so let me just right click and edit that one more time edit the geometry there let me just sort of take this shape here and use my clip tool so I'm going to get my rubber let's just rub those bits out again and basically I'll just leave that one this time what I'll also do though is basically change the angle okay so if I want to I could maybe bring this up to zigzag and let's use the mirror tool let's mirror down and I'll change the spacing back across now I'm not really sure what this kind of particular line type is doing for me but it's really just to show you you can create any line types you want and you still have the different sort of lime weight within that as well okay fantastic so if you would like to create a line uh completely from scratch a brand new line type the best thing to do is double click basically you can see that I create a brand new line type so when we click create we actually get two different options so the very first option is going to be the basic line okay a simple line type the next one will be the complex one so this is where you can create your sort of dots and dashes and you can see in here you can basically move all of these different spacings around over here you've got the kind of repeating sort of length as well so let's go with this one okay we'll call this line type one and let's just drag and drop line type one our new line type onto maybe this line here so you can see I've been able to create a nice sort of dot dash line as required using the simple line types okay so that's pretty cool the simple line types a bit as I say you will find lots of different sort of dot dash and standard line types in there so I really needed to do that okay so let's go ahead now and make a complex line time so I'm going to do command R and bring up my resource manager I'm going to right click or double click rather and go to create a new line type so this time rather than the simple sort of line type here we created before I'm going to go to complex and I'm going to create it as a world-based one now the good thing about world base is they take into account the scale so let's click okay okay and basically all we need to do is draw something so if I draw say let's say I draw a Timber stud okay so I'm going to make this 50 by 100. let's just place that bow and into the center there and you can begin to sort of see this working already and basically what that dwix is doing let's hide resources is enabling me to basically change the Gap here so let's say I want a 600 stud Gap okay you can see that that little stud will repeat every 600 mil now if I add a bit more detail let's draw the traditional kind of stud lines in there if I really want to maybe give that a little bit of Timber color to do that I'm just going to go on to my row colors and choose a nice sort of brownie color here let's use something a little bit sort of subtle and basically let's exit the line type so now I'll pop open resources and here's my new line type so basically I can just drag and drop that on and you can see I've got Timber studs okay let's turn off the line weights because it's a bit heavy so the great thing is whenever I sort of duplicate or stretch the line um really I'm just going to get Studs repeating at 600 spacings so what I could do I could go down and call this a stud line type let's call this studline type and let's call this 600. okay great if I wanted uh 400 studs for whatever reason I could simply duplicate okay let's call this 400 okay and then I could right click edit edit the geometry command R and basically all I need to do is move that one in let's say 2 4. so now when I come back out you'll see there's my 600 stud if I go here I can double click and attach the 400 stud so more regular so this is actually quite a nice way to work so if I did want to um this would be one potential way that I could actually use my wall tool and basically let me just select a different wall type and we'll go for something of course from the JRA walls pack and let's just say um I've got this sort of Timber stud here we'll drag it across okay I will just need to edit this wall style very slightly because I just want to make for this particular example the stud a different dimension let's make that 100 Mil just so you can see where I'm going with this yep okay and then all I need to do is basically drag in my line type snap that into the center of that particular component bring it to the front and I've got a really kind of nice little bit of detail of some Timber studs in the wall there now of course they won't show in 3D um if the wall was three-dimensional just giving it height you'd see that you know you won't see those but it's still quite nice to see them in 2D and top plan okay great so I really hope you've enjoyed this short video on different types of line Styles and as I say a really sort of good thing to understand how to kind of create different line weights but also different line Styles within Vector X so thanks for watching everybody and if you are new around here make sure you like And subscribe I'll be doing lots more videos for you soon and I really hope to see you on the next one take care bye foreign

Channel: Jonathan Reeves CAD

Views: 570

Keywords: Vectorworks, Vectorworks BIM, Vectorworks Training, BIM modelling, Renderworks, Vectorworks Architect, Vectorworks Spotlight, Vectorworks Landmark, Jonathan Reeves, Vectorworks Upgrade, Vectorworks New Version, Vectorworks 2023, Made with Vectorworks, Save on Vectorworks, Buy Vectorworks, Learn vectorworks, Vectorworks 3D, Which version of Vectorworks, Best Vectorworks Version for me?, Vectorworks Text, Text Styles, Power-Ups, Line types, CAD Drawings, Vectorworks Power-Up

Id: k7MML3tu5Ac

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023