Issue:
- I noticed that Tool Palette customization into groups, which is an accepted method of organization in ACA (and AutoCad going back a few generations), apparently does not perform in VisionRez. I can create the tool palette groups in the User Defined grouping and it works fine so long as I stay in the tool group, but if I select any one of the items in the content and styles navigator other than user defined, the tool palette group I created disappears. Am I missing something, is there a better method of organizing user defined content or is this something that has to be lived with?
- What I am visualizing is having the ability to organize the clutter that will occur when a user loads up the content we are developing here. For example, I am concentrating on roofing right now. Since we have nearly 100 different truss configurations and nearly as many dormer configurations, the interface, using only the user defined palette will be very awkward. I guess the next best solution would be to place these tools in the Content Browser and allow the end user to select the content that he/she needs for the particular design they are assigned to, then clearing that content out of the User's Defined Palette when they turn their attention to another design. Any thought on that scenario? Are there any particular content tool sets that I need to be aware of to do that?
Solution:
We use the pallets in a different way than ACA. We just don't have one pallet like ACA. We use our toolbar to switch out several different pallets. During this switching, it resets the pallet groups.
There are a couple of alternative solutions. One is that the 'Roof' tool pallet only has one tab and you could make 4 or 5 tabs and populate them with your roof truss tools.
We can also make a separate tool pallet if that is the case, a User Defined 2 called 'Roof Trusses'. What the tool pallet is just a folder. The groups of them are located at:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\ACA 201X\enu\Ameri-CAD\ToolPalettes
What the buttons on the tool bar do is call the pallets. The command those buttons run is something like '^C^C(VrezLoadPalette "User-Defined"); '
So to make a new one, you would go to that path and copy and paste the 'User Defined' folder and rename it to 'Roof Truss'. Then you will open up the Customize User Interface, duplicate the User Defined button, and change its macro to '^C^C(VrezLoadPalette "Roof Truss"); '. You would then put that tool on your Content and Styles Navigator toolbar.
The only problem with this method is the implementation. The CUI file doesn't move very well. You would have to go through the motions of setting up the tool at every user. Adding a couple of tabs to the Roof pallet is much easier and easy to distribute. All you have to do is modify yours, and then copy your 'RoofPlus' folder:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\ACA 201X\\enu\Ameri-CAD\ToolPalettes\RoofPlus
And replace it with the users RoofPlus folder with yours.