Visual ARQ - Drawing Experience

VisualARQ
1

Excuse me if I will miss something, I am testing Visual Arq just out of curiosity and don’t have time to dig deep in it. So if I will say that I can’t do something there is also a chance that I don’t know about some functionality or that functionality may be hidden too deep to use it comfortably.

Anyway, I think Visual ARQ is an interesting project and I can imagine myself using it in the future. But before that, and before it will become fully mature software (and hence less open to changes) I would like to mention some things which worry me.

1. Lags
Lag on the start of the command because of Panel opening. – It feels like working on a much worse computer.

2. Drawing walls at angles
Drawing walls at right angles are very uncomfortable. Dealing with it as it is with drawing curves in Rhino is not enough. Both Revit and Archicad have it better. Some more dynamic, easy to access, responsive guidelines would be welcome.

3. Moving Walls
Moving walls in a perpendicular direction, automatic wall extensions, etc. This is crucial.
One of the reasons I (and others I know) don’t like Archicad, Revit in that field has it so much better, so much more intuitive and pleasing. Simple doodling walls is probably the first experience we have with software like that and we can call it an equivalent of hand sketching.
Sketching tasks like that should be as little distracting as it is possible.

Revit:

Visual ARQ:

When I align Gumball to Object it gets in a way of one wall control point.

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Much better use would be if Gumball could be automatically placed in the center of the Wall. (And I don’t mean manually relocating Gumball for every Wall :wink: )
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Issue with that is that red scale handlebar will interfere with one of the Wall end points.

4. Visual feedback
Note how much visual feedback I receive when I draw this walls - guidelines, length, angle, different popup icons. All of that is extremely helpful and prevent from making slight errors. As I said earlier, automatic guidelines from vanilla version of Rhino are not working that great with VA Walls.

5. Trim/Extend Walls

Under _vaWallExtend command, there is what Attach is in Revit. What I refer to is extending/trimming walls on the floor plan. Sorry, I couldn’t find any quick way to do it in VA. This normally needs to be done in the blink of an eye.
I Especially like that Revit is showing lines that previews what piece of a wall is going to be trimmed.

Rhino / Visual ARQ

Archicad

Revit

2

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback!

I will answer in the same order:

  1. I don’t think we can do much about the lags, on our computers it takes less than a second.
    Is this VisualARQ panel the only thing in the computer that is a little bit slow?

  2. You are right that the Rhino SmartTrack doesn’t work quite well with walls.
    We will think about how to solve this issue.

  3. This would be very useful of course.
    It’s about keeping walls intersections. This has been already requested so I added your vote.

  4. This is similar to point 1, we have to think how to tackle this issue.

  5. I add you vote for the trim and for the horizontal extend wall command.
    The fillet already exists (_vaFillet), it’s under the VisualARQ Edit tab.

Kind regards

3
  1. This might be just a Rhino UI limitation. Some Panels opens quicker, some slower (even opening RPN Calculator needs some time). Obviously more complicated panels need more time to open. This could be a vote for general Rhino UI improvements. Another thing is that VA isn’t a speed devil elsewhere too :wink: .

I don’t know what is your development strategy for the VA.
What I would like to see (and suggest) is that before you completely dive into an infinitely deep sea of functionalities where always will be so much to work on, you make a couple of very basic stuff better than a big guys (Autocad, Graphisoft, Nemetschek). In case of basic wall drawing, this shouldn’t be even that difficult to beat garbage unfriendly Archicad wall drawing system. Don’t know about Vectorworks, but drawing in Revit it is super intuitive.
Especially all those Revit’s dynamic dimensions, which can be used to move things, this is just right way…

Best luck with developing!

4

Hi Jakub,
Thanks for your awesome feedback and videos! We will study all these requests. Some of them though rely on Rhino behavior on editing or moving staff, but we will see if they can be improved.

Just to add to Ramon’s comments, you can use the vaSplit command to split walls as you can do with curves.
And also use the wall end grip points to stretch them (see gif attached) and the extension arrow to extend one to another along the same wall axis. (I know it is not as straight forward as in Revit though)

MoveWalls
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5

Hi,

vaSplit Unfortunatelly doesn’t accept walls as a cutting object. So I can’t split wall by another wall which would be the most common scenario.

Yes, with control points it is possible but it is waaay to much work. Waiting for some elegant solutions :wink:
Building VA over Rhino brings some amazing possibilities, like Grasshopper Styles for Objects, but how you will deal with limitations/workflow differences that is very interesting.

6

Then we will consider this feature for future versions.

7

You can use vaSplit and then Point.

9

@Czaja Since VisualARQ 2.13 with the VisualARQ Labs plugin, you can use a command that lets you extend walls to other walls. More details here: Labs - VisualARQ