A couple of days ago, New Guy asked me how to get started drawing a meeting room in Vectorworks.  As usual, I assumed my pompous, egalitarian CAD Rock Star Persona™ and began to explain and demonstrate how to bring the real world into paper space.

The first thing I do when building a new room is try to find an existing drawing, preferably a vwx or dwg set of as-built plots.  Since this is the Lost Cause of event CAD, I usually fall back to the venue website and grab a copy of the cheesy pdf or low rez jpeg that most hotels have available.  From there, it’s a simple File->Import->Import pdf… and I get the cheesy website plot into working paper space.

Once the original pdf plot is imported, it must be made to behave like, at the very least, a well groomed 10 year old.  I usually assign the pdf to its own layer and class so I can dispense with the annoyance of eternally selecting it while I am drawing the walls and doors of the room.

Next, the pdf has to be scaled to the proper size.  This is done with Modify->Scale Objects… and the use of the interactive measuring button about half way down the dialog.  I try to scale to the longest dimension I can find since this minimizes scaling errors due to sloppy source plots.

With the pdf, or jpeg, scaled, I then begin to draw the walls.  While showing New Guy how to draw walls, I did something unusual for me: I use loci.  For those who don’t know, loci is the plural of locus.  A locus is simple a point in space, either 2d or 3d, that is used as a reference.  You can think of loci kind of like pencil marks a carpenter would make before cutting or drilling.

The reason I even used a locus point was because I turned a bit lazy and didn’t want to have to tell New Guy each step of creating a polygon and go through the tremors of explaining how to fix the inevitable mistakes that are made when trying to line up walls from a bad source plot.  In my laziness, I had New Guy grab the 2d locus tool and drop a locus everywhere a corner should be.  Loci, coupled with a smart cursor and the Move By Points tool let New Guy mark up the corners very quickly (for him anyway, I could have done it about eighty times as fast) and left him waiting for me to ‘splain the next move.

Typically, I draw a polygon and convert it to walls.  For New Guy, I wanted to introduce him to the Wall tool right away so I could get back to my coffee and Internet.  I had New Guy grab the Wall Tool, showed him how to set up the tool’s insertion mode, clicked around all the loci and, voila: the walls were drawn.  I immediately deleted them so New Guy could experience the joy of the Wall tool.

So, you are probably asking yourself why something so trivial as marking corner of a room could make me fall in love with loci.  Well, it’s simple.  I had an epiphany.  A light came on over my head and the idea began to coalesce that loci can be used for everything.  Today, as I strolled walked with a purpose into Sales Guy’s office to take pot shots at the Breeze, Sales Guy immediately set upon me to draw a room for him that was only a month overdue to the client.  I opened up Vectorworks, dropped in the architecture from a dwg and set about using a locus as my reference for the center line of the room.

This might not seem like a very big deal, but it is huge to me.  I have been dropping in guidelines for years and dealing with issues of not having the reference I really needed.  I always had guides showing up where they shouldn’t on plots and exports.  With loci, I can use the magic wand and select locus object in the drawing, class them as loci and turn them off.  This is a HUGE boon for me.  Plus, I have a very quick way to put reference exactly where they are relevant, not where I must extrapolate the placement of every object I insert.  Now, I just select a known reference, Ctrl-D, Ctrl-M and I’m making hay.

Thanks to New Guy, I have a new love in my life and her name is loci.  (Don’t tell my wife…)