snelson

I picked up a SpaceNavigator and am just using it for the first time today. I'm using OpenGL, Advanced for rendering settings. (Edit: same issues are found in DirectX, Advanced) I'm finding that parts I drag out of a catalog into the scene show up as an outline until they're placed then they simply don't show at all until I use Recreate Display or for some reason zoom in and out with the middle mouse button. Even changing the color of the scene's background won't always take effect until I hit Recreate display. It's not for every part but this is really annoying and not worth the hassle. As in, I have no use for this thing if I can't resolve this. Has anyone else run into this with this or other 3Dconnexion products? Any ideas on how to fix it? Steve

Email sent. As we've tried before though, I haven't had much luck with the debugger running. Steve

I'm fed up with display issues on Advanced/Open GL and things not working the way they should. (target camera) You should not have to hit Recreate Display every time you open a file to get rid of attachment points showing up. I still have to do this every few commands with the same set up as Mike so I don't know whats goin on there. I crash often and could echo a lot of everyone elses concerns and general instability issues. I agree with Eric's bug report post about the UI issues. I can crash on the most basic operations with no way to repeat things and it's therefore worthless to post about until a topic like this comes up. My quantity of Exception logs for V11 is only 10 less then V10 in exactly half as many months of use which is ridiculous. Gotta agree with the Ver8 comments too. I have only 1 Exception log from that version which was great.

Steve, I put a perspective view in the drawing and used Smooth Shaded with Textures. I've attached a pic, it seemed to work fine in the Beta 3 of IC2009. Steve

This just happened to me also for the first time in the current build and product update. Unfortunately it happened Friday and I don't remember the exact steps. However, I made the exact same changes to 2 identical files just minutes beforehand. The only file to change to all facets was the 3rd file after the change and after i had printed to PDF. While that and a save is usually my last operation before closing, I can't say for sure in this case. It's probably not a cooincidence then that on all 3 files I wasn't able have more then 1 shaded view in the drawing without it crashing and not being able to save. (Failed to save the document. Cause:Unspecified error) It was all standard parts that we use in all our drawings, not complex or unusual in any way that I can tell. I just tried to retrace my steps and couldn't reproduce it, sorry. Steve

Yesterday I lost the ability to drag and drop .jpg pictures into my drawings. I know what I did to cause this but theres no way I can undo it. I hear this was a function added into a hot fix or product update a few versions back and I just need to know what I have to re-register or fix to get this working again. I'd like to keep re-installing to a last resort as I just got done setting this up last week. Any help would be appreciated, thanks Steve

I just bumped up my virtual memory this morning and havent had the Low Available Memory warning come up yet today but I haven't used IC all day long today either so I'll probably have to wait till next week before determining if bumping that up really helped. The memory warning is the one most of us here get every so often, I forget exactly what it says but it asks you to close other applications (which does nothing) or restart Ironcad. You can close the message and even close every other application and it will still come up every 10-15 minutes or so until you restart IC. Doing the 3gb switch is what failed the last machine so I won't be doing that to this one at all. From what I was told, on these Vista optimized Optiplex 745 Dell boxes, you can't do the switch at all. From what your saying Mike T., it sounds like I should just go back to my old box if i keep getting this message since I can't do the switch. I'll just have to wait and see what happens next week.

My PC is the one Mike is talking about in this thread. I just got a new one a couple days ago after crashing the last one with the 3gb switch and yesterday I was getting the Low Available Memory warning every few hours even though I was working relatively small scenes and drawings all day. Even though theres 4gb of ram in here now, IronCAD is still acting like it did when I just had 1gb in the pc for a few days. I do notice the performance difference while multitasking but IC is still running low every so often.

You are understanding it correctly but it doesnt do this for Mike, Brian, myself or anyone else here. It never opens the working folder for us. We're using 9.0 with the hotfix but it hasn't worked in the 2 years and however many versions we've used in that time. Can you help us figure out why it doesn't do this behavior for any of our users here?

Someone emailed me the way to get around having to redo those each time. For those who would normally do the workaround that I was just shown and miss the update you just did, can you let us know when the hotfixs effect our button/hotkey file so that we don't do the workaround?

WHY???? Why do I have to redo all my shortuct keys for a little hotfix? I just set em up a couple weeks ago installing the new version, and now I gotta do it again???? Already knowing that this hotfix doesn't even help any of the issues we are having here, if I would have known I'd lose all my keys too I wouldn't have even done the Hotfix. Waste of time, waste of productivity to redo this every few weeks for every couple issues that are addressed. Can this be fixed?

Do you mean, did I check the OpenGL box in the Ironcad options? No, because I was told to leave it on Software due to other issues we've had. I'm going to wait till Mike gets back to give better answers on this one now that it's gone to hardware settings and he knows why we have our settings the way we have em. Steve

Thanks, a couple of us changed this, restarted completely, and are still having the problems though. Steve

Under Video Overlay there is a box checked for Disable hardware overlay but nothing regarding planes. We might just have to wait till Mike Allen gets back next week to talk to him about our card settings.

We have OpenGL and Open GL (Camera Tools Only) but we use Software because of other problems we've run into. Our cards are NVIDIA Quadro FX 500/600 PCI Since we dont have the option of the Overlay Planes are we out of luck?

Any form of the box select in 2D and 3D. Yes, this is mostly in larger files, but all we do are larger files so it's an all the time thing. New drawings, old drawings, new scenes old scenes. This is frustrating all the time for all of us here.

That would be great because as is, the more I use it the more it really bothers me and it's always when I only want to move the text just a little bit out of the way of something in a view.

Anyone?

In a drawing, is there a reason that when you click off center on a text with leader text box that it automatically centers the callout on your pointer? Pretty annoying when you're zoomed in and just want to move it a little bit, then you have to zoom out to get it back where you want it. This is new for V9. The attached picture is the best way to show it but it's kinda tough to capture it in action. Also, was there a point to moving "Delete" from the bottom of the list to the top of the list when you right click on a drawing tab? It was great where it was for the last few versions of IC I've used. steve

Creating mounting plates where many parts have to stay certain distances from each other and other objects, no matter what, is the perfect place to use references. I would make large mounting plates and if anything that attached to one of them had to move, I wanted to change just one dimension and have everything else adjust. I used to do machine design that had me mounting many parts onto steel plates. I used the edges of my mounting plate most of the time for reference points. This keeps you from referencing possible changing features like cuts or adding walls, just go to the outside of the part. Or, if these needed to be dependent upon one another, say, a nail feeder into a nail gun, but yet stay away from the laser positioning unit, moving them all in unison is a great thing to be able to do. You learn really quick what not to reference when creating detailed parts. Just the same as you learn what things can and can't be done in IC. Maybe for some of you referencing was a nuisance, but for me it was a daily time saver. Time to head home, see ya, Steve

Flame suit is on. I kept myself to the point, on topic and descript in my response. I kept myself very civil when in reality; I would rather tear this program to bits. I feel I provided a valid response to this. If you guys can't take constructive criticism pointing out positive uses for both this program, and heaven forbid, other programs then I will gladly withdraw from posting here again. If someone wants to take this is a real “attack” on the software and would like to make this personal then I see no use in being around. Currently I work with someone here who provides weekly feedback to IC in finding bugs, oddities, and fatal errors all in hopes of bettering the daily use of this software. I am not the type to complain all day long without doing something constructive in the bettering of my situation using this program. I provide feedback in the use of this software to someone who directly conveys my situation and findings with someone at IC. I provide screenshots and detailed info to help solve problems. If you feel that I am only a basher and would like to “flame” me for posting, then I’ll be happy to leave. About IronKevin’s response: When making irregular shaped, stacked assemblies, a square, whole part, all or nothing selection tool is of little help, and you have so many parts stacked on top of each other and inside of each other that your best bet is going through the browser selecting them piece by piece. And when you use the same part over and over it’s not as simple as just picking it by name. So, “selecting all” can get very time consuming. Again, depending on what some of you design for a living, you may not use this software nearly the same way as I do. Not your fault, not bashing you, just stating that you may not use it the same way I do and some of the features you didn’t like in other products, I did. Steve

I currently use pre made parts to make larger assemblies and do very little part design from scratch at this job. This is also my first job using IC and it's only been for a few months. At previous jobs I used Mechanical Desktop and other Autodesk products. I would have to say that this argument is very dependent upon one's work and the parts they are creating. Just as you guys have grown to love how this program does part modeling, myself and others have grown to love references, constraints and other dependents that other products offer. It may have been my previous line of work with the parts we made, but I relied on constraints and references for everything and was very happy for it. When my parts needed changes it was nice to go in and change one dimension and see how it would effect everything else down the line. All of my parts or features at that job needed these constraints using references and I wouldn't have had it any other way. If you know how and where your part will be used then it is usually pretty easy to pick or find an edge or reference that will not disappear. Before, I made upgrades and guards for parts that were additions to existing parts or machines; therefore it was really easy to pick a reference point that was going to be consistent no matter what. I know that not everyone has the luxury of having existing geometry so again; this all depends on what you design for a living. Now I may not be fully trained on IC yet, but I'm getting sick of tri balling everything into place and assembling everything in order to move multiple parts at a time instead of constraining them once and picking any of the contained parts to move an assembly. I know that IC has constraints but as I have heard, no one here (at my job) even uses them and all that we do are assemblies. It also seems that this list of ten reasons is really just one long drawn out rant on references and two mentions of drafts and rounds. So I read it as only two reasons in ten sentences. As far as rounds are concerned, depending on how the part is machined used to determine where in the design I would insert my rounds. Some of them can be inserted at a sketch level where sometimes it would be beneficial to add them at the very end of a design. I use the same principals here with IC, when I can get the rounds to even work in IC. Never have I seen something so finicky as to how the sketch is made and how every single line intersection is constrained for a round to work. I have to go around and individually make sure every single line intersection is joined correctly with a tangent constraint or similar. It seems rather incapable of blending imperfections that are hidden by the round itself after it is made. These imperfections at the intersections are not an issue or even noticeable when it is extruded yet rounds will not work. I waste valuable time hunting down very small sketch issues that cause a round or extrusion to not work properly. Bottom line is that it completely depends on the line of work you are in and what you do that dictates what drafting program is right for you. I like the smart snaps in IC (when they work) for projects I do here and don't think too many other programs could do great in this area of dropping pre-made parts in one after another and having them just pop into place. But I loathe using the sketching and part modeling in IC more then anything else I have done in any program. I despised sketching in Pro-E 2001 and earlier revs but this program bugs me even more. Steve