Special Use for Viewports

In this issue we have a tip that covers a fairly specialized use of viewports in VectorWorks. Although not something you're likely to need every day, if you've been working with sheet layers and viewports for some time, you'll probably appreciate this clever approach to cropped viewports. Credit for this goes to Chloe Hahn, an intern architect at NSDA Architects in Vancouver, who taught us this new trick.

The illustration below shows a site plan for a development of townhouses. Due to the grading of the site, the lower level is at grade on one side of the buildings, while on the other side the main level is at grade. The challenge was to create a site plan that shows a portion of both the main and lower level plans in the viewports, instead of just one level or the other, so that the most appropriate level is displayed and one gets a sense of the connection of the plan to the outside space. And of course, this had to be done with viewports, so that the links to the floor plans are "live", and drawing of a new combined lower/main floor plan isn't required.

Essentially, we want to see half of each floor plan. The problem to overcome is that there are 13 buildings in the project, and a viewport, as you know, can only have a single crop object. Cropping each building plan over two levels would mean 26 cropped viewports making up the site plan, a guaranteed mess!

The solution here was to create complex crop objects with numerous masks, or areas that are hidden from view. Below you can see the crop object for a viewport in which the lower floor plan is visible. The polygons inside the surrounding rectangle are actually clipped out of it using the Clip Surface command.

Working on the design layer, the first step is to draw a large rectangle that represents the overall crop boundary. Next, draw a series of polygons that mask the portions of the floor plans that should be hidden. When all the masks are drawn, select them as well as the surrounding rectangle and choose Clip Surface from the Modify menu, thereby clipping the polygon shapes out of the rectangle, and creating a complex polyline for the crop. If the rectangular shape had a fill, it would now look like this.

With the complex crop object selected, a viewport is created with only the lower floor plan layer visible. Since the nature of viewport crops are such that anything inside the crop is visible, while anything outside it is not, the areas that acted as "holes" in the last illustration now act as "masks" when it becomes a crop object. Set the Pen type of the crop object to None, so that the edges aren't visible.

The final site plan is composed of three viewports overlaid: one with the site plan visible; the second with the lower floor plans partially masked; and the third with the main floor plans partially masked. The break lines separating the levels of the plan are added in the viewport annotation space. Presto! Complex site plan done quickly.