editing lines

[rodlord]

After a long gap doing other stuff have today had to return to using FormZ 7.3.4 on Mountain Lion. Have discovered all over again the nightmare of finding that using it is simply not as obvious and instinctive as the earlier versions I was familiar with for so many years.

 

I am hoping that someone can advise me on the problem I am trying to deal with at the moment. I am creating surface profile shapes (roads, verges, residential plots, etc, etc) from an ordnance survey map and am using bezier spline tool to do it. All was going well until I had to cut a shape as a hole in the most complex shape. For a while I didn't realize anything had changed until I tried to access the control points again. Of course they are no longer available as FormZ has now converted the line to a plain object.

 

So as I am in a tearing hurry as usual I thought "ok - no problem, I'll just switch on SHOW POINTS and do a quick hack on the bits I need to edit. Wishful thinking !

 

SHOW POINTS no longer seems to do that - it is showing me about 10 points seemingly at random out of what must be hundreds or thousands of points ! So it appears I am now only able to edit the very few points I a being shown and have no way of editing the remainder of the profile short of literally HACKING bits off with another line or STITCHING bits onto it.

 

This to me seems absolutely extraordinary compared with the very flexible and useful way I was once able to do this kind of stuff.

 

I am hoping that somebody will be able to tell me that I've just missed some absolutely crucial voodoo and just need to do the right chant.

 

Help please ? !

 

Many thanks - Rod

[bluemonkey]

Have you tried:

 

Using pick tool pick object to be edited.

Go to tool 'options' pallet and choose 'show controls'

The turn off 'show controls' when you have finished

 

Is this what you were looking for?

[rodlord]

Hi Bluemonkey - Thank you very much for your reply.

I'm afraid that in this version 7.3.4 the tool options pallet doesn't offer "show controls" but this is instead available by holding the CTRL key down when picking the line. Unfortunately this option often just suddenly gets greyed out and becomes unavailable, particularly when the shape has had something else done to it, like a hole cut in it etc. I've actually now found myself in that situation and simply want to be able to display and get hold of the points in what is now a plain object line. But "show points" only displays a very few points and it is not clear how else it is possible to edit a line like this short of chopping bits off it or stitching bits onto it. For this one-off line I can manage by doing that if necessary but it seems ridiculously clunky compared to earlier versions which never constrained me in such a way. I also need to understand these limitations in order to make sense of continuing to use this software at all !

Thanks

Rod

[rodlord]

Hello again - my apologies - what I said about the options pallet not showing the option for "show controls" turns out to be nonsense - it seems it's just always been hidden in my layout and I've always just used the CTRL method. But the principle of what I said remains the same regardless.

Sorry !

Rod

[rodlord]

I've finally discovered the "convert object" tool and it now seems clear that when a spline object has a hole cut in it it DOES NOT GET CONVERTED to a plain object at all but it DOES get all its controls removed from it. So it becomes a kind of hybrid nothing that you can do very little with so you need to be sure you will never have to do anything else with the line. In my situation I have now discovered that I can at least ACTUALLY convert the hybrid nothing to a plain object and therefore can access the points I was trying to find. These are of course not bezier points and there are many points along straight segments but at least I have found the points again and can be in a position to edit. Seems like a strange tool to me that removes controls and leaves you with a fairly useless shape. But it is what it is I suppose ad I will make the best of it.

All the best - Rod

[Des]

Hi Rod, I remember you on the forum from many years ago. I would highly recommend upgrading to v8.5.

V7 releases IMO were the "transition" versions and were a bit "iffy".

When I made the transition from v6, I remember freaking out trying to get my head around simple operations.

If you persevere you won't regret it. I find the latest versions (8 series) to be the most stable of all and the quickest for modelling.

 

Use the migration guide, it is a great help.

 

Des

[rodlord]

Hi Des - thank you for your reply. I will check out if *.5 will run on Mountain Lion.

Although I have an El Kapitan (!) machine I am having to keep running the Mountain Lion so that all my many Adobe apps don't suddenly have to come out of "the cloud" !

Thanks for the advice - will follow up.

cheers - Rod

[darwin06]

Rod-- per the ADS system requirements you need 10.9.2 or higher for version 8.5.  I believe this is due to an Apple graphics driver update.

 

Also, updating your computer from Mountain Lion to El Cap / Sierra should not affect your adobe installations (and it definitely won't force you into using Adobe CC "the cloud" because this a a separate product that a subscription based).  I just updated from Mountain Lion 10.8 to macOS Sierra with CS3 installed and had no issues.  If you did have a problem, simply reinstalling your adobe programs would probably fix it.