ACAD2014 Model Space Viewport Not Active After Picking Command From Menu

Hey,

This is a weird recurring issue I am having, it will be resolved after restarting the ACAD session, but it does return.

When picking a command (or any item) from the menu, the current viewport will not re-activate (I have to click into the viewport to get it to activate). This is not normal.

ACAD 2014 64bit, Windows 7 64bit, model space, 1 viewport.

Please see GIF animation below demonstrating issue and also another showin normal behaviour.

Problem:

Normal:

Has anyone seen this before and know of a way to either fix it permanently or know what causes it to happen?

Thanks for any help.

The gifs don't seem to be working. The perimeters of the screens appear blue, as if to indicate that they have been selected?

They seem to working Overtime now!

Might this be related to the number of drawing tabs which you have in the drawing?

In the bottom GIF you have only one, and all is well, in the top one you have multiple tabs, and you are required to stipulate.

I agree it seems odd, as it is being displayed, but that is the only conspicuous difference I see?

Presumably when you restart Autocad, there is only one tab, and no problem.

Maybe there is a threshold number of tabs, which triggers this undesired effect?

Hey Dadgad, thanks for the reply.

I don't believe the number of open tabs is the issue, I have since tested a fresh session with multiple tabs (same number and also more than first GIF) without any issue. It's probably just a matter of time before the issue returns. The tricky part is figuring out what causes it.

Ps: do the GIFs display/play ok? I've got the hosted on Photobucket, which can be a bit flakey.

Is it a graphics memory issue of some sort?

I've been dicking around, and looking through system variables to see if anything jumped out at me, but I don't see any likely culprits.

It is always hardest to debug when you have an intermittent problem like this, since you are not changing your settings, and yet it happens.

Might you be using a lisp which changes a relevant but elusive setting?

RIBBONSELECTMODE setting?

I reckon it could be a memory issue, or even a Windows issue. Though I really have no idea.

I haven't noticed any other new strange behaviour in other programs (or Windows itself).

RIBBONSELECTMODE doesn't seem to have an effect.

RIBBONSELECTMODE was a hail mary pass, as unlikely as it sounded.

The good news is, that as annoying as it is and much as it breaks your flow, you have a workaround.

Is this with ProSteel running?

True, and I guess it's not a bad idea to quit and restart the session from time-to-time.... memory refresh and such.

Yep, with ProSteel running.

Good effort remembering that I'm a ProSteel user Dadgad. How have you been finding it lately?

I have a love-hate relationship with ProSteel.

I love when it saves us tons of time, and hate when it keeps me from drawing.

I do enjoy that I can check hundreds of drawings very quickly.

I appreciate that it is accurate, am not overly fond of how the completed and tweaked drawings look.

I greatly prefer our old drawings aesthetically speaking.

I am not doing the modeling, I am basically checking and tweaking all of the software generated fabrication drawings, right after it spits them out.

Once we get all of the fabrication dwgs into the fabricator in China, then we have sort of bought ourselves a little time, and can I start doing loads of Plan & General Arrangement drawings.

As great as the different display tools are in ProSteel, I wish that there was such a thing as Viewport specific Area Classes.

When I am working on those, I wind up having up to 70 or 80 sheets displayed in modelspace, in each of multiple drawings, with about twice that many viewports, and up to 1700 layers in a drawing. Thus I need to turn off a bunch of the viewports, as I have exceeded 64.

That becomes rather unwieldy, and makes me miss our old straight AutoCad dwgs with 20 to 30 layers.

Then on to the Erection drawings, which are okay.

Whenever I do get to do some work on AutoCad, like when I am doing preliminary geometry drawings for approval, I feel more at home.

We use a whole lot of Standard items (of our own design) in our jobs, for which we already have fabrication drawings, so we Xref all of those items into our models, rather than add them into the data overload. No need to reinvent the wheel, they are already drawn and checked.

That makes the layer and display management a bit more tricky, but the system we have come up with is appreciably better than on our first couple of jobs with ProSteel.

We are definitely learning how to apply its strengths to our game.

When working in straight Autocad, I could rely on Data Extraction to quickly count and identify everything in a model, this way it is a multi step process.

As far as I know, you are the only other regular on the forum using ProSteel, and have been kind enough to offer your assistance in the past, not going to forget that, eh? Much appreciated!

Haha, I know exactly what you mean. I figure Prosteel can be handy for doing what it was built to do, but isn't exactly capable of meeting everyone's needs when it comes to innovation or tasks that are a little unusual. It can be flexible within certain parameters, but also really rigid in some aspects.

Are you using ProSteel to generate both design and erection/fabrication drawings? Mostly structural? It sounds like workframes could be useful to you (if you're not using them already?). It pretty much allows you to create a 'view' of the model, which you can then export to a 2D drawing (almost treating the 'view' as a model element), and control the part display with detail styles. I don't use them a great deal, as most of our jobs are on the smaller side and quite easy to manage with layers, area & display classes. Though having said that... an extra area/display class tool would be useful.

Do you use the partlist database (Ps_Partlist) and the Detail Center for model auditing? The databases created with Ps_Partlist are pretty comprehensive, and easily exported to Excel. I wasn't even aware of this feature while I was learning ProSteel, stumbled upon it a while later haha.

Structural exclusively, and we learned about workframes in the basic class that we took early last year. The modeling and almost all subsequent drawings are done with ProSteel.

We have not used, although we know about Display Classes, we have not had much use for them yet, although they are definitely a good tool. We have not used the Family tools yet either.

I have spent a fair amount of time trying to create detail styles which are less Universal, and more appropriate within the narrower spectrum of objects for which they are used, with limited success, I must say. At the end of the day, it is software, and always needs to have real people looking over and tweaking the output. Eliminating dimensions which are redundant, or poorly placed, or adding others which would be helpful during fabrication, or on site.

Of course we use the detail center a lot, although typically I don't, unless I am working on customizing a detail style.

I wish the Containment List outputs included a total for a particular item. On some of ours, when I am doing the first check of containment totals versus drawing totals, and item weights, I occasionally get ones with as many as 800 of a part, and I have to confirm the total, which is rather tedious, being a list of 60 to 100 different numbers to be added oldstyle.

One of the reasons we wind up with so many layers is that each Xref brings a bunch. We have had as many as 1800 layers in a drawing, but when things are going well, we would have about 800. Which is still a hell of a lot of layers to have to wade through, and set layer visibilities for with great regularity.

Oh containment lists are a not well implemented.

For fitting drawings like the example you have shown... I would have the total part/fitting quantity display in the material list, and not show the part text below the item, but that is just our convention and either way works. Out of curiosity... why do you only show a quantity of 1 in the material list, but have the true quantity in the part text below?

As far as comparing containment list and part quantities, I usually copy the containment list out to the side of the drawing, then explode it a few times (to get text items), then use a LISP routine to add up the values of each assembly quantity. Saves adding each assembly quantity manually.

This is for the fabricator, and gives the weight of a single item.

This is obviously a splice plate, which will be used on a great many (as identified in the containment list) assemblies.

The group drawings, showing the complete assembly, have a cumulative total for all of a particular assembly.

Usually I can add them pretty quickly in my head, as regards the containment list totals, but for things like splice plates, clevises and stiffener plates, the lists can get pretty long, and may be up to 700 or 800.

The style shown is similar to how we have done it in the past, I will post a little screenshot to show you how we did it before switching to ProSteel. You will see the resemblance to how we have chosen to do it with ProSteel. In the past there were no Single Part drawings, as subparts of assemblies, they were all put together on each drawing. For the fabricator however, it is very helpful to know by looking at a single part drawing, how many they will need to make of a specific bit, for the whole job, instead of a by the assembly total, like in our old style.

Ah yes. That makes perfect sense.

Do you (and your fabricators) prefer the system of having assembly and fitting drawings separate? This is the system I was taught when I first became a detailer, but we get the odd client here and there that would rather have all parts detailed on the assembly drawing (eliminating the fitting/part drawings completely, and reducing the number of drawings for the job) - just like your old system. I think this boils down to the difference between structural and mechanical detailing conventions (in Australia at least).

I am sure that our fabricator likes that we can spit out the fabrication drawings for tall buildings within a week or so of having completed the modeling, and with no human induced errors, like hole diameters misstated. We save at least one to four months of our hard work right there, which gets it into and out of the shop much more quickly. When talking about fabricating 1,000,000 pounds of steel, and trying to get it on site in a timely fashion, and since the architects always sign off on project geometry just about, if not after, the time construction was intended to start, that certainly helps.

All of our Standard drawings of parts which were designed for previous jobs and have come to be go-to parts for our new projects, are on sheets like the one I posted, with all assembly sub parts included on either the same sheet, or on as few additional sheets as needed to detail it clearly, typically one.

A reduction in drawing number is nice, but likely offset by not having to go through them and total common parts from the whole lot, which would be quite tedious. Our fabricator will farm out individual parts to other large factories in the area, if they need to, which is pretty much the norm, as they are very highly regarded and stay quite busy.

Personally, I love getting to do some real drawing, but all the more so, when we are not under the gun, because the job is already way behind schedule, and we still have a lot more to do. When we drew everything with AutoCad, we might be looking at doing 500 to 600 drawings in a big rush, with a small team, and we worked pretty long hours, and then we needed to laboriously check them all. It was definitely a lot more labor intensive than using ProSteel.

Good to hear mate. Glad it's working out so far.