Evan Wallace, who was CTO of Figma at the time, introduced Vector Networks on February 9, 2016 in this blog post. For those who aren’t familiar, Figma is a design tool mainly used to design software UI (we use it to design Arcol).
I’d argue that Vector Networks is the second most revolutionary feature of Figma, next to real-time collaboration. It’s one of those features that you don’t notice until it’s not there. Evan mentions this himself in the post:”We were surprised to discover that many people didn’t even notice a difference between vector networks and paths. The tool just worked how people expected it to work. They did notice the difference when they went back and tried to use other tools, however.”
Vector networks have been a key part of the Arcol workflow since our early days, and with 3 ex-Figma engineers currently on our team we have the skills and knowledge to port this feature over to a CAD context. At this point you’re likely wondering things like “okay but what exactly are Vector Networks?”, and “why do I care about this for a CAD tool?”. Let’s dive in!
Okay but what exactly are Vector Networks?
The simplest explanation of a Vector Network is a sketch made up of multiple connected lines that maintain their relationship while being edited. In legacy CAD tools you often use commands like join, trim, and offset to constantly delete and recreate lines. The workflow feels like gluing disparate pieces together rather than working on a cohesive whole.
The gif below is a recreation of the gif in Evan’s post (mentioned above), but in Arcol. It shows what Vector Networks are, and how they behave in Arcol compared to the original Figma feature.
As you can see, the real power of Vector Networks is their edit-ability. You can add or delete points and move edges however you like. Beyond just being a sketch Vector Networks in Arcol enable other key features like parametric 3D modeling and floor plans. Let’s look at some of the details of this feature and how they click together.
Edge Dragging
We’ve put a lot of thought into edge dragging to ensure that angles are always preserved while editing. This leads to some interesting and extremely useful possible behavior, like creating a stepped shape just by dragging edges.
Let’s create the same shape in Rhino below. The steps needed are Polyline, Trim, and Join. 3 different tools are required including a “glue together” step - fair to say that’s quite a bit more complicated!
To really drive things home with edge dragging - in the context of a more complicated sketch (like a floor plan) it really does feel magical. Best of luck doing something like this in any other CAD tool :)
Temporary Dimensions
When you select an edge in a sketch in Arcol, you see dimension strings from that edge to the nearest adjacent edges - we call these temporary dimensions. You can edit temporary dimensions to accurately set the location of that edge.
Combine edge dragging with temporary dimensions and now you’ve got a sketch that’s both extremely easy to edit AND accurate to a fraction of an inch (or millimeter).
Drafting Functions
Trim/Extend, Offset, Align, Fillet - yep, we’ve got all of them working inside Vector Networks. You can create sketches just as accurately as you could in any other tool, but in a faster and more streamlined way.
Regions
Since a Vector Network behaves as a single sketch, the regions inside of closed loops in the sketch can be derived. These regions can be selected and assigned properties like Function (eg. “Residential) or Area Type (eg. “Common Area”). The areas of these regions can be calculated based on the assigned properties and voila! you’ve got floor plans with their associated metrics (unit count, square footage, etc).
Buildings
You can see in the gif below how all the pieces of Vector Networks click together to make creating and editing a building much easier than in legacy CAD tools. Vector Networks can be used as input sketches for extrusions - buildings in Arcol are special types of extrusions with floors. This means that as you edit a floor plan sketch you can also be editing the 3D geometry of the building at the same time!
What’s next
We’re not done with Vector Networks yet. Stay tuned - soon you’ll be able to apply floor plans to more complex building shapes in Arcol (eg. lofts).
We really think we’re on to something here.