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Doesn't work for me with Viewports either.

An easy way - because the bearing heights and rafter lengths are different front and back is to use roof faces: Plan View - draw a rectangles representing the front roof AEC>Roof Face Axis 0 Set the correct slope Two clicks to draw the the 'bearing line' along the ridge line and a third click to denote the up-slope repeat for the back roof Move the roofs a hair apart and connect them at the ridge using the Connect/Combine tool. Lift the roofs to the correct elevation

Sounds like an excellent BIM exercise and application of Data Visualization & Worksheets. Create a Service Record with all the pertinent information, Attach it to each Plant and fill in the relevant data. Determine the minimum Service-Time interval and set up a worksheet(s) & Viewport series that looks at and reports on the relevant Data at each Time Interval.

Is this new - or an old treasure I didn't know?

Welcome back, Rather than disabling the top row from your keyboard try to reassign / remove assignment of those those Keyboard Shortcuts in a custom Workspace. Tools>Workspaces>Workspaces>Duplicate your favorite workspace and track down those keyboards shortcuts that are causing the issues and delete them.

@ 100dpi the Section Viewport rendered for me in HLR in <7s Have you tried adjusting your Vectorworks Preferences>Display>Navigation Graphics @ all?

& $ 😉

Actually Lumion also works live w/ Vectorworks- really well in fact. It is also windows only. The Lumion LiveSync updates the Lumion project as your VW Model is built - it's amazing how quickly renderings can be tested & generated, think in seconds and minutes instead of quarter hours and hours. It also has a huge library of included materials, 3d grasses, trees, plants & entourage objects which you can add to your model in Lumion. Keeping all of that out of Vectorworks if you choose.

You may have your VW View Layer options set to Grey/Snap Others or similar. Go to View>Layer Options>Show Others and see if it changes the behavour. Or the visibility of your Ceiling Layer is set to Grey - in which case it will be visible when active but return to grey when another Layer is active. Change the Visibility of the Ceiling Layer to visible This should fix it whether you're using the native VW textures or Lumion assigned textures

Yes, backups & version histories are two separate things. Delete all backup files frequently, preserve version histories at significant forks in the design tree.

Here's the file I used: Existing Trees with Shadows v2020.vwxExisting Trees with Shadows.vwx

3 stacked VPs is not that unusual. Save the stack for future projects in your Template file.

Some careful Layering of your 2d elements wrt the existing trees, placing a shadow catcher in the 3d scene And stacking Viewports on top of each other should allow you to get the composite look you're after.

Have you tried underlaying a 3d Viewport w/ Helidon below the Top/Plan Viewport?

Place a horizontal Section Viewport on a dedicated Design Layer, adjust class visibility, class overides etc to suit. For your new simplified project: in a blank file create a Referenced Viewport that references only this new DL.