Matthew Giampapa

Wow, I never thought that anyone was quite this interested in the topic. Here is my understanding... draw your own conclusions from this, but remember I?m not "in the loop" on this. I do not speak for NNA, I do not have an affiliation with NNA other than providing training in the NY/NJ area. 1) Nemetschek licensees a version of Lightworks for use in Renderworks... 2) Renderworks does not support the high end features in the higher end version of Lightworks... 3) Therefore, it stands to reason that Nemetschek licensees the low end of Lightworks' offerings... 4) This Altivec support appears to have been added across the board to all of Lightwork's current product line.... 5) In order to stay current, we can assume that Nemetschek probably keeps reasonably up to date with the current version of Lightworks for development support reasons... 6) VectorWorks 10 came out in October, and past performance shows that NNA likes to release product somewhere between every 12-18 months.... 7) We are about 7 months from the last major release, so 10.5 should reasonably come out in the next few months.... 8) NNA has made a big deal of including "new" free features in it's .5 releases... So the real question is not if we will see Altivec support, but when. Personally, my guess is that we will see this in 10.5 in about 3 months. To me that would be the perfect time to market a new release if they are going to stick 12-18 month cycle.

3D Studio will let you save a file or selected objects as a DXF. VectorWorks can then read them fine as 3D polygon based shapes. At the moment, a client has a rather large body of work we would like to leverage in VectorWorks, so I am going to try to find a way to get all these 3D Stuido files into IGES so we can keep the curved surfaces.

Version 7 and Version 9 will also work. The general rule is that the current version will open a file 3 versions back.

Check your classes, they are brought over when you copy and paste. If you copy an object that was in the class "3D" and then paste it into a file that already has "3D", but it is invisable. It will paste the objects but just leave them hidden.

Yea, I thought of that when I put a "known issue" category into the Knowledgebase while at NNA, but I guess that no one there liked the system enough to ever use it. I suppose I could add a user driven version at VectorWorker, but I really don't have much time to spend on VectorWorks issues these days. If I see a bunch of feedback here in the positive direction I can go work somthing out.

Yes C. Deel, you hit the nail on the head. I try to stick with EPS files (without the preview) if I really need to keep file sizes down. Otherwise I just save to a compressed directory on Windows 2000. I think with all the new image based features introduced in VW 10 (Better texturing, 2D Image fills, Prop Objects and RenderWorks Backgrounds) that better built compression is probably in the works for a future version.

The hidden line renderer can take a really really long time with some types of surfaces. It can also take a huge amount of time if your computer is using virtual memory for the rendering. Does your hard disk grind excessivly while rendering? Does OpenGL rendering work?

This is caused by a confilit between your version of MacOS X and some older versions of VW 9.5. Update your copy of VectorWorks to 9.5.2 or later and the text tool should work as you expect. (You can get the updates here)

AFAIK, a RTL (HP Raster Transfer Language) is basicly what Gimp-Print is creating. Its the .plt (HPGL/2) file that Gimp-Print is incapable of. I suppose the litmus test would be to set up gimp-print to print to a file instead of a port and send that to someone expecting an RTL file.

Hi, the file you are importing probably was drawn with ACIS based solids. (Somthing VectorWorks does not yet support) In general it would probably be better to use IGES to transfer these types of objects, but you can convert them in AutoCAD to a format VectorWorks can read. 1) Take a copy of the AutoCAD file with a new name. 2) Select the Export command, and choose "3D Studio". Sekect the objects to be converted. 3) Select the "Insert 3D Studio" command and save the file. 4) Import the new file into VectorWorks.

I have heard from some users that they were able to get VectorWorks to run under W.I.N.E. This is the same software package that Lindows uses for Windows compatability. It should be possible, unfortunetly I did not check with the person I heard this from if they were using plain W.I.N.E. or W.I.N.E. with a copy of the Windows DLLs.

Ion, VectorWorks does not store images as compressed data. It just stores the raw bitmap in the file. Import a 32 bit 640x480 jpeg thats 24k on your disk and it will bloat your file by 1.2 megs. If at all possible you should do your logo as an EPS file with a 72dpi preview. This will stay at a small size in your file and provide high quality output provided that you are printing to a PostScript printer. Otherwise your other options to reduce this kind of bloat is to import at lower bit depth like 8 bit, or use a lower resoulution image file. If it is the same logo being repeated all over the file on different layers. Turn it into a symbol and use that instead or the raw image.

Well I don't know about the "masses" but here are the results that I got...VectorWorker Poll Results I'll admit its not scientific, but I re-opened the poll in case anyone else would like at add their opinions. If you want to vote at this point, you can do so from the main page. [ 11-14-2002, 06:01 PM: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

There is but one thing you can do. Buy a faster computer. A faster video card will do next to nothing. Pentium 4 2.53Ghz Systems Athlon XP 2200+ Systems

SketchUp is not really aimed at the same market as VectorWorks, but there is a 3rd Party Add-on for VectorWorks called "Doodle" that can stylize your 2D drawings in a similar fashion. If you are working in 3D, you can always take a 2D snapshot with the convert to polygon command and then process that with doodle. You can find Doodle at PanzerCAD [ 11-10-2002, 12:57 PM: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]