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 ]

Mat, the view changing hotkeys are still the same on VW10 as they were in 8 and 9. On the numberic keypad, 2=front, 4=left, 6=right, 8=top, 0=top/plan and 1,3,7,and 9 are isometric views. Remember, for these to work "Num Lock" must be turned on, and you can not be in the process of editing a text feild. [ 11-10-2002, 12:45 PM: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

To date (Sunday) we have had 140 registered users, and 8740 hits to the site. Lately, we have seen about 1 or 2 new registered users a day.

The image export feauture in VW does not handle very large / high rez images for printing well. In your version the only way to increase the resoulution is to do the math out. DPI * desired image size in inches = #pixles of image data you would need to export. A much better soultion for this type of problem is to use VW's printing subsytem for this. You can use VW and the AdobePS driver to create a PostScript file which many shops can print, or you can use a 3rd party product like MacPlot to create a windows style print file. However, the best solution for you IMHO is to download and install the shareware "Print2PDF" from www.jwwalker.com. This is a Printer driver for the Mac that will let you make a high rez PDF file for your print shop. (I'm yet to meet a print shop that will not accept a PDF file) [ 11-02-2002, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

The 3D primative objects for VW 10 are stored in your Resources\Samples\3D Primative Objects folder. Move these .vso objects into your plugins folder and then add the Box, Elipsoid, Cone, Cylinder, Parabaloid, Pyramid, Sphere, and Torus objets to your pallet with the Workspace editor.

Well text and graphics are handled a bit differently when printing. Have you tried using the "Postscript Only" checkbox in the print dialog? You could also check your output from VectorWorks first ot find out if the problem is in VW or the printer/driver. What does the text look like if you use the PDF preview option? (BTW when using the OSX PDF, the above mentioned checkbox may eliminate all text)

I think we the only common problem with VW 8 on 2000 or XP is that it does not play nice with other programs. While it is running, it likes to take up 100% of CPU resources, and that for it to run reliably the user must have local administrative privilages on the machine. This isn't exactly serious but we did get a number of complaints. However the point I was trying to make was that had a serious problem come up that prevented it from working being functional, Nemetschek would not be obligated to fix it.

Paolo, Dimensions are not scripts. They are an object type that is natively supported in VectorWorks like a Wall or parametric constraint. (Ok, Well they could be internally, but I can be sure that they are not a standard PIO type object.)

Hiya Ion, Ironically it was to try to solve my own VectorWorks problem. At least it turned out to be a driver issue on my own system and not a VW 10 bug... I'll probably keep reading these just to stay up to date for training purposes. If I have something to add to a discussion I will. Anyway, where else am I suppose to dig up info for VectorWorker?

Clay a script for this isn't exactly hard, but you may be better served with a worksheet. Just create a new worksheet, and turn one of the rows into a database query that matches your objects. Something like "Type is Polygon" or "Class is SomeClassName". Then in the header row for the query put in the formula =area(). If you want to sort the results, just drag the sorting widget down into the column header.

Prior to version 9 I believe VectorWorks was using it's own in house solids modeler for CSG solids. This got the job done but was fairly limited, (If you want to get the history of version 8 straight Andrew Bell would be the best person to ask. You can frequently find him on the mailing list) When version 9 came out, a change was made to use the very powerful SMLIB ( www.smlib.com) library because of it's excellent NURBS support. However, a lot of the features and functionality of SMLIB were not used in the initial release of 9.0 due to time constraints. Users were first able to reap the benefits of SMLIB when the 3D PowerPack was released with 9.5.1. Now in VW10, a lot more of that functionality is being integrated and expanded upon in the VectorWorks environment. ... I'm not as certain about how you mean associative drawings and parts. You can reference layers of other drawings so that an up to date copy of one drawing is reflected in another, but this is not a live process as it would be in something like Microstation. Changes like that need to be written out to disk for VectorWorks to see them. You can however place geometric associations on 2D objects. Like keeping one line always perpendicular to another, or two points always touching.