Andrew Bell@NV

Umm.. you said you were going to try to open them in 8. So did it work?

My understanding (possibly flawed) is that section marker attributes are set by editing the Section Line itself, and you can set it to whatever size you want: however, it will appear the same everywhere, and does not scale. Do you need different sized markers for different viewports, or are you seeing behavior different from my description?

Go to the section viewport and select it. There's an item in the Object Info palette labeled "Section Line Instances..." Click on it. A dialog will appear that allows you to choose viewports and layers where the section line will appear. Select viewports from the drop-down at the top, and put checkmarks by all the viewports you want the section line to appear on.

Simply open the files; they will be converted automatically.

12.0.1 contains fixes for the most pressing issues with 12.0.0. It does not require changing "methods of work, templates, retraining, revising existing project files, etc." I don't know of any new problems from it; the only concerns have been things that weren't improved. It should be a no-brainer upgrade. As Dave mentioned, the splay "issue" is *only* in wireframe, not in anything that should be used for final presentation. No resolution of any sort should be needed, just use whichever rendering method you desire for your elevations.

Have you tried opening the DWGs in other programs, including VectorWorks and the AutoCAD viewer? If they appear in that case, it's a problem with AutoCAD LT.

Can you export an image file and then use an image editing program to tweak the brightness?

What are you importing from? Have you tried the actual import already, and what sort of objects do you create? 3-D text is easily created with the Text Along Path command, but if you have a logo as your source, you may not have text in the traditional sense, but instead some sort of outline that has the appearance of text. We'll need a little more info to give more guidance. [ 03-01-2006, 09:31 AM: Message edited by: Andrew Bell@NNA ]

1) You might consider printing to PDF, and then printing that to your plotter, rather than doing the VW12 back to VW8 translation. 2) Your hardware should be fine for running VectorWorks, and no one at NNA has said it isn't. The only thing you didn't mention (except for the PowerBook) is RAM size. For large enough files, you could be hitting virtual memory, which would slow things down a lot. Perhaps a check with the Activity Monitor is in order. 3) File sizes nearly doubled for 64 bit rather than 32 bit precision. Hard disk sizes have multiplied by a factor of 20; is storage really a problem? Many large VW 12 files are large because they have lots of textures and images, for which the 64 bit precision makes no difference. How big are your files? 4) Viewports don't slow down VectorWorks if you don't have any in your program. Nor, save for program startup time, do plug-ins, or having 3-D functionality. A VW2D program generally wouldn't scroll faster in plan view. 5) The Classic workspace has tools and menus very similar to the layout of VW 8. If you don't like the modern layout, try it. 6) Clearly lots of users are not having the same performance problem you are, since they're posting on this thread telling you so. It's not "bait and switch", you being "mislead", etc. It seems like there must be something distinctive about your setup that's causing the problem; have you contacted tech support? 7) Use Mike M's advice re: quieting minor alerts, such as "no edit behavior." 8) I don't happen to have VW8 handy, but I've been working here for ten years, and I've never seen a version distributed on floppies. I think you're overstating things a bit.

If you import the DWG back into VectorWorks (into a blank, new file), how does it look? Often, you can use that to gauge the quality of an export and track down problem items.

It sounds like a problem with the Window plug-in, since if the plug-in file isn't available you get grayed fields in the OI palette. If it's possible for you to reinstall VectorWorks, I'd try that first.

12.0.0 still has this crash. 12.0.1 stops the Rosetta crash, but offsetting still does not work in all cases on Intel Macs. If you follow this link: http://kbase.nemetschek.net/index.php?ToDo=view&questId=91&catId=23 You will get information about VectorWorks and Intel Mac compatibility.

If you use a sweep to create your "onion", you can edit the sweep, which allows you to change the 2-D profile that is swept. The loft tool creates nurbs surfaces, with no "memory" of how they are created, so you would probably have to rebuild that. However, assuming you're just wanting to change height or diameter, you could use the Scale Objects command to do that change.

General recommendations: AFAIK, NNA has never tried running VectorWorks on 64-bit Windows. Apparently it should run; however, a lot of printer drivers don't, so I personally wouldn't recommend it. For most VectorWorks performance questions, WinBench or other similar generic CPU benchmarks will probably give you a reasonable approximation of how well a given machine will run VectorWorks. Only RenderWorks is multi-threaded, however, so run tests using a single processor/core. Solid operations (Add/Subtract/Intersect/Section Solid, etc.) use a lot of floating point, so check tests related to floating point performance if that's important to your client. Hard drive performance is rarely an issue unless you're using virtual memory, but given what you've suggested for hardware already presumably you'll make sure you have plenty of RAM. VectorWorks uses OpenGL acceleration; it does not use Direct3D. Look for graphics cards with good OpenGL performance numbers. [ 02-21-2006, 09:07 AM: Message edited by: Andrew Bell@NNA ]

My mistake, BTW; it's tech@nemetschek.net , not techsupport@nemetschek.net . You could even send me the file if you want, for a little redundancy.

Please contact tech support so we can find out what's going on, either by phone or techsupport@nemetschek.net .

Contact tech support by phone or e-mail, so NNA can fix this problem. How large is the DWG file?

The extruded rectangle tool draws an extrude (unless the creation snaps out of the working plane); I think this has been the case since 11.5.

quote: Originally posted by ErichR: When applying the fillet tool, it fails at least 50% of the time. And, unexpectedly, the polygon is converted to a polyline! If a polygon gets filleted, it has a rounded corner, and thus by definition isn't a polygon. Or are you using the first mode of the fillet tool? If it's failing where it clearly should work, submit the problem file with a description to bugsubmit@nemetschek.net or call tech support.

The Cut 3-D Section command creates 3-D polygons for all the objects in the drawing, and then sections each of those by the sectioning plane. Because our 3-D polygons do not have individual edge hiding flags, when it creates those polygons, it can't hide the split lines it creates. Thus you see them. It is possible to hide all the edges for a 3-D polygon, so in some cases it may choose to hide all the edges and then you'll have less of an issue, but in certain renderings you may lose the edges you want. Solid addition might also work to combine surfaces and hide edges if you can do that. The live section code, however, creates internal polygon records which do maintain the edge hiding of the split lines. Thus you don't get those lines. You do however, get the sectioning surfaces. And, of course, it can be updated easily if your model changes. The "What's new in VW 12" PDF the Nemetschek web site shows a couple of example screen shots.

Look at CTO Paul Pharr's quote again: "we want to assure our many users we are committed to providing an Intel-native VectorWorks 12 application for Mac OS X." Intel-native does not mean running under Rosetta.

Can you print to PDF and plot that? Just a thought for a temporary solution, you haven't really explained enough to indicate the specific problem. VW8 can plot, but VW12 can't? Is it because VW12 won't run on the machine that can talk to the plotter?

VW8 and before used (as Robert Anderson said) a long integer coordinate system. For this to work with different layer scales, VW coordinates actually were scaled by the layer scale. So changing the layer scale actually made minor changes in the coordinates, and the larger the scale, the less precision could be represented by those coordinates. (If the scale was later reduced, the precision could be higher, but it didn't automatically restore an original value.) You said the precision in the units drop-down is .0. Did you try changing it? VW doesn't actually change the coordinate values to the specified precision, that's just what rounding it uses for displaying the coordinates.

So you would like something like this? http://www.caddigest.com/subjects/autocad/select/images/dotson4.gif

Layer links are objects, akin to symbols, one layer per layer link. There's no global record of which layers are linked to which others. You unlink a layer by deleting the layer link. (You may have to unlock it first -- they're created locked -- but they're just like other objects otherwise.)