Amorphous - Julian

Hi Luka. Really appreciate the detailed instructions you provided... worked brilliantly! Except for one thing... I now seem to have too many decimal places 🙂 What should I do if I want it to be rounded off at 0? Thanks.

Thanks for the quick response on this @Frank Brault, but it is simply too much work to do this for every plant we input into the document, especially during design phase when we are exploring different design options. To be Frank, this problem applies to everything from Plants, to Furniture Objects, to Technical Drawings symbols. On another post, we discussed a tool called SmartPaste by @GioPet, which has since been discontinued. I wonder if Giovanni can share with us whether his tool can help with a situation like this too?

[UPDATE 2 10/03/2020] All terminals on v333 suddenly couldn't save to server. The Project File suddenly seems to be locked up for some reasons. No one can save and commit without this error message. Onto version v334 now.

Haha I think I just beat you to asking that question. As above, empty openings. It is very cumbersome.

Hi @CiaMariaPia I'm glad that others are seeing similar problems with current Wall Styles. Hope the engineers at Vectorworks take note. We generate floor plans from this as well. But honestly it gets very messy and cumbersome. Think about how it works around doors and windows. We generally create two empty opening around doors and windows for it to all make sense (one on each side) Problem arises again when we need to move the doors and windows. It is very slow. Very well pointed out. This makes our plan drawings look weird. We'd love to have an approach that balances between 'modelling', 'architectural drawing' and 'rendering'. But this doesn't really exist in VW as it is now. There has been other posts that talks about this. In particular about stone/tile/wall joints, I will link them in later. As for your question about plan appearance, what we do to suppress it is to cover over it in annotation space. Depends at what stage you're talking about. It makes sense at concept stage to just allow for a 50mm finishes zone, which takes care of everything from 'Decorative wall panelling' to 'screed + adhesive + stonework'. We control 'renderworks textures' with 'classes'. So by changing the class of an object we can very quickly change the appearance for the purpose of design exploration. A wall with no build-ups makes more sense at this stage. Later, towards design development, we can then have different wall styles that show the real substrates, material thickness and hatches. IN CONCLUSION Our method is not ideal, it is only to 'work around' the counter-intuitive nature of 'Wall Styles'. Hence, if VW can change how 'Walls' and 'Finishes' works, per post by Tom Klaber and myself, we save ourselves the pain that you pointed out in your three questions.

[UPDATE 10/03/2020] Today we had another PS issue. Onto version v333.

Hi thanks @Luka Stefanovic that is great news! However, I have searched through the IFC list in Data Tags, and cannot find 'IFC set' or 'Component.Thickness' for me to get the core thickness. Would you be able to tell me the exact steps to get to those functions, or give me the callout formula? The best I can get to is: #CD##IfcMaterialSet#.#IfcMaterialSet#.#Components# Much appreciated, thanks! 😁

@E|FA When modelling in Vectorworks now, we prefer walls with only one component (instead of walls with attached component which is a hassle to modify). IE we don't go through the effort of making 'Wall Styles' with a 'core' and different 'finishes component' over them. In a shared project file scenario, wall styles is just trouble. Too many permissions issues everytime we want to modify one style.

Can't offer help on this issue, but would like to be able to have plants assigned to a particular class as you said. Also, apart from the overall class of plant object, we have long struggled the problem of the sub-classes of the components of a plant (they have default classes for trunk, canopy, etc). We'd love all the classes and sub-classes to be ones that are part of our company system and not Vectorworks Defaults.

Thanks a lot Matt!

@klvanov thanks I am using VW2019 SP6. When does VW2020 SP3 come out? I don't want to upgrade till then. Can we add this for the next SP release for 2019 as well? @Luka Stefanovic Many thanks for the helpful tips to get get core thickness. I'll follow your instructions for Expert Formula when we get to 2020. I suppose sequence is counting from the top of the list, correct?

'let's sweep this issue under the carpet for another 3 years' Afterall... this question was only first asked by @Tom Klaber in 2017. How does it matter to revisit it in 2023?

Hi @JMR last when it we ran the script it worked perfectly. The converted objects will appear in the annotation space. I'll try it out again tomorrow.

I'd like my data tag to report wall thickness, preferably the thickness of the 'core' But browsing through the functions, this doesn't seem to be available. Shouldn't reporting wall thickness be something quite basic for BIM? Any help appreciated.

I actually also made a similar post in 2019 (not realising @Tom Klaber had put up a much more comprehensive version as above). I'm 100% on board this idea. In fact- we currently draw our walls as three layers in our VW model- 'Core' and two 'finishes' on each side. It's more complicated but gives us more flexibility to change finishes inside a room.

Thanks a lot @Boh

HI @Nikolay Zhelyazkov I have 300 sheets in my file. What is a quick way to uncheck all 'this titleblock is active' box in all 300 sheets? Today, a team member placed a titleblock on a new sheet, and that took 30 minutes. YES, 30 minutes to just place a titleblock onto a sheet.

Hi. This is a SERIOUS ISSUE. Our basic drawings can't even look correct or professional. And there is NO WAY for us to modify this. Is anyone from Vectorworks reading these posts at all, or am I just wasting my time posting here? With respect, it makes no sense for us as designers/architect who charges for the work we perform, to spend time here reporting software issues if no one has the courtesy to write back. Issue occurred again today, and screenshot below. We cannot modify the position of this callout arm.

As users subscribers of Vectorworks, I understand we may not be in a position to tell Vectorworks what to do commercially. So, may I ask just about the features that has been developed by Giovanni in SmartPaste? I can really see how these features helps with our workflow. Below you can find a video of us demonstrating the process to 'clean up' a file. That is, 'deleting a class' from our Vectorworks file. I recorded it on my iPhone, as 'screen recordings' via Quicktime do not show the 'spinning beach ball', which indicates 'processing'. Our computers have good specs, so the slowless is due to the large file size (2.2GB) and complexity. This cleanup process we'd do class-by-class: to make sure we don't accidentally delete the wrong things within a given glass, or reassign objects to a wrong class in the process. Hence, multiply the length of this video by 50 to get a sense of the pain of this process for us users. I would like Giovanni's SmartPaste tool, or something similar, to relief us from this pain. So, just speaking about this on a user-feature level, and not touching upon any potential commercial arrangements between Vectorworks and SmartPaste, can @JuanP please shed some light on whether these features may come in future versions? Thanks. Deleting a Class.mp4

[UPDATE 2 - 4/3/2020] Not long after saving v330, we recognised the project file is not the usual 1GB. So we are now reverting to an other version, and have to go through that archaic 'copy-and-paste' between versions again. Onto v331. In total, around 3 man-hours lost over this today. ... breathe.... stay calm.... 😉

In one of our project requiring ceiling grid, we end up modelling a panel and 'duplicate array' the whole thing, which was quite inefficient. Agree that it would be great to be able to 'profile' both the grid and the 'panels'.

[UPDATE 4/3/2020] Today, one of us had a file-crash during 'save and commit'. Upon reopening the file, there was an error message saying somewhere along the lines of (we didn't screenshot it): 'I.O operation failed... will recover as much information as possible... if you continue to open this file you may suffer from a loss of information...' Of the 3 of us working today, all of us lost information in the latest Project File. So, we had to copy and paste objects we modelled in our working files back into a new version- v330. We mainly worked in the 'model space' (design layer) today. So it's not too bad, as changes in model can be 'copied and pasted' to the new version. However, on days when we 'create viewports' or work on 'annotations' in viewports, such copy-and-paste between files is not possible/not easy, and losing 2 hours of work between 3 team members would be disastrous.

@JMR refer to the script I uploaded, and created by @Julian Carr on the 23/October in the following post, and you’ll find the script to do exactly what you describe

@JMR I haven't experienced the 'speed exit crashes' you mentioned. It is worthwhile getting someone from Vectorworks to look into your issue for you-? Because I may well be next to experience it. Our office uses Mac (client computers and servers). Do you use Windows? Maybe different platforms experience different problems with PS? Let's hope our reported bugs will improve Vectorworks, so it can become a stable program for all of us. This current period of pain will hopefully get us to stable project sharing in the future. [UPDATE 27/02/2020] After we removed all the 'auto-hybrid' objects from our file, which were were told was the culprit of our constant 'file corruption' issue, we got the 'this file is corrupt' alter during S&C again. Our PS shrunk from 950MB to 488MB. So we're now starting version v329.

Thanks @JuanP for the update. Exciting news indeed! I see that you mentioned 'REDSHIFT ready' is on the roadmap for 2021. Is there any roadmap to fully support REDSHIFT as a Vectorworks plugin beyond 2021? I would be willing to pay for the plugin.