Tom Klaber

You can export a sheet layer as DWG, but they way it is translated is that VW creates a Modelspace copy of all the design layers associated with that sheet layer, and then creates a paper space that references the information on the model space. When you import it back into VW, you end up with Viewports again. Unless I am missing something, because I have not gotten that convoluted workflow to work.

Yeah. That is the system that we are going to be moving to. Up to know we have favored drawing full detail sections of the building and then 'zooming in' via viewports for the details. It was a lot more drawing, but we usually encountered enough design conflicts to make the practice worth it, but now we are finding it is harder to incorporate that work into new projects because it is tied up in whole building sections. I am closing in on work around that involves VW -> PDF -> Open in ILLUSTRATOR > Export as DWG > Import into VW. There are still some problems, but I am hoping I can this to work.

Yeah. The copying has saved me once, but it was a huge process and headache. I am actually trying to build a detail library for the office, so I am trying to avoid bring anything but the finished detail itself. I am going to experiment with some exporting / re-importing to see if I can take advantage of viewports being clipped in that process.

I would love a way to take a cropped annotated viewport and convert it into a editable drawing. I have created large complex full building sections for a project and then created cropped viewports to create my details. I then annotated these viewports. I now want to use this detail for another project but of course I can not 'flatten' that viewport into a drawing and copy it over. I know you can 'Convert to Lines" which gets close to what I want to do, but all my polygons, hatches, fills, and text disappear when I do that. What we need is a "Viewport to Drawing" command that will clip all polygons and lines to the viewport crop, and move all objects in the annotations into the drawing.

On top of "L" and "T" modes, there is also a "Capped" and "Uncapped" mode. The icons are not great, but to the right of the 'X' join mode button are two straight walls, one has dark lines on the ends, the other is open. I think you have the capped mode on.

2nd.

A complete re-imagining of how pallets are docked, manipulated, and controlled. The current floating pallets are a mess. VWs needs to re-think the UI.

A "Window Construction Tool" would be great. Maybe similar to what Revit has, where you can build symbols from scratch but incorporate rules and variables that allow instances of the symbol to manipulated. This could be great for all sorts of things. Doors with fancy trim could be built once, and then their sizes changes per instance rather than having to create a custom door symbol for every size door. Etc.

In the VW options section, you could add a preferences dialog that allows users to pick from or customize how dimensions are displayed. Our typical standard in the office is with the dash, and we lament that we can not maintain that in our VWs drawings.

Framing Member tool has wooden truss with pitch and angle settings.

Text has come a long way in the past 2 releases, now we need to take it a couple sets further. Bullet and Numbered Lists! I hate having to renumber my whole general notes page every time I add or delete a note. A auto numbered list with some spacing control would make Gen Notes so much better. A bigger picture idea would be a General Notes manager that would allow the establishment of a database and a user would be able and simply click through the line items to include them on a general notes page. -- We all know that schedules are in desperate need of a total revamp, but I am desperately in need of the ability to override auto generated data fields. We auto generate our door schedule which is great - most of the time, but there are times where I need to have VIF instead of a door height for example and there is no way to modify the schedule short of placing opaque text on top of it.

Is VW user base smaller than Bonzi? MicroStation? Modo? Houdini? Nuke? Maybe.

Just released - Maxwell for Revit. I really do not understand why that Vectorworks is still the only major modeling / CAD software that does not have its own plugin. There must be a technical reason for this. Does anybody know what it is about Vectorworks that makes the manufacture of this pluggin so prohibitively difficult?

It is so weird that this seems to have gotten worse when Zooming / Panning Enhancements was a promoted "Feature" of the new release.

I am having a file melt down. A whole handful of my classes have disappeared and those objects seem to be in a self created class called"root-". This class is not listed among my classes but appears when I select an object. Every time I come back to the document more and more classes are self destructing into root-. What is going on!!??

I was under the impression that navigation, scolling, and zooming was improved in 2013. I experience tons of problems - mostly with odd artifacts appearing while I scroll or pan that then disappear when I arrive. Sometimes the whole drawing disappears while scrolling. Symbols with record formats flicker with alternate inputs. Anybody else seeing this?

I find rendering to be slightly slower. Another thing I have noticed is that all the viewports on a sheet need flash to Out Of Date after an export.

That does look pretty good. Point source?

Has anybody ever rendered using soft shadows in a way that works? As far as I can tell, soft shadows just make your render grainy.

Thanks. This is helpful. If I can get auto naming per sheet and standardized project data and dates across files, we are golden.

OK, VW - next step, full file merge.

There it goes! Not perfect but a huge time saver over anything else. Thanks V_G

Interesting. I can not get it to work yet, but showing promise.

This is almost good except you can not import viewports like this. I am in the same boat, where I need to combine several drawings into one file. The viewports have crops and annotations that I do not want to have to recreate, but there seems to be now way except to export to DWG.....

The symbol should know where it is. Unlike a viewport, the symbol itself is placed on a sheet and text fields should understand that. We used to do a viewport, but moved to creating an actual symbol that gets referenced from a global file. The viewport method, as you know is totally rife with issues. The new system allows us to globally control project information, dates, revisions across multiple files while still giving us local symbol control over sheet title and number. I would just like to automate the sheet title and number portion to cut down on coordination and titling mistakes.