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Kevin C

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  • Occupation
    Chartered Architectural Technologist
  • Homepage
    www.crawfordarchitectural.co.uk
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    United Kingdom

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    k-crawford

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  1. Agreed - The 'UK stair' is technically incorrect, and doesn't really exist. The approved Document posted above applies to England only. Different rules and standards apply to different countries within the UK.
  2. Closures occassionaly deciding not to show / wall components randomly disappearing / internal and external views not showing components etc.
  3. Matt, I think that VW as a company is missing the point of the question that was raised. Over the years VW has struggled with providing real time working solutions to shortcomings in the actual software. If you go back to the start of this thread and look at @Jonathan Pickup's post, this is all that we are really asking for. You mention closures and visibility of components in Top/Plan - this is still touch and go as far as working properly in the current version of VW (2024 v4.1) - how many years was this in the making and it was released not working properly, actually damaging VW files and entire projects in the process - almost as badly as the catastrophe of the introduction of the Title Block Manager. One might ask, if I am so disappointed with VW, why don't I go elsewhere. The simple answer, I like the software - but there is only so far that that will travel. It's a question I seem to be asking myself more often. I have invested many thousands of pounds in this software and all the seats that I own, my business would seriously struggle if I were to change software providers. Although if I did I would be able to access manufacturer libraries much easier and also collaborate with other design team members without any concerns or compatibility issues. Something VW needs to take note of, especially as they broke their promise of never changing to a subscription model - the users never wanted or asked for this.
  4. This keeps cropping up - I just happened to put a roadmap request on this item earlier today. I'll summarise below - Is what I'm suggesting too radical, or is it just basics. The ability to create a wall containing all the necessary components required to construct the wall up to and including say the outside cavity. Being able to 'stick' a cladding (of our choice) on to the structure - with the ability to control both vertical and horizontal extents), but when doing so the cladding recognises openings like doors and windows. A great number of 'cladding' variations happen at locations the designer has chosen specifically to create a specific outcome, sometimes we just want to experiment to see how the design will look with different elevational treatments before deciding on the final options. These don't always tie-in with a predetermined formula. This is technically achievable at the moment by excluding the external cladding material from the wall structure and placing a 'cladding' wall directly in front of the main wall, but then all openings etc. have to be manually added in - and it gets very messy. One advantage though is that wall joining and component joining becomes much better, as we are in control where walls join together and not a piece of software
  5. Anuyone had failures in updating to SP6? It corrupted our VW and we had to roll back to SP5
  6. It would be useful to be able to combine 'align and scale' in a single command. This would be extremely beneficial when overlaying imported files (images / pdf's etc) onto a model. The current scale is very 'brute force' and only scales up from the centre of an object meaning that even if you exactly what scale to apply, you have to manually reposition and potentially rotate etc. to get the correct overlay. I don't like quotuing old AutoCAd commands - but this has been around for decades, you can select the scale origin and select by distance on a drawing or entered data; it even aligns 2D objects to 3D planes (something the 3D rotate should be able to do).
  7. As a sidenote - we as a practice cannot work in projects that have been imported from earlier versions (2022) and use spaces as the conversion process splits a space into a space and Datatag - making it nearly impossible to work with. Well done VW another 'user improvement' that makes life harder again.
  8. From my simplistic viewpoint, they have taken a tool which was really difficult and not user friendly and just made it 10 times worse. Spaces in VW have always been problematic, they are actually provide very little use, but they are needed. As we have now moved forward onto Datatags and spaces being intrinsically linked, one of my biggest gripes is that I cannot associate a space with it in the Datatag OIP or at least give us an option of changing the way 2D locus are represented on screen so that we can see the!!! There should be a way of selecting the space without having to scowl round the drawing trying to find a 2D locus which, by it's design is nearly impossible to find if there are any objects in the drawing.
  9. Has anyone tried to import a file into 2023 where they have been using spaces? I am testing out 2023 before rolling it out to the office and noticed a potential serious bug. Any file imported into 2023 with spaces (styled or otherwise) splits the space into a Data Tag and a space, however the space itself is no longer editable, although it seems to be locked to the data tag and the data tag itself is all but useless. Have tried with numerous files and all have the problem. Just asking the question before submitting a bug report.
  10. Interesting that no-one from Vectorworks has entered this discussion. It is very telling that VW are always quick to blame the users saying that we are not using the program as it is intended and that items are 'working as designed' and that there is a very good reason why the software is now operating in the way it does. Can someone from VW please step up in and tell us why you have removed the 'none' marker setting ?? Also, I am not a programmer - why should I have to use a code to fix something which was not broken in the first place. This one is almost up there with the debacle of the Title Block borders a few years back. Or do we roll back to SP1 - as everyone knows that SP2 didn't actually work and that all bugs were meant to be sorted in SP3???
  11. I am using Flixo energy for linear thermal modelling (I am on version 7 - think it is now on v8.1)- not cheap, but extremely reliable & robust and most importantly I can calculate in accordance with EN ISO 10211:2007 and BR497. This is the website: https://www.flixo.com For my energy design I use Elmhurst DesignSAP (again a windows only product). I used to use NES Plan Assessor, but they were bought over by Elmhurst a few years ago and so I had to change.
  12. Pat Thanks for your views. As an office, we have been operating Macs as the primary hardware for at least 10 years. However within my standard setup, I have to run Parallels on the iMac due to the fact that Apple is not capable of running all the software that is used in normal day to day business - Energy design and thermal modelling software, something that Apple does not support. All of our business software is licence transferrable - so no cost or issue there. There are very few differences between Windows and Mac OS nowadays - with the vast majority of software completely interchangeable - if anything it is easier to operate on Windows than Mac - Networking / Microsoft Office all run 100% native on Windows and to be honest, a lot of Microsoft Office products have reduced functionality on a Mac, which has irked me for years. As far as hardware replacement is concerned, a 4 to 5 year cycle is acceptable in today's world - Mac's provide support for 5 years with their operating systems - free upgrades etc., but I can see this changing dramatically with the new apple business model that enforces a hardware change in a defined number of years due to the extremely limited user interventions that can be made. On the flip side, Windows has always been the hardware system that is fully user upgradeable and the downside of the OS used to be that Windows used to charge for OS upgrades, but Windows seems to be going the same way as Mac with free OS upgrades, as long as the hardware supports it. I have simply come to the business decision that Macs are simply no longer suitable for purpose in terms of adaptability and flexibility. They are fantastic pieces of hardware, however, that on its own does not justify keeping them. I also don't agree with your statement that Windows users don't upgrade - yes, that used to be the case, but that is no longer the norm. The main software that we use is Vectorworks and Microsoft Office - I am the only one who is certified to use the energy software. There are also very few differences nowadays between the two pieces of software a large proportion of work is done in the cloud. Thanks for your thoughts though on the Mac - that ship has sailed though, I am changing to Windows OS.
  13. Hi all. Been thinking about moving the office from iMac's to PC's for a while now and we have a couple of workstations that are way overdue for replacement and the price of iMac's have been going through the roof - for basically an average computer paired with a fantastic monitor. The spec I am currently looking at is as follows: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Eight Core CPU (3.8GHz-4.7GHz/36MB CACHE/AM4) 64GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (4 x 16GB) PNY QUADRO RTX A4000 16GB GDDR6, 6144 CUDA CORES - 4 x DP 512GB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2200 MB/R, 1500 MB/W) 1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE Windows 11 Professional 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence Samsung LU32J590UQRXXU 32" 4K UHD Monitor The cost is coming in at under £2,800 (with 3 Year Collect & Return, 3 Year Parts, 3 Year labour - equivalent to AppleCare). The similar spec mac comes in at £4,029 excluding AppleCare, but the Apple Store normally throws it in at nil cost due to my business account. I am not confident that the new iMac due out later this year is going to be more affordable - and it will definitely be less upgradeable, so do I take the plunge now or wait?? Any thoughts??
  14. I think there are more issues than just the stability of SP2 for VW2022. As an office we had to roll back to SP1.1 as there are a fundamental errors in SP2. Most notably you cannot have multiple item attached to some walls. Symbols such sockets / furniture / switches etc... which you could previously snap to walls the face of walls create full wall breaks - irrespective of the setting, meaning ANY project cannot be used in SP2. Until this is resolved we as a business are basically stuck with SP1. We have been using this feature in VW for years - We cannot go back and change every single project and drawing. This was first notified to VW when SP2.0 came out for VW2022 - we are now on SP2.1 When we contacted VW - we were told, they were aware but not a priority and will be fixed in SP3. If this is not a priority - what is? When will SP3 be released.
  15. I was really pleased to see the wall component wrapping in this years release, unfortunately it still has some major implementation issues. The entire wrapping does not work with windows if you have a cill - funny enough, cills are a pretty basic element as the cill completely obscures the wall component wrap in plan view Again with cills, he wrapping does not extend down to include for a cill and leaves odd gaps at the jamb. Not sure if the same situation appears with door thresholds (haven't tried it yet). As an office, we have just started last week to use 2022 in anger, so it will be a while before we are at that level of detail for most projects. Had a look at the changes to stairs - it's a start, but VW is still miles off what the rest of the industry is able to do.
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