Petri Sakkinen

I have finally purchased VW 9 and while I am impressed by the intent of the new DTM, I am somewhat confused as well. Tried to use the slope analysis facility, but don't seem to get any appropriate results. According to the documentation, there should be a colour change for every increment of the slope, but the dialog (on the Mac) does not refer to increments. Furthermore, the calculations seem to give erroneous results: the site in question has grades between 1:90 and 1:8 and I only get one colour (blue), spread rather randomly and with little resemblance to any slope variations. I have tried various values for the slope (from 1 dgrees to 8 degrees) and the results look too similar to be true - and in fact are totally wrong, unless I don't at all understand how this is supposed to work. In fact, I do get some red and pink, but those are in an area where the entire DTM is calculated incorrectly, with DTM contours crossing happily the 3D polygons of the terrain data. Partly this is perhaps caused by the source data, but still rather disturbing: if the DTM interprets the terrain entirely wrong here, does it do the same elsewhere as well?

Well, this is getting worse and worse. I had another DTM to do but VW 8.5.2 gave a 'threading error.' (Like in 99% of my attempts to create DTMs.) So, back to my friends with another data set - a whopping 3,000 3D loci. With Landmark 9.0.1, absolutely NOTHING happened. No errors, no DTM. The point data set had even been carefully filtered not to have duplicate loci (a killer for the old DTM), but even that did not seem to help. Back to the drawingboard, guys, before you can extract a single pound of flesh from me!

I had an opportunity to briefly test the new DTM. Looks great, with all the new functionality - but it still does not actually work, at least with larger terrain models. This time I tried a terrain of 35,000 points (3D loci) and the results were disappointing. I was able to generate the model and even to modify settings, but there were several freezes. Slope analysis failed entirely. Well, let's say that I am not sure if it was always a freeze, since I only waited for 30 minutes or so for something to happen. I had tried the same data set in VW 8.5.2 with no success whatsoever - but a friend of mine used AutoCAD and a 3rd party add-on (can't remember the name) on a rather old, slow PC to generate a DTM for me. It took only a few minutes and the slope analysis a couple more. The latter also had fully customisable ranges (not just even 'steps') and accepted gradients as input, in addition of awkward angles. He was able to quickly and easily switch from a rectagular grid to triangular and back again, change the size of the grid etc. No freezes, no glitches. I got both a good mesh and a rendered raster image of the terrain in less than 30 minutes. Under the circumstances, I see little reason to get Landmark - instead, I obviously need to start to budget for a new PC and AutoCAD. The long wait was useless. Landmark 9.0.1, 130,000K allocated Mac OS 9.1G4/400, 256MB

I have written my own command (& tool as well) for this, Julian Carr has had it commercially available as apart of his utilities and I would not be surprised if there would be one in public domain - somewhere. Perhaps you might check the archives of the infamous mailing list, infested with censorship freaks and 'moderated' by someone whose signature only refers his religious convictions, not to anything related to design. It's a funny world out there! If you can't find anything, it is only a few lines of delphin-friendly, no-cholesterol & wheat-free VectorScript code. However, it totally eludes me why it is not a part of VW itself...

Before I tell a new prospective user to go ahead, can anyone verify that VW is capable of handling Chinese fonts? Mac platform preferred. What do they need? (on top of Australian MacOS)

Thanks, John, but I solved the problem with my own simplification routine which does not crash. It is a quick & dirty one, just deletes every second polygon. The one that used minimum distance ceased to work with VW 8 and I haven't had the time to rewrite the part in question. Of course, the problem & the poly were not really mine but rather those of a client. It is somewhat awkward (to say the least) that a design practice has to have a specialist consultant on stand-by for this kind of eventualities.

When trying to export an image file from VW 8.5.2, first I of course got these 'not enought memory' messages. Increasing memory allocation & reducing image size (below useful) finally helped - but the images exported don't have colours. PhotoShop interprets them to be in 'RGB colour' mode and the size also reflects this, but colours are entirely missing.

No, I haven't. With this web page set-up, that is an extra step entirely - can't just cc a message to bugsubmit. Also, I am not sure what happens to emails sent to you guys: a couple of weeks ago I received a reply from tech support saying that they only handle questions which quote the serial number. Fair enough, no problem - except that the question was posted 18 months ago. quote: Originally posted by Andrew Bell@NNA: Have you submitted it to bugsubmit@nemetschek.net? I don't see anything like this in the buglist. We can't fix it if we don't know it's broken. (If you have reported it, and it hasn't been properly recorded by us, my apologies.)

I have this polygon, well, in fact a polyline, coming from somewhere else, with 32571 vertices. With VW 8.5.2, its behaviour is erratic. When converted to a polygon, a third wont be able to be filled. When I simplify it by deleting every second vertex, it becomes manageable. However, with VW 9 nothing helps & nothing works. If I try to convert to a polygon, VW just dies. I guess this is progress - maybe junior users like myself don't just understand how things are.