Robert Anderson

Fast interactive is -sort of- like the SU interface. In SU you highlight and select faces (polys). In Vectorworks, when you point at a face in the drawing, the object that the face belongs to highlights. So it's a little different, a little more object-oriented. Also, in Sketchup, the x-ray is an alternate viewing mode that you choose and, once chosen, is the standard transparent-ish working mode. (Lots of visual clutter for a complex model.) Vectorworks solves this in a different way. By making the "x-ray select" as a key enabled mode, you can stay in your "natural" fast-interactive viewing mode and "drill down" instantly and momentarily, do the operation on the "hidden thing" and pop instantly back. I would say they're pretty different workflows.

We use Office 365 here at Nemetschek Vectorworks. I recommend you call Tech Support.

To understand the usefulness of the so-called "X-ray Select" you have to understand how the new "Fast Interactive 3D" viewing works. X-ray select is a complementary mode to Fast Interactive (FI). In some ways, the more fundamental (and useful) change is FI viewing. With FI viewing, all selection is done using familiar methods, but now face selection is enabled. You can select only objects whose faces (or partial faces) you can see. This is a little hard to explain with just words, but suffice it to say it's a much more intuitive and natural form of viewing / picking / editing. And it is fast--when you edit, scenes are rebuilt so much more efficiently, there's no need to ever work in 3D wireframe. All of which is great until you need to pick or snap to something that's hidden. That's where X-ray Select comes in. Just by holding down the x-ray key, you can now see and snap to anything (in wireframe) around the cursor and pick anything (using the edge-select mode). You don't have to change your tool or mode or whatever it was you were doing. Just hold down the B key, drill in, do your thing, then go back to what you were doing.

We never ever discuss unreleased products. I think this is pretty widely known.

Nomad, being a cloud app, is being updated all the time. It is not on a yearly cycle like Vectorworks versions. One of the things that Nomad does (that your standard cloud PDF-viewer does not) is, it updates all your viewports, and creates the PDF export in the cloud. So you don't have to. Imagine working up to the last minute to make some changes to a project, then just posting your Vectorworks file to the cloud, and when you get to your client's office to make the presentation, everything is ready and you just present on your iPad (or Android tablet.) Nomad is anything but "half-baked." Like any mobile app, it is undergoing constant change and improvement. I think that some of the 'competing' apps you describe don't even allow markup.

Use IfcFlowSegment. IfcElectricalSystem is used to describe the entire electrical system in your project. Nothing intuitive about IFC! For more information, (and probably more than you wanted to know,) see: http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/IFC2x3/TC1/html/index.htm

This is also trivial to do with the Create Roof from Walls command. Select the walls, run the command, give it the slope, overhang, and eave type settings, then it creates the roof. Click on the two roof hips that you want to be gables and set them to gable in the dialog that appears. Pretty simple.

Hm. I don't know what is happening here. The information is written by Vectorworks, here's an excerpt from a simple one-object IFC export from Vectorworks: #68= IFCELECTRICDISTRIBUTIONPOINT('1CM3yzf$P7TxtXY9Qadfr8',#11,'ObjectName','ObjectLongDescription','ObjectTypeDescription',#50,#67,$,.USERDEFINED.,$); Arguments 3,4, and 5 in the above IFC line delineate the name, description, and type of the IfcElectricDistributionPoint object. Vectorworks has been certified for its IFC 2x3 export by BuildingSMART international. I think this is just an issue of Solibri not showing the data in the place you expect. I looked at the IFC file exported by Vectorworks in another IFC browser, Tekla BIMsight, and the fields all showed up as entered. (See picture attachment.) It may be that the SMC application needs some configuration to show the fields you want?

Title blocks are just symbols with particular data attached. Choose one that has similar data to what you want, then find it in the Resource Browser and modify it to what you want.

You will need to transfer the license through Nemetschek. There is a standard legal process for transferring a Vectorworks license. Please contact our Customer Service.

There is no "Slab Area", but there is "area()" which works with a slab object. Please review the worksheet in the very first 'quantify.VWX' document I posted above. (I fear we may be discussing in circles?)

BuildingDesignConsultant, Vectorworks has slabs, beams, and columns. All allow concrete (as well as other) materials. I assume you're referring to Extrude Along Path by "EAP", but there were no such elements in the examples I gave. ???

See the sub-topic "Clipping a Slab" under the "Editing Slabs" topic in your online Vectorworks help. I just clipped out the voids from the lower-most slab component. You can clip away from or add to any component of the Slab object. Very flexible.

Khurshid, Vectorscripts are interpreted, not compiled. Vectorscripts are very powerful for a scripting language. With them you can create menu commands, plug-in objects, or tools. If you want to go beyond the Vectorscript environment, and would prefer to work in a c++ environment, we also have an SDK which give you all the same API access to Vectorworks as Vectorscript, plus of course the ability to create more complex plug-ins that can take advantage of anything the OS has to offer. For more information on the SDK, see: http://developer.vectorworks.net/

Yes, this is a bug in AutoDesk's IFC importer. It is proper IFC (as attested by Solibri.) We have been in contact with AutoDesk's engineering team and have made them aware of the problem.

alfie, please submit the file as a bug file attached to a bug report (see "Bug Submit" link at upper right of this page.)

alfie, try deleting and re-creating the section viewport.

Don't know what you mean by "thinkable". (Depends on your imagination!) But basically, the answer is "yes".

Vincent, I know this sounds rather simplistic or perhaps even disingenuous, but the latest is the "Paste Function..." command. Just type the equals sign in a worksheet cell, then choose the Paste Function... command in the worksheet menu. You will get an annotated list of functions.

Justin, thinking a little more about this issue, an alternative way to solve it is with a "retaining wall" wall style, not too different from the "stem wall" wall style shown in the files below. This way you can use the Length() function to return linear quantities of the retaining wall and ComponentVolume() to return the total yards / M3 of concrete.

Justin, Wall and slab objects don't have PIO records because they are not plug-ins, but internal objects. I realize this does not address the consistency issue you ask for. Slab styles are not a true 'enumeration' (fixed-list popup value) even though they are presented that way for convenience in the mode bar. For walls and slabs in particular, we introduced some new worksheet functions at the same time we introduced the Slab tool that you might find useful: ComponentArea(); ComponentName(); ComponentVolume(); These will work in both worksheet-style and database-style sheets to report on the quantities of walls or slab components. See the VWX file and illustration below for an example. Hope this is helpful. Feel free to email me directly if you have questions or want to discuss further.

When someone says, "this is a known problem", a red flag goes up in my brain. 99 times out of 100, such problems are NOT known to our Engineering staff because someone has not submitted a bug for it. So it is with this case. Now, for this one, I've submitted a bug for it, but please, please, anyone reading this: Submit bugs (there's a link just to the right on this page) when you encounter an error, "known problem" or otherwise. Many of these things are easy to fix when we know about them.

Hakman, please submit a bug for this, and please make sure to include your corrupted file. (See link at right.)

Jonathan, I have reviewed this bug and it is marked as fixed, however, the fix will not be available until the next SP release of Vectorworks 2012. Sorry you still have to wait. Feel free to contact me off-list if you want to discuss further.

Pedro, in your case, you can ignore the software updates recommendation. Just make sure you describe which version you are using in your report. Thanks!