Clint Alderman

Hi VW Tech/Engineers. We really do need someone to fill the huge void left with Jim's absence. The CPU and GPU venders keep pumping out devices, and it's not clear if VW makes use of the new tech. And if so, in what way? For example, hyperthreading. For years, I've been using a 6-core Xeon processor with hyperthreading. It looks like VW is using all 6, plus the logical 6 during renders. So, is Jim's comment about a 4-core limit still accurate? By my experience, it was never accurate. But who am I to really know? Considering a new PC with either a i7 9700K or i9 9900k. Would VW make use of the i9 hyperthread? What would be truly helpful in the System Resources is a list of the vendor technologies and whether or not VW uses them. Another example, one of Jim's emails mentioned that VW does not use SLI (not sure what that is, but it's suppose to be great) and other technologies. Still true. What else? Rather than have us search the forum for hardware info, which for the most part is user experiences, start a list and keep it current. Telling us to get a gaming rig is not very helpful. And gaming rigs are just plain ugly and unprofessional looking. Yes, that matters. We need better guidance. And, really, do we have to ask? Please, pretty please. Would you tell us what you know? What systems are VW staff using? What are their experiences? Thanks,

Thanks Grant. Good info!

Curious about this as well. I have a 3K, 2000x3000, 13" screen on a Microsoft Surface Book. My eyes aren't great now, but the clarity is really good and makes up for the small screen. I'm amazed how well I can work on it - almost as easily as my 1.9K, 1200 x 1920 , 24" monitor. I'm guessing a 4K, 24" or larger monitor would be better than my current monitor. Hoping someone with real world experience chimes in.

Good example of why it’s a best practice to have a user group to test review UX design. The icon is attractive. My first guess of it’s function would be a calendar wizard. It would take much to make this look more like a worksheet.

Agree. The outline style is just visually unprofessional. Worse, the outline style is confusing. When looking over the tools, I saw two logs next to one log, and wondered what the log icons were for... ugh, double lines and single lines. No. Don't do that. I really like using Vectorworks. Hats off for all the work to improve it. But the visual look warrants much more investment from the company. You do need to address it. The Mac GUI has always looked better than the Windows GUI, which I use. I wish we either had a Dark mode, or a White mode. This in the middle wishy washy blah Windos GUI is visually weak. I'm sure designing a new style guide for icons for a program of this size is hard. But just stop. Now. Take a break. Revert if possible. Then research or hire someone who know how to design professional GUI design. Start over. And why not ask for feed back on the design concepts before you implement the design? I don't think anyone would have voted for the VW2020 icon style. I'm wondering if you have competitors working on this. It's really not good. What would be helpful is to revert back to VW2019 and just improve the contrast of the pallets, especially the Object Info pallet. There is not enough contrast between the background and the buttons. Don't increase the outline contrast. That would add visual clutter. Either lighten the background, or darken the buttons. And why is there not a consist use of colors in all palettes? The Attribute palette uses the same color for the background and the buttons. I would prefer if the background were White rather than the light gray it is now. Sign me up if you want some feedback on a new GUI design. Sorry to rant on this one item. But if I didn't care, I wouldn't bother to watch things go from poor to worse.

Agree. The GUI design is headed in the wrong direction. Prefer VW2019 to VW2020.

Learning to use GIS has been on my to-do list for a few years. Excited to see how this new VW GIS feature performs! FYI, QGIS is a 17-year old open source GIS project. It's available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android(beta) and looks to be very capable. https://www.qgis.org/en/site/ I know ESRI dominates the GSI world. But, I wonder if QGIS might be useful to un-trap some of the resources in ESRI-world and become useful in VW. Kudos VW Developers!

Looks good. As the Teaser Tuesdays are demonstrated, can you list the device info: brand, cpu, gpu, ram, etc?

After restarting my PC, and reopeing VW, the callout works. After installing the 2019 SP 4, I opened a file to edit. I guess, after installing an update, you need to restart the computer.

Not working for me either. Well, everything works except no leaders. Even if you add a leader...no leader, only the text box shows. Same issue whether a new file from the Blank template, or in an existing file. Existing callout leaders look fine until you add a leader, then the original leader disappears.

The Sheet Grids are helpful for layout. But they don't usually need to be printed. Why not make them non-printing by default? If there is a need to print, have a per sheet toggle to print, and even a global toggle in the Publish Dialog to print or not. A related wish is for a non-printing class, and even a non-printing design layer. A similar concept is found in word processors for Formatting Marks, which even if visual, will not print.

Hi, I've been using the 4-bay Synology 414 NAS for about 5 years. Created project folders on the NAS and then mapped them as drives on my PC Desktop (cat5) and Notebook (wireless). Also put a VW Resources folder on the NAS so both machines link to the same folder. Configure that in VW Preferences. Been very pleased. At times, the notebook via wireless felt sluggish. Switched to a Synology router and have not had that issue since. The NAS has two RJ-45 network ports. If you have a managed switch (which I'm considering) it is supposed to eliminate data traffic bottlenecks...I think. Synology also has an app called Drive which works similar to Dropbox. This is handy for current projects that I can sync to my notebook and take it on the road and have access to the data on the notebook. If you're looking to buy, get the Plus Series: https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/series/plus

Not from this forum. I did search for Revit export to IFC and found some step by step guides. Haven’t asked the architect to try it yet.

Background info: An architect client uses Revit. They usually export to DWG and that works okay, but it seems to be somewhat of a hassle for them. Not sure why. They have shared some Revit files, but the import feature in VW 2017 and 2018 does not produce a usable VW file. I asked them to try an export to IFC. The didn't know how to do that... So, I'm looking for a best practice guide to give to them for exporting Revit to IFC. Request To Vectorworks: PLEASE publish a straightforward step by step process for a Revit user to export an IFC file which will be usable for VW. If this exists, I couldn't find it. A VW webpage dedicated to a Revit to IFC Workflow would be very helpful for VW users. We can send our Revit clients to it. This would also be a great marketing opportunity to Revit users who may be interesting in switching to VW. Thanks!

Look at the ink cartridges. HP are 30-38ml at $30-$35 each. $1.00/ml Canon are 130ml at $65 each. $0.50/ml Aside from any other feature comparison, Canon has a cheaper operating cost with a lot fewer cartridge changes. Several years ago I was comparing HP and Epson and chose Epson because of the ink system had larger cartridges and was far cheaper per ml. HP does make good printers with nice features, but every time I compare, it seems like they make printers to sell ink.

What is B- thing? I can’t figure out from the thread or searching the forums.

Jweston, see Uglycat's second post above.

Well done! Thanks for figuring this out. Very helpful.

That looks very nice. I’ve tried to do this and not getting the same results. 1. I’m getting a white border around all buttons and other elements. 2. The application title bar background color is not black or dark gray like your screen shot. Perhaps you could share your theme and color settings screenshots. I’ve tried multiple options and not making progress. Thanks!

Yes, good catch! I fixed it. Thanks!

The testing chart was very interesting. I tested my two rigs, one being the SurfaceBook w/ Performance Base. Computer Name Computer Model OS CPU CPU Cores(c)/Threads(t) CB R15- CPU Score CB R15 - CPU Score – Single Thread GPU CB RB15 – GPU Score OpenGL Performance Heaven Benchmark Score Cinebench Version PCT3500 Dell Precision T3500 Windows 10 64bit Xeon W3670 @ 3.20 GHz 6c / 12t 741 101 Quadro K5000 59.74 Good R15 PCSB- PE Microsoft SurfaceBook w/ Performance Base Windows 10 64bit Core i7-6600U @ 2.6 > 2.81 GHz 2c / 4t 318 136 GeForce GTX 965M 69.77 Good R15 This SurfaceBook runs VW and other apps great, and beats the T3500 for OpenGL renderin. For non-OpenGL rendering, I'll revert to the 6-core (12 logical processors) T3500 which is much faster.

+1 For MS OneDrive. And, longshot +1 for personal NAS cloud services such as Synology Cloud Services, https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/cloud_service. Oh, and BTW, really impressed with all the development and appreciate the Teaser Tuesdays. Good job you all!

Have you taken a look at Box Rendering devices. They have desktop or rack formats up to 3.7 GHz, 44 cores! http://www.boxx.com/products/rendering-and-simulation I've been eyeing either a new desktop or mobile workstation.

pma2011, thanks for doing this. I was wanting to make modifications as well and figured I would need to do something like this. And there you did it already. Great job. This looks like it will work. Though I'm still struggling attaching records. Sure wish VW would enable making modifications and applying text styles to the drawing label. It should not be this hard.

Trouble here too with VW 2013 64-bit. Looks to be graphics drivers. In my case, ADM V7900. I noticed others are using NVIDA. Would be interesting if it was a graphics driver with that brand also. Was using the latest ADM graphics driver (9.003.3.3) per WK recommendations. Was crashing opening a particular drawing and sometimes just starting VW. Switch to the current Windows driver using Device Manager and search. No VW crash, but there's a problem with this driver and Acrobat and Air being blurry. Installed an older driver from ADM website (FirePro_8.982.8.3). No VW crash. And no issues with Acrobat and Air being blurry. So far... VW has a lot of information about graphic card issues. But one still has to hunt and peck to find a suitable driver. I do wish that VW would work directly with ADM and NVIDA, like Adobe, AutoDesk and others do to make a performance driver.