Samuel Derenboim

Good afternoon everyone, I have a fairly serious situation when i recently decided to go about creating an existing 5 story building in vectorworks. The model is pretty large, approximately 405 megabytes. It contains 7 floor plates - including a cellar and a roof plan, but other than that it isn't that complex. I did include plumbing and sinks in 3d as well as 3d cabinets and countertops for kitchens on most of the floors. The existing building is a substantially a brick building, so i decided to use a brick hatch and texture for the surface perimeter. the opengl 3d model is pretty responsive, it takes a little bit of time to preload the 3d elements, but after that its very easy to navigate. The problem is this - the wireframe renderings for elevations take extremely long, in fact impossibly long to render and i cannot figure out why. In previous versions i haven't had this problem on 4 - 5 story buildings, but i also didn't have as many objects in it either. My question is this - could this be a memory leak? or just incorrect method of approaching the project? or perhaps not enough hardware specs? Listing my hardware specs below: Windows 7 sp1 Intel Core i7 - 5820k @ 3.3 ghz (can overclock to 4) Ram - 16 Gb - Dual channel ddr @ 1200 mhz Motherboard - Asrock x99 Extreme 4 Graphics - Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 - 6 gb Main HD - crucial 250 bx100 ssd drive (operating system, temp storage) Storage HD - Seagate 2 tb harddrive - 7200 rpm If its hardware - what do you suppose the bottleneck is ? Hint - could it be the ram? I checked the usage while rendering - and it jumped to 16 gb (my max). But does it really need that much ram in order to render line renderings from a BIM model? and 2 - why does it preload ALL the objects in back of the facade when they're not shown? Isn't that a bit counter productive? (at least it seems that way - from a logical standpoint) I could post the file - but let me know, its 400 mb Thank you in advance everyone !

Thank you Alan! I'm looking the marionette, very interesting! Just need to convert metric to imperial units! In fact, I'm currently experimenting with it now. I still don't have my head fully wrapped around marrionnette, but i will keep at it! This is an example of a roof that's fairly complex but that's fairly easy to create out of 3d polylines. Converting it to an actual roof is very tedius. Any suggestions? test roof.vwx

+1 !!!

something interesting - why do Sketchup models when imported with sloped faces can be easily converted to sloped roof objects? But we can't easily do that within vectorworks itself?

For classes it could make sense to do it by class independently. But you're right, it can get complex if somehow you wanted to create separate textures for plug-in styles and still maintain classes for 2d line type elements. The only way to do that is to have 2d elements and 3d elements controlled independently. That seems like it might be a total overhaul to the plugin objects themselves.

yes, that and how would you call out the attachment element of the structural member to 'attach' and 'move with' a node object, or a symbol for instance. Regarding the example file - I will upload shortly with screenshots : )

Well by class is one of the preferences. You can also set line types by object or plugin style as well. So if you were to take the custom texture approach, force the plugin style to use line types by object. Doesn't seem that difficult of a method to address coding wise (I'm guessing) because not too many parameters would need to be changed or overhauled. Just a simple conditional statement.

Any way to just generally convert a polygon into a roof face without specifying slope? or any other information? Lets say you have a 3d polygon with a series of sloping edges. My goal is to extract the sloping edges from that model - and create them with roof faces in their place. Any way to quickly do that? The only work around i see is to create a series of roof / facets in a 3d geometric object and then use shell solid tool to give it a thickness. It's crude, but very quick and effective.

Yea i was referring to members that would be sloped. This would be very effective for truss type structures - where you would have a class for the web, the top chord and the bottom chord connected to lets say a column top and bottom. By moving the column, this would in turn move those elements on different classes. Is there a way to have a marionette be coded for members attach to something like a node?

@Matt Panzer - I know, but it becomes a little redundant with the amount of classes one can have for every texture. What if i have 5 different window types with different textured frames / glazing. Wouldn't it be more productive to set the textures in the plug-in style rather than create 5 different classes for each one of those elements? Essentially ill have a class for every different window type, personally don't think it would make sense productivity wise. The other way to do it is by object - give a specific object a whole texture and select all of those particular objects by special selection. But it's still cumbersome and counter intuitive. Perhaps this can be a wishlist item?

I've noticed that the new beam tool can attach to girder elements and such, which is great. I did have a question though - the attachment is lost whenever there are beams at different heights. Is that meant to be like this? Also, any plans for column elements to snap to beam elements such as this in the future planned? Thanks in advance!

Good afternoon all, Was wondering, is it possible to assign door / window texture by plug-in style? not by class? This would be especially useful if you have one class that controls windows, but several window types. Was wondering how everyone handled that situation?

Has anyone had the problem of going over the limit of describing a Walltype in IFC records that are longer than the character limit for the description? I have been having trouble with that lately, and have been creating separate records to fully verbally describe the condition of the wall section.

That's a very good point! Never tried showing spaces in section!

From my experience notes and annotation still have to have an IFC record in order for them to be exported, and even then i'm not sure if they would be exported via geometry or not. I have a lot of experience just annotating on the design layer that the model is located (which is my mistake) because they end up showing up on the elevations or sections if the planar objects check box is marked off. You make a very good point about putting them on a separate design layer if you aren't very strict in putting the notes in the right annotation layer - especially if you have your own classing system for notes or elements on that sheet. - just make sure they're higher than the story you're annotating so that they don't appear behind or below the elements that are drawn above grade level (which is usually default for annotation level) so you have to assign the design layer to have the same story that the design layer is located. This is something I will do in the future as well.

Yes I do. There are two ways to do it. Either you work with both layers and classes, or separate them into different design layers. My method : Usually my classes for annotation start with a A- (whatever the annotation layer is) or and 2d line work. I put the prefix BLDG-.... for classifying BIM components. The great thing in VW is that it groups all classes by the first hyphen...In other words A- has a triangle next to it that opens all the other classes below it. Try to add a few classes A-Anno A-Linework A-Viewport Youll notice they're all grouped under A. Just make sure you have the hyphen in there, no other separator will work. To make a long story short, when referencing them in the sheet layer viewports, just turn A- on or off under the classes category. Now theres a new thing - You can have 2 or 3 design layers for the same floor level (I had trouble in 2016 though, in 2017 it works) That means if you have multiple split levels, or just an annotation design layer, you can put all of that information in there. Or better yet, just reference the BIM file in another vectorworks file, and annotate there. It eliminates your worry about having a single editable file and second it allows you to annotate in the design layer viewports. One common thing though....When doing sections and elevations, unfortunately there is no workaround sheet layer viewport annotation. This is the ONLY exception to the rule. If you were to reference the section or elevation in a design layer view, it wouldn't work and as a result would tesselate the model - UNLESS you provide annotation in the design layer view that is aligned to the plane of the viewport. Hope this works. Let me know if you need an example file for your info. Sam

That would definitely make the task easier or at least mass import similar to dxf / dwg import

Hahaha, both of you are great. Thank you both for your insight in this matter. After playing around a bit, i notice that can't do the same if i set the input parameter to a dimension function. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Marissa, Thank you so much, that looks awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That looks exactly what i wanted to do ! Jim, your method only works with lines and arcs, Marissa made it possible with any polyline! Marissa, did you code the divide curve tool? or does it come standard inside vw?

Yea, at first it was made into a .pts file, which took ages to import into vectorworks. Then I found a workaround that allows .pts files to be converted to .xyz files and substantially reduce the size based on the new format. .Xyz is then imported into Vectorworks quite easily and quickly, and the model is then reduced from 1.2 billion to 300,000,000 (i believe this is the latest maximum) either that or 500,000,000. Thats why i was asking a series of questions regarding extraction of point clouds into isolated points than can then be converted into 2 dimensional geometric cross sections. slicing 20 or 30 slices of geometry would allow for lofting a surface of the model (say if it is a very complex shape like a vaulted ceiling or something). That is my latest set of experiments. Currently learning the subdivision tool, hoping that could help speed up the process

In 2016 version we weren't able to isolate any points, which made it a bit cumbersome to do. What i did was I created a design layer viewport from another layer and simply overlayed that section / level from the data. Normally it would be easy on a building with a single level, however, the building that I am building the plans for has 3 buildings and 5 or 6 split levels per section, so isolating different sections of the building and differently levels was a little harder. I was just wondering in the future if it would be possible to extract certain parts of the mesh cloud into points, that way it would much easier to model a very complex geometry, like a curved/vaulted ceiling inside a historic theater.

The size of my point cloud is approximately 1.2 billion points. In Vectorworks it however only imports 30,000,000 i believe. I'm just thinking it would be much easier modeling the model from scratch. I already created a good part of the plans in 2d using Vectorworks, which already is a life saver!!! Next step is recreating BIM How many points do you usually deal with Jim when meshing? Do you also generate normals? Or do you just export the normals included with the .pts file / .xyz file?

Hi Alan, Thank you for responding! But if you want to organize your document after you created the worksheet, wouldn't make sense for the document to look for it in that new folder? or is there another way?

Perhaps I'm not aware, but I don't think there is a way to add multiple nurbs surfaces into one monolithic modifiable surface without creating a geometric object? (this is what happens when you compose those surfaces) common workaround is to use the divide by distance tool and then redoing the nurbs surface, however the process is quite cumbersome of redoing the entire surface if you have a lot of segments. Just wanted to put that out there.

Has anyone tried modeling a point cloud object? Any suggestions on workflow?