ErichR

Our office uses mostly AutoCad, and has one VW 12.5 license, which I use. There is a movement, initiated by a consultant, to switch the whole office to Archicad. I would like to be able to intelligently discuss our options, and to speak up in behalf of VW, but am unfamiliar with the capabilities of cad apps other than VW. Any comments would be appreciated.

I have been finding it increasingly difficult to import AutoCad drawings, including text, even though it might originally appear in Model Space. I have tried multiple explodes in the AutoCad original. This problem occurs when there are no AutoCad xrefs. Is this because text could be placed in Autocad Paper Space? If so, how can it be imported to VW?

In 12.5.0: Create a symbol with two windows with six inches or so between them. Make a 3D louver 42"x16" and center this between and below the two windows. Make a new symbol of this combination. Insert the new symbol in a wall. Look at a rendered elevation of the wall. It will have diagonal lines between the bottom of the louver and the lower, ourside corners of the windows. Within the triangles created there will be a void in the wall.

I'm interested if anyone has a way to use a BIM system (VectorWorks or otherwise) from schemaic design through construction documents.

Robert, thanks.

Upon using a Lintel window Part that is wider than the window opening, the elevation view of the window shows the wall to be cut at an angle from the lintel to the sill. This is really yucky-looking and makes the lintel part unusable, unless there is a setting that allows the wall to close in around such lateral projections that are wider than the overall window width.

The file I am using, 110MB, crashes when I add a class, and when I modify a symbol. It also crashes when deleting a layer, and when deleting a dimension from the drawing. I exported to v11.5..., and the same behavior occurs. Any ideas why this might be happening? Is it the size of the file? I've had problems like this before, and I recall that these occurances might be associated with file size. Also, could this result from the number of polylines or curves in the drawing? This is an XP machine, 2GB RAM.

I have a VW drawing that has .dwg survey imports.. This must be where the 266 symbols came from that all say 'Proxy" in some form or another. It would be great to eliminate these, but deleting just one of them causes a VW crash. Is this a VW bug?

Naturally, I did that - found Section Line Instances in online help before posting this question. Lots and lots of words, but not a lot of help. Spent the better part of an hour going around in circles. Thought that someone out there would be able to answer the question, which, I think, should have a simple answer.

In experimenting with the Create Section Viewport command, I was pleasantly surprised to be easily able to section the 3D elements of a plan and have them recorded as descrete viewports on a sheet layer. However, the section lines do not show up in the viewport of the plan where the section lines were drawn. Is there a way to do this?

I would love to get rid of it. I'll email it to you.

By using a process of elimination, the errant object, which caused Renderworks crashing, turned out to be an extrusion. Upon this discovery, I remembered having a similar problem before. Double-clicking on an extrusion revealed the 2D object that was used to make the extrusion. It was a polyline. There is some incompatibility between polylines and extrusions, at least as far as Renderworks is concerened. Simply converting it to a polygon didn't work: the resulting shape was divided into many polygons. However, using the polyline as a template and cliping a new one from a rectangular surface, a two-step positive to negative to positive process, I was abale to produce an acceptable polygon and then to extrude it. So, it appears that renderworks can't handle an extrusion made from a polyline, but it can process one made from a polygon. Wonder why this is, and why there doesn't seem to be any documentation covering this. I've wasted untold hours without knowing what the problem was or what I was looking for.

I apologize. Renderworks works fine on an earlier iteration of the same file (with v12.0.1). So, there is something wrong with the newer file. I aborted the FTP to Katie, because it was taking over an hour, and it seems I should probably try to find the problem myself. Thanks anyway.

I turned off the image prop class, since I am not able to get them to render properly with Custom Renderworks, so zero instances. FTP would be better, since it's 100MB. Thanks.

The silence is deafening. Renderworks (Final Quality)doesn't work for me. Is it broken? Is there a bug?

George, I didn't create the image props. They came from the VW library. The Model>Create Image Prop dialog box, for editing an image prop, does not appear to be intended to be used for editing and is confusing and was sort of dead-ended when attempted. Dave, Why is recursion levels an issue with Custom Renderworks, and not with standard Renderworks? I set it to 20 recursions and still the image prop rectangles are opaque. This is beginning to be a really, really clutsy workaround for something that shouldn't be an issue. Again, is it a Renderworks bug that causes VW to crash? If so, will it be fixed? So far, I can render (only with Custom Renderworks), but not using the image props the way they came with VW.

Grant, WXP OS Turns out that one of the limitations of Custom Renderworks is that it puts an ugly opaque color rectangle into all of the image props. I had replaced all of the trees with image props,in order to reduce file size and, maybe, ease processing issues, and now not only will it not render with standard Renderworks, the image props are all unacceptable. Fooled with all of the image prop variables, and their class color assignments to no avail. So, the bottom line is that RW doesn't appear to work, but it's curious that we don't see a lot of similar posts.

Sorry, there IS a NURBS option. In addition, I got an out of memory message (4GB available) when invoking the Convert Copy to Lines command. This isn't Renderworks, but it is part of the rendering function. Again, this crashing with Renderworks does appear to be a bug. Is the Convert Copy to Lines problem also a bug?

Dave, 1. Custom Renderworks works, so this is a welcome workaround. 2. There doesn't appear to be a NURBS option. 3. Fit to Objects does not zoom out, with all selected. 4. Then this is a bug with Renderworks? 5. Are there fewer capabilities (NURBS, for instance) with Custom Renderworks than with Renderworks?

Both Fast and w/ Shadows work as expected.

In v12.0.1, VW crashes when doing a final quality Renderworks rendering. Settings are for moderate levels of detail, at 72 DPI. I thought the problem might be mitigated with a reduction of the rendering window, or lowering of the DPI setting, but this does not help; VW still crashes. Also, when restricting the perspective window (this is a model layer with layer links), the image, or parts of it disappear. Seems like these are serious bugs, but if I'm overlooking something, I would appreciate being set on the right course.

Christiaan, I totally agree with you on this one. The window and door tools border on the counterproductive. Not waht we bought VW for.

I remember when you could buy all of these in plastic. The application of French curves to CAD drawings implies a connection between manual drafting and CAD that could contribute to creativity. It would be intresting to learn the history of the Frrench curve.

But what's their motivation to stay in 'business?'

Obvious antiestablishmentarian logic notwithstanding, I have no love of Symantec, but other logic would tell me that $ motivate, and the more $ the more motivation. Very capitalistic and very American. MW: Clam, Norton, or otherwise, have you tried an antivairus fix? Have you contacted Nate at NNA directly?