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Sean Flaherty

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Everything posted by Sean Flaherty

  1. Mike M. had posted in another thread yesterday that the Vectorworks wikipedia page has been cut back to just a few sentences...even the version history (year released, major features, etc) has been removed as being "brochure text." We've made some attempts to get it added back but we're being wikibullied as not bringing a neutral point of view. Apparently even I'm not a credible enough source for the version history. I had fleshed out this page a few years ago from my old notebooks and manuals and it stood for a couple years but since November there seem to a group of watchers intent on keeping the article very small. If any of you are more savvy (or more neutral about wikipedia and would like to contribute to the Vectorworks wikipedia article, your help is appreciated.
  2. I added Vectorworks to the list of Parasolid applications on Wikipedia. I'm surprised nobody did this already
  3. Thanks for taking the time to detail your thoughts! This gives us a good picture of what you think works well and what we should be improving for the future.
  4. I think maybe the term "design phase" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone here. For me, this phase isn't just conceptual design but continues all the way through delivery of construction documents. Your wishes for more detail about how the building is put together structurally would be included in a design-phase application. When I talk about construction BIM, I mean the phase of the project that includes construction sequencing, change and defect management, progress information to stake-holders, etc. My general feeling is that we're better off partnering to solve these needs rather than building them into VectorWorks itself. This is definitely a fast-moving change in the industry, however, so we're still considering how to best move forward here.
  5. All 12 licenses with a dongle are cross-platform, regardless of whether they are upgrade or new. I just meant that dongle licenses are different than non-dongled ones.
  6. Chris, Thanks for the feedback. So what would you like to see coming out of VectorWorks that you don't currently?
  7. Alan, This is correct, you can use the serial number for both; the license is slightly different for Series B licenses.
  8. My intention with those comments in Architosh was to reflect the fact that VectorWorks remains a design-phase application. Construction management and post-construction management are very different disciplines which fall only peripherally on our future path. In fact, most of the really futuristic BIM stuff you see is mostly design phase. I still hear from architects and design/build firms plenty of wishes that make me think nobody has "solved" the design needs yet so we'll keep heading in that direction. This does include more and more detailed information about the construction technique inside VectorWorks, but not the construction process itself. Real-estate management, construction phasing, defect management, these are all interesting areas we rely on other applications to solve. Maybe further down the road, these will be an expected part of design applications and we may need to reconsider this. I'd be interested to hear your comments. We always walk a fine line with VectorWorks to keep adding power without overwhelming you with complexity.
  9. I think mw's right about it being confusing. If you use nemetschek.com as a guide, we don't promote VectorWorks anywhere The websites are the results of subsidiaries and channels working to promote themselves, but not doing a very cohesive job of it. I'm trying to get the nemetschek.net site more gobal so hopefully you'll have a single starting point for getting information about VectorWorks around the world. I'll also see what I can do about nemetschek.co.uk, another subsidiary of NAG.
  10. Actually, we've recently made a important change in policy for customers using VectorWorks 12 with dongles. These licenses will ship as cross-platform licenses so that they can be installed on either machine as long as you have a USB-HASP4 dongle (the purple ones).
  11. A short training movie for live sections was posted to our knowledgebase today for those looking for more information on how this feature works: http://kbase.nemetschek.net/index.php?ToDo=view&questId=73&catId=19
  12. We have given up our membership in the flat earth society. VectorWorks Landmark 12 supports SHP files and geo-referenced coordinate import and export.
  13. Mike, Section viewports must be an orthogonal view. We're pulling together some more detailed information about live sections now, I'll post again when it's available on the web page.
  14. Tom, As Eddie suggests, calling NNA or e-mailing them (sales@nemetschek.net) is the best way to get pricing now. The e-store should also be updated in the next few days. Regards, Sean
  15. Some clarifications on mw's post: 1) VW 11.0 was launched in the UK in April of 2004. 5) VectorWorks is very actively promoted in the UK and the rest of Europe. In architecture, we believe we are the #2 CAD product by units in the UK and not only appear at most major trade shows but also have been doing joint technology conferences with RIBA and Apple. I think you'll find the same to be true in most of the larger European markets as well (we're still new in eastern Europe). 6) Live sections are really live, you can think of them as a viewport that automatically cuts the model it is displaying. In the UK, you can see this all live on November 16th in London and other parts of the UK over the two weeks folloing. CU can provide more details or you should be receiving a mailing shortly about the events. I'll see if I can't get more information about live sections posted to the web page. I'm not sure I understand your concern about Live Sections being "the only real extra" to 12 as the list of new features and improvements with this version is greater than any other release we've had. Radiosity, Navigation palette, improved door/window/stair/cabinet objects, wall styles balance out a set of improvements that tackles many of the top wishes from our customers world-wide. We've got some things like rotatable coordinate systems that still need to be tackled, of course, but this release really improves a wide variety of product areas. Regards, Sean
  16. NNA is committed to the Mac platform and to supporting the new Intel machines that Apple will be introducing. Right now, however, we can't offer any real details since Apple is still in the very early stages of providing information to developers. We have staff out at WWDC investigating what this will entail and Apple has already offered their support to us as they have on a number of recent projects that we've undertaken. I don't think users buying G5 machines now have much to fear since Apple and its developers have a large installed base of those machines that they'll need to support during some period of overlap. I know NNA (then Diehl Graphsoft) continued to support 68K machines for many years after the release of the PowerPC-based machines. We'll continue to keep you updated with our plans and progress in this area, but I wouldn't expect a lot of news until the beginning of next year. Right now we're still focusing on adding the improvements you've been requesting and will be integrating the new processor into our plans in the coming months.
  17. quote: Originally posted by Shaun: Sean: I use renderworks and I wasn't survuyed so I think that survey was directed towards a certain group of people and wasn't diverse enough (I could be wrong). Shaun, Now is as good a time as any. What are the three top ways we could improve RenderWorks for your use? Thanks, Sean
  18. Kurt, The LWA texture format doesn't work for us because of licensing reasons; Lightworks requires that the texture not be reusable except as a separate LWA file which we are not allowed to distribute (only the creator can). Instead we've decided to outsource creation of VectorWorks-format texture resources ourselves to make sure we have the content our customers need. 10.5 and 11.0 both added many new textures developed by expert customers in the industry. 5 days for a full rendering application with API for two platforms?! Sometimes the marketing teams of the technology firms push a strong story out there, just like Apple kept telling customers developers could make their apps native in "just a few weeks". There is a reason that you can't buy nice stand-alone renderers for $200 that have all the capabilities you need. Radiosity is not part of the AEC pack. We asked RenderWorks customers before we started 11 what they wanted to improve and the answers were pretty consistent: 1) Faster rendering 2) Easier texture mapping and 3) Better texture content 4) Radiosity. The first two items were by far the most requested and were driven by the goal to generate presentation renderings more quickly. These two areas were where we spent the most effort in 11 and will likely to continue to put effort in future versions. We also feel that Artist RenderWorks rendering provides a tool to allow presentations much more easily since a high level of detail is not necessary in the scene...the more photorealistic the scene, the more time is necessary to make it look right. And yes, mosaic comes along for the ride with the other more useful modes. Radiosity gives the most realistic results but also is quite an extensive project for several reasons. It nearly requires a full physical lighting implementation. Good implementations also don't do it as just a post processing implementation since it is so slow, you need to support interactive refinement. Finally you MUST tune the entire process perfectly for speed, since a bad Radiosity solution can be disastrously slow. We're also concerned that many of the people who ask for this have never used it, they only know that it is the most accurate. Will their first tech call be to complain that it took 5 hours to render their scene? So this remains on our roadmap for the future, but our current strategy has been to make the basic elements of rendering highly usable for customers and then move on to the more advanced functionality. Regards, Sean
  19. quote: Originally posted by Kurt Magness: And no I do not write C code but I posed the question to Andrew Bell at NNA before: "How much more time does it take to write in renderwrks versus Lightworks LWA ?" What do you mean by "write in Lightworks LWA"? Do you mean the LWA texture format? Regards, Sean
  20. Jesper, If the light on the dongle is not lit, that usually means that the driver is not installed. When you archive and install Panther, I don't think the dongle drivers are copied to the new Panther installation. If you reinstall VectorWorks, it will install the dongle drivers. You can also install just the driver from Aladdin (you want the unified installer): http://www.ealaddin.com/support/hasp/enduser.asp We have tested Panther with our dongles and found them to be compatible so this should be just a driver installation problem. Regards, Sean [ 11-14-2003, 09:43 AM: Message edited by: Sean Flaherty ]
  21. Chris, When you archive and install, I don't think the dongle drivers are copied to the new Panther installation. If you reinstall VectorWorks, it will install the dongle drivers. You can also install just the driver from Alladin (you want the unified installer): http://www.ealaddin.com/support/hasp/enduser.asp We have tested Panther with our dongles and found them to be compatible so this should be just a driver installation problem. Regards, Sean
  22. akiwi, VectorWorks 10.5 introduced a new feature to address this kind of driver-specific problem: raster printing. When you use raster printing (which is slower than the normal vector printing), VectorWorks produces the entire image itself and sends it the printer like a hi-res photograph (to gloss over a lot of details) which makes sure that it looks identical to what you see on screen. You might try running this update in your tests with raster printing and see if you get the results you want. Best Regards, Sean
  23. quote: Originally posted by Chris Manus: I hope you're also focusing on radiosity and a quicker rendering engine? Regards Chris, We consider speed to be the higher priority of these two items. With VectorWorks 8, 9, and 10 there has been steady increases in speed which will continue into future versions. Radiosity is important to users who need the absolute best quality in rendering but for the near term we plan to focus on the basics: speed, texture content and placement, and reliability.
  24. Thanks for the feedback. Do you have a preference as to how they're organized? I'm wondering whether you would like one big texture file that you can add as a favorite or do you prefer them broken into several files by material class (metals, wood, etc.)? Thanks, Sean
  25. We're evaluating the quality and selection of textures that we supply in RenderWorks. I'd be interested to hear what textures you feel are missing in our current textures or any comments about the quality and organization of the textures that come with RenderWorks. Regards, Sean
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