unearthed

I do a lot of site planning (planning as in scenarios, big P Planning, and very large sites, km's across) with vw, but tend to work largely in 2D and without using the terrain tools*. I do 3D-heavy tasks in QGIS and Sketchup, faster that way. In NZ publicly-funded spatial data is available online (mainly thru a single database) as either dwg/shp so is easy to import. *Some of my reason for this is that the Property Line Tool lacks most functionality and un-customisable and not fit for purpose. Over the years I've put multiple entries on the wishlist but have seen no improvement. A big one is topological editing which I can kludge in Sketchup and is straight-forward with QGIS, another is poor annotation e.g. square metres, usually written as m² appears as S.M. (so ignorant that it's embarrassing) - yet there's no way to change it. The most recent (its date is telling; an indication no one's using it) Property Line discussion below:

I often see drawing files where people have drawn things that no one will ever either see of need, hours are often spent/lost trying to draw 'reality' when a model is only ever a model: a representation (to a pre-defined level) of reality.

Not really a full answer to doing everything in vw but I use QGIS to prepare all gis data for vw, QGIS is a real GIS, vw IMO will never be; horses for courses really. QGIS also enables me to reduce size of/simplify data prior to import.

@E|FA Thanks, Hadn't noticed that, the dropdowns with settings add a lot of utility:

Just found this, may be useful for programmer types to chase up way to extract raster/ image information from OLE files; python-oletools: a package of python tools to analyze OLE files, apparently partly written for forensics on MS files but appears to be applicable to OLE's in general.

At the top of my view there are ~10 pinned pinned posts, the content is not useful to me and it pushed new question to page two. Is there a way to not show pinned posts?

I was going to say just use your local council's GIS or the national data set, but thought I'd better look to see first. What a terrible, disorganised country you have there! I thought it'd be like NZ where everything's centralised into ~1800 layers and you can select layers (including aerials down to 10cm res or finer), draw a window and download everything inside it complete with a .jgw for the aerial, but no, it's a mess. Ah here it is - https://magic.defra.gov.uk/MagicMap.aspx - not too shabby, but hard to see how to download other than their print fcn. But better than other offerings and relatively useful without paying. There may be some free data here - https://osdatahub.os.uk/plans, but no aerials, lidar though bylook of it, which I find > useful than aerials a lot of the time. Yeah, .jpw/.tfw is well-supported by VW.

Shannon, Are you still seeking this? I may know someone who has a copy.

I'm still using vw2012 so can't open but can you tell us something about your file. e.g what is the data complexity problem? What is your import data/where is it from? Sometimes the original data are at too fine a detail and need reducing in various ways.

@Cleo_Designs I'm using a stone-age version of vw but depending on how complicated your .skp is, the normal route for me is convert to dwg/dxf in sketchup and import the file.

Not an answer but my feeling is very few people are using vw for tower projects (even short towers), also the number of users for a whole range of use cases is (I think) vanishingly small as many questions go unanswered.

Like Jeff set bk based on number of operations. All bks go into a folder with my jobs folder and get backed up daily. VW backup folder runs at about 6Gb. When I send pdf/s or whatever to clients I save a vwx copy to a named folder, very useful when you want to step back a decade when something reawakens.

I'm with @jeff prince re this being a valuable tool for terrain and hardscape and services. For plants nah. I tend to design planting by hand (even very large ones) watercolor/colour pencil (gives me time to really think deeply about the effect I want to produce etc.), show that to the client and then cad it up to work out numbers, then write a spec/speak to contractor about pattern | ° of randomness. It might be useful to guide ideas about visualising plant mixes, degrees of randomness though, and I currently do this using R or sketchup to generate a selection of random patterns as a starter for a hand-drawing base. The thing about drawing (and showing) random planting patterns is that they are just pretty; planting them requires coordinates/plan for every plant - ok for a 100 plants, less useful for 20000+.

@J.P. That's usually coz an object is owned by a class that is switched off. If you put your problem in your subject line and edit your profile with your vw version you'll increase likliehood of replies.

Yes, Rhino+Grasshopper - Rhino's weakness seems to be poor/clunky layout/pagemaking and the lack of a spreadsheet (altho' Tabl looks like a solution to live link with Excel). Certainly the video shows some problems being solved; pseudo-random circle-packing, tiling solutions. Olin is a good pedigree anyway so prob. a nice product.

@michaelk HI Michael, Would be able to convert that hatch package to Version 2012 for me, apparently they're very very nice hatches. Cheers NIgel

@zoomer Yeah, I mean that really is selfish, people do stuff when they're students that they can't access when in practice.

Is there any way people can be forced to enter their VW version number?, I can help some more modern version users but with no version I'm averse to clicking thru. Also require a subject line that is meaningful and not the person's name or vague statements, cause 'Subject: Jim Jones' is not gonna get you a lot of reads!

If you load it here and add your VW version number I'm sure someone would convert it for you, or convert it to dxf or whatever.

I run my classes in a hierarchy associated with my layer names. I design landscapes, mainly for farms, industrial and commercial as well as some residential so each site highly custom (like Rossford ^) Layers 1 Legal svcs trees and top 2 Topo exist_features 3 Water 4 Arch 5 Hardscape 6 Plants 7 Traces Guides Underlays 8 Aerials 9 Sheet Classes are like; 1 legal-boundaries_Surveyor [and usually a surveyor code and file date] 2 topo-proposed 3 streams, drains, wells, springs... 3 arch-build footprint 4 arch-footprint 6-plants_-typeA [often have 10-15 types with worksheet doing plant mix calcs for each] 9 sheet-viewport I find having to only remember 9 numbers as basis for classing is quick and simple. I don't stick to it like a religion - but it's a useful framework. I try and limit classing to 2 levels, and for some items like trees use an empty class that owns all classes in hierarchy so I can toggle individual elements off - or turn all trees off; 1 trees-00 SymHolder 1 trees-00 SymHolder_Exist_trees 1 trees-02 CODE 1 trees-03 graphical 1 trees-04 circle.planting 1 trees—05 10yr dripline 1 treesfls mature dripline 1 trees-baseGraphical 1 trees-3D [for interworking with sketchup] When you have hundreds of trees, many with different type of protection orders, and other variables this saves a lot of time, and helps remove map clutter.

@Luciole Design Agree totally, it's only useful if your work from a small palette and only do small sites (else the sheer line number in all the objects makes file too heavy). I've never bothered and just use worksheets reading from colour-coded / classed polygons, plus a few pretty objects where absolutely necessary.

@Entire Leaves You are not an idiot. VW has an often very confusing interface, is patchily documented and highly-counter-intuitive. Unfortunately it is one of best best tools for landscape architecture - arguably the best for what I do.

@Luciole Design What other CAD software do you have? I use https://www.glamsen.se/BricsTurn.htm which uses autocad or Bricscad as an engine, I have Bricscad and BricsTurn does a good job

I don't work directly with .dwg much nowadays, and didn't know ACAD allows image embedding. Seems the file is parsed to become a new format inside the .dwg. Seems there's a way to extract/remake the raster but would need ACAD, or BricsCAD or similar - sounds a palava. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/visual-lisp-autolisp-and-general/extract-embedded-images-from-autocad-drawing/td-p/5900562

AFAIK vw can only read the information in the associated .jgw (that usually comes with an image/raster file ) .jgw files hold the real-world location coordinates and orientation for the centre of the top left pixel. Normally a dwg/dxf file will have an associated raster file, along with a jgw file which is simply a .txt file, which looks something like this: 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 -1.000000 263111.187500 4375666.000000 where the bottom two lines are the upper left pixel coordinates. there is an app out on the web createJGW.exe which will read/parse an image and create .jgw's (I think it will do batches of tiles too), altho' they can also be written by hand