unearthed

Whatever happened to the small graphical patches we were taught back when pencils were the main tool. Drawings need to leave room for the imagination, if your clients are so lacking in imagination they need literally everything shown you have the wrong clients IME.

I'm considering buying a GNSS (mainly for landscape survey - so I don't need millimetre accuracy) and asking here if anyone has one, what your make/model is and what you use it for, and the sort of wrinkles and bugs you have found. I'd be looking at a base station and a roving pole as much of my work is under trees, but I almost always have line-of-sight to an open space to place a base station. Also for collecting terrain points. I'm only looking at systems that have a reliable New Zealand agent, and this is NZ so range of models is small; EMLID (setup looks worrying), South, Stonex, Sokia, Leica (but prob. too $$$) and Buildmax (altho' they might be a joke), as their agent visited me once and couldn't switch their GPS on! I'm especially interested in units with a tilt function as it may save some key entry time when e.g. doing offsets from trees and object.

Hi Rachael, Can you tell us what you are trying to achieve? An outline of • things you really need to know asap • things that are less urgent e.g. are you wanting to draw in 3D, or just 2D, are you doing costings etc. Also are you mac or windows?

Bricscad is useful for pre-import checking of some files, also for cleaning / removal of data that VW would get bogged down with. Also it is very fast for viewing things. IME any drawing office needs some type of native dwg/dxf platform.

I'm only on vw2018 and haven't tested it yet, but on prior versions if there was an image file in a viewport, an export would include the image data outside the viewport too. Ever since I worked that out I have tiled large rasters and put each tile in its own class.

For layers I do something like 1 legal and trees 2 other top level items 3 topography 4 architecture 5 landscape plants 6 landscape hard 8 aerials_and_underlays 9 sheet items and for classes I expand on these to create a pseudo hierarchy. I found VW confusing for a long time as VW classes have not been implemented in a way that is congruent with either programming and Pattern Language thinking. Just seems to be some programmer's fever dream. Classes example I use to control visibility with tree symbols: 1 trees_Sym_-O Holder 1 trees_Sym_-01 basicGraphic 1 trees_Sym_-O2 CODE 1 trees_Sym_-03 graphical 1 trees_Sym_-O4 3D_content 1 trees_Sym_-05 matureCanopyDIA I find classes are faster to read when using a dual coding like this, also it enables meaningful sorting.

Just trying to understand your file; when you do export a .dwg do the images from your .vwx change size? Is your file 2D or 3D? Are you wanting to export the entire file contents to .dwg, or just the date shown in your drawing sheets? VW tends to export a lot of crap along with the data you want and it can take a while to develop workflows. I'll see this again again in ~10 hours

Glad it worked. I normally build my functions in VSCode as I have better visuals that way and can remove any extra spaces etc - very easy to make errors typing directly into worksheet . VW functions seem largely undocumented, I have a long list of what has worked for me in the past (along with completely inexplicable ones that didn't work).

=COUNT(((L='05.1 planting YR 1') & (S='AcaIns'))) ^ you may have to play with the number of closing brackets; vw is a bit weird/unknowable when it comes to brackets IME. Also I've had problems with class names that include periods so best to avoid those

My hot take is that VW should be running a real physically distributed mixed-discipline office [preferably with real jobs] (architecture, landscape architecture, lighting, engineering..), and running a mix of platforms - win/max/linux. and a mix of common CAD in addition to several vw editions - Sketchup, Acad, Revit.. Sounds like a lot but they supposed to be a big company and yet we the 'users' are being used to test the software at no cost to VW.

Would anyone be kind enough to upload a planting plan with a planting schedule, Something reasonably large and complicated (I'll build on it and delete your info before I publish anything). I have Landmark 2018 but it didn't come with pre-loaded planting plan examples. I just want something real-world I can hack at and rework into my own - and will delete your data before I publish anything. Landmark 2018 on Win64 Also - I only use simple 2D symbols, and solid-colour polygons, many of my schemes have >10000 plants so it's essential to not bog the file down file with needless detail. Can the database work without building the graphics? i.e. just working off polygons.

We're sharing a file via my local NAS with Synology in a win64bit (my end) / mac (Mojave) environment, so Nic only sees the Synology interface. We don't do workgroup referencing as we've both had problems before and don't want to waste more time on that. We only work on a file one at a time. The problem is the VW file cannot retain linked references from one hard-drive to another. The issue is one project with a lot of image rasters* (mostly .jpg) which I reference to at my end to keep file size at a minimum. At Nic's end files open fine, but a save at Nic's end changes the link locations to Nic's machine and I have to relink on my machine. I'm considering trying to have Nic's mac reference a copy of the files off a Dropbox (and link the dropboc files back to my NAS, but still trying to see if that's viable). No, that didn't work. I've seen this forum post which doesn't look hopeful and seems to add needless complication. * 24 files each in it's own class, 200Mb in total but fluctuates with edits and expected to rise to ~1Gb

D21002 2 vw2018.vwxD21002 2 v2013.vwx One of these may work for you. Two diff versions as you don't have vw version in yer profile.

I drop text into notepad or VSCode first to clean it up; pasting straight from a pdf is asking for problems as pdfs are postscript code and you risk bringing in rubbish along with your content.

What are your export settings? What's your VW version and platform? Are you trying to export all 3D, all 2D or a mix? Also edit your subject line so people don't have to click thru to read yur content

It's totally annoying not being able to do that - I've resorted to using Capture2Text (it's !100% accurate for clean text like this use case), capturing Layers or Classes, dumping into VSCode for a quick clean up and then dropping into VW worksheet (or whatever), as VW worksheet lacks drag and drop I also build most of my formulas this way - which saves ages of time.

Someone will do it for sure, just load it up here and wait.

Well that exploded fine on my PC, Ctrl u, delete white box, select all, change to class of choice. 'tis a pity we can't extract layers. Still a weird file tho' as it has the vectors, AND a jpg version of the vectors.

I use Sketchup, BricsCAD (better than Acad and a lot less $), QGIS and Rebelle - I tend to make content, and analyse in other packages and use VW to collate info (and count / sum areas and objects) and make pages.

We've been building a mine surface model about 1 kilometre across and been finding ways to work (we're both on VW 2018 and finding a few things don't transfer between platforms). Our aim is a simultaneous earthworks cut minimisation, and a visual profile for planning consent. We did spend a lot of time cleaning / simplifying our data before bringing into VW to get the size down (we're at 400Mb and about to have a major clean - our project area in VW is about 250 square km, although that's mostly cadastral with a site model here and there). We set our Minor contour interval at 5m, and Major at 0, which seemed to help. We've had some artifacts with contours that are deeply concave in plan view. We have got to the point where we trust the calculated volumes, and very happy each time we reduce them by 50000 cubes or so. In edit mode we've opted for the tedious method of converting 3D poly's to 2D (as there's more edit options), doing the edits and converting back, entirely unautomated, but it works - only worthwhile as this is a high-value job. I've always avoided VW 3D but with 2018 it's a lot easier and it's an essential with this particular contract.

I belong to a group blog (30000 members) and they have a meta-page to raise issues, suggestions and problems about the forum. Might something like that be helpful here? I see this forum as critical to being able to operate with VW, I'm surprised VW does not involve themselves more in it. Rhino's forum is slightly better, Sketchucation is probably the best working forum. This forum definitively needs to enforce a users VW platform (win/mac) and version - that wastes a lot of time, and if I don't see (or already know) that info I wont go and look at topic. (a good forum is almost as important as the software IMO as there's plenty of good CADs that are basically useless without a user-group working out how to operate.)

IDK what your version (nor do I know if your file has image dats) is but for many versions VW has exported image/raster info outside the viewport frame, when I worked this out I have split large images and put the parts on separate classes, that makes for much smaller export .pdfs. I have noticed my file sizes are much smaller since changing to 2018.

That would be amazing Pat, I'm sure a a lot of people would find it very useful, I have a current jobs where huge numbers of classes are needing to be changed as new data comes to light. It's basically impossible currently as too time consuming. The worksheet idea is very good too as it would enable keeping earlier versions of class names.

I've also found the need to keep a copy of the QuickTime version for your particular VW version - for 2021 I locked QuickTime behind a firewall to stop it updating, along with a text reminder for myself of what my version was - QuickTime. For VW_v 7.69.80.9.txt IDK if it's a thing with 2018, so it may have gone away, one less problem,

Agree, seems like a basic fairness issue to be able to open/save back to zero (accepting progressive loss), this is normal for .dwg tools, .sketchup and a number of other CADs. Like you I have a back catalogue of hundreds of jobs and occasionally need to go into older files for reference and bring and item fwd, also the re-awakening of old jobs, same site new owner etc.