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I normally only use VW on my desktop but am in the process of installing it on a laptop too. Is there a quick/easy way to make the setup on the laptop match my desktop setup as closely as possible, or do I need to somehow manually copy across things like custom workspaces, plugins, preferences etc?

The loft tool gives you a preview of the starting vertex, and the ability to adjust it so as to match vertexes between the two polygons as you wish. However...this reminds me of a limitation of the loft tool, which is that even if you choose "ruled" it doesn't create a solid that is made of of triangulated flat faces - you get something like this: And you can see it creates four-sided faces which are not flat. Quite often I don't want that - I want flat faces. I've never really used the multiple extrude tool before. Looks like it can nearly do what I'd want but unfortunately doesn't let you match starting vertices in the same way that the loft tool does.

Any thoughts on this..... ?

This is a screenshot from a georeferenced file, where "project north" doesn't match actual north. The compass ring is very handy for keeping on top of what direction everything is - I like that I can always see where real north is, regardless of the orientation I'm looking at the drawing in. But is there any way to draw anything in the file, in such a way that it's exactly aligned with real north? The north point tool seems unaware of where real north is. And so do heliodons. I'd kind of assumed part of the point of georeferencing was so that these kinds of objects would automatically point the right direction. Anyway, they don't, but I can't work out how I can rotate them to exactly the right angle, other than by some very tedious process of pasting a map or plan with north marked on it, into the file, and then manually rotating it to match the model. The pink line in the screenshot is drawn by a version of that process, and then I have to line my heliodons up with that. But am I missing something?

Did you ever resolve this @Christiaan?

I'm having these problems again now; erratic behaviour of heliodons. Solved (temporarily) by moving them onto a new layer and deleting the old one. There is definitely some kind of bug.

No I don't believe it's been addressed. It constantly annoys me too and if there are any workarounds I'd also like to know about them.

I'm considering submitting this as a bug. Is it reasonable to consider it as such? I consistently get this message when I try and save a large-ish file I'm working on: There is plenty of space (>400GB) on the (external) disk the file is saved on. There is a lack of space on the hard disk, but this is because VW has eaten up everything available with its swap files. I assume that this then prevents something like a temporary version of the file being put on the hard disk in the process of saving. I can save it by doing a "save as" and then saving on top of the most recent save, saying yes it's ok to replace the previous file. Shouldn't VW be clever enough to leave enough space on the HD that it can do whatever it needs to do, in order to routinely save a file? I know that it could release some of that space if it wanted to, because when I re-open the same file, it doesn't use up that much space to begin with, it slowly creeps up during the session. This behaviour has been going on for several releases, and it's been raised before, but the complaints are always ignored. Am I being unreasonable in expecting an application to be able to manage memory use such that it doesn't prevent itself from being able to save an open file?

Have tested this for a week or so and my conclusion is that it makes no discernable difference.

This is what I see too. I even do it myself! Recent jobs, on site the contractors use a mix of pdfs on phones and printed drawings. I don't see them with a tablet. A tablet doesn't fit in your pocket. Contractors also want discussions on whatsapp rather than email, so they can take photos (or screenshot bits of drawings), scribble on them and drop them into a conversation without needing to be in an office.

I think to some extent we are probably talking at cross purposes. It's not that I don't see the potential value in having a full version of VW running on a tablet, it's more that I don't think it's an immediate priority given all the other things about VW that need to be improved, and the amount of resource that (it feels to me) would be required to produce a one handed touchscreen version of what's already a complicated and messy application. I don't think it's really comparible to something like affinity photo (which I also use).

If you're sat at a desk yes. Not if you're walking around site though.

The only drawing on site that I see is marking up of drawings, and various types of sketching/ hand-drawing of details (either on paper or on ipads or other tablets). Or on a desk in a site office on a laptop. I don't think I've ever seen anyone stand on a scaffold board, or in the middle of a muddy field, with a drawing board, set-square and T-bar. Likewise, I've not yet see that happen with someone drawing directly into a working CAD file on an ipad. Maybe this will start happening soon, or maybe it happens already on certain types of large projects. I've not personally seen it happen on the small to medium scale architectural projects I tend to be involved in. Like @Pat Stanford says I find it hard to picture quite how you'd draw in a full version of VW on an ipad, because it's such a two handed application with many keyboard shortcuts and generally used with a mouse with multiple buttons on it. How all that can get translated into one hand of fat fingers I don't know.

The equivalent of the laptop, not the ipad. The ipad replaces the paper drawing set (in a ragged bundle with mud on them). The ipad retains the functionality where the contractor continues to use drawings several versions older than the last revision you sent them.

I think there are two things being talked about in this thread. 1. being able to use VW whilst on the road. That is, in a hotel room or at a meeting or whatever. 2. being able to use VW literally walking around on site. The first of those can be done with a laptop. I can see why it would be nice to be able to do it on an ipad, especially if an ipad is already used for on-site stuff, because of course it's nice to be able to have one device to do everything. But that's more of a nice-to-have rather than needed-to-get-the-job-done. The second of course needs something like an ipad. But it also needs software that's designed for that purpose. VW isn't, just like ye olde drawing boards weren't designed for using on site and that's why we didn't take drawing boards to site. I don't think it's reasonable to expect VW to be able to do this. Of course it would be nice if it could. But it's much more important that it can do its primary purpose properly. And being able to draw a usable parametric window, at my desk, is 100x more important than being able to edit a VWX file on a tablet whilst standing on site. What's a reasonable expectation will change over time of course. But at least in my world the primary means of communication of designs on site is still the 2D PDF. So a reasonable expectation is that I can pull these up on site, and mark them up in a convenient way, and ideally get that info back into VW. That would recognise current mainstream practice. Actually it's only relatively recently that this has been common practice, I'd say. It's not all that long ago that you drew in VW, printed on paper, and the paper went to site.

Unfortunately they basically have no real competitors - great for them as they can sell the expensive hardware and then not worry too much about everyone complaining about the software (there's quite a lot of it online) - not great for users especially once the device becomes an essential part of workflow. It constantly feel precarious - will the next release of VW be the one where it finally becomes unusable.

I was just this moment reading 3dc's email update too! And also noting the absence of any mention of Vectorworks while compatibility with a large number of other softwares is announced.

No! This is not how the door object is intended to be used. The way to create a glazed door is to use the right option under the "leaf" settings.

Yeah, I'd rather resources were focused on sorting out the full version of VW first. For people who want to edit VWX files on the move there's already a solution: a laptop.

There was definitely an AI vibe to the prose.

I do have that ticked. Maybe I'll try unticking and see what changes.

I've realised that Vectorworks is the reason my Time Machine backups have been repeatedly failing with a "not enough space on disk" error. It's because VW is being so greedy with swap memory that there's hardly any space left on the disk and Time Machine can't function. I have to quit VW first. (Arguably MacOS should not be allowing this to happen ... but it's not something that any of my other applications are doing, as far as I can make out.)

There are quite a few other threads relating to this broad issue, stretching back over time (and there never really seems to be any engagement from VW themselves), but thought I'd strategically reply to this one because it includes the term "memory leak". To me (a non computing expert) it appears very clear that Vectorworks regularly holds on to more RAM than is necessary. And I think this is part of what contributes to these situations where the RAM usage goes up and up to the point where it hangs, crashes, or is unable to save a file. This is a regular problem for me when working on certain large files on my M1 mac which has just 16GB unified memory. I know some people will tell me that's the root cause - my machine needs more memory - and yes it's a contributory factor but I see plenty examples on the forums of people with much larger amounts of RAM having the same problem. It's been bugging me again this morning. In this case VW's memory usage had gone up to 27GB, meaning it was using at least >10GB of swap space. That's working on a 2GB file. When I closed that file, VW relinquished about 16GB of memory, but it was still using 11GB. All that was open was another, empty file. Why's it still using that 11GB? Does it have a legitimate reason - or does this count as a "memory leak"?

Do many people actually use detail section viewports? The last time I tried using them, I decided they were more trouble than they were worth, although I now forget all the reasons why. If they were functional though, this in principle would be a useful feature. It could get a little complicated, because there might be things in the main section annotation space that you don't want to pull through to the detail section. And would you want to be able to edit those elements in the detail viewport, and have those edits carried through to the main section?

It's always a problem that these imported models are far too detailed ... and it's a tedious & time consuming process editing/simplifying them. So I often end up just accepting them, or drawing a simplified version from scratch.