line-weight

It's also something that it's capable of doing for wall segments. See attached for example. Two wall segments of different heights attached to each other. In the hidden-line elevation view, it knows not to draw a line where the two walls connect. So surely it shouldn't be a big ask to do this for adjacent simple solids, when required. Another situation - because of the limitations of the wall tool, sometimes a section of wall has to be modelled directly using a solid. But then how do you join that section into a piece of "real" wall seamlessly so that you don't get a join line? You can almost do it in plan, because you can choose not to have a "cap" on one end of the wall segment - in top/plan view the end of the wall segment is drawn open. You can then draw some 2D lines continuing the wall for your custom wall segment if you're only concerned with the plan view. It would be nice to be able to do the same thing with a manually drawn 3D segment, so that it still works in all the elevations, sections, etc.

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It doesn't seem to me like something that should be difficult to implement. The renderer doesn't have to do anything clever - I just tell it that I don't want to draw this specific edge, that's all. Like I say it's a basic feature in sketchup.

Maybe you misunderstand slightly - I'm not really talking about rendering 3d views and so on. I'm talking about generating elevations, plans, sections and other 2D projections from a 3D model.

There are various situations where making a solid addition isn't possible. For example, when the two things you want to add are on different layers. Or another example - something I built in sketchup but apparently wouldn't be possible in VW. I had a series of vertical elements, "legs" if you like, that made up a custom-made stair. Each of these items was a different length and had different connections at the top end, but they all had the same detail at the "foot". That detail I modelled as a component - sketchup version of a symbol, so when I changed it I wouldn't have to update every instance individually. Then the simpler upper parts, the legs, were drawn individually. So each element was modelled as individual "leg" grouped with repeated detail "foot". In reality they were all made from one continuous piece of steel so I didn't want the join between foot and leg to be visible as a line. In Sketchup this is easy - just hide the edges where the two pieces join, and then in all views that join is not visible. On that occasion I imported views of these sketchup models into my VW drawing to supplement the main, 2D VW drawings. And I thought, it would make much more sense to do all this in VW, draw it all in 3D, and then generate both 3D views and elevational drawings, instead of drawing it twice. But it seems that I'd hit this difficulty with the limitation of control over the appearance of hidden line renderings. So this seems another example of a really basic thing VW can't do, that ends up making loads of the more complex things it can do redundant. Unless of course there *is* some way of selectively hiding edges in which case someone tell me how, please!

Take a look at the Needle and Mortar wiki. It is completely separate from these Vw user forums but it exists for the very purpose. Yes...I looked at that a while ago but wasn't sure if it was still current or how to contribute to it.

Sure - I just think it might help to try and gather together, say, a "top ten" of basic things that don't work properly, that a lot of people have problems with. The way the wishlist forum is set up, issues like this tend to end up as things that are mentioned in bits of discussions here and there. But maybe I should just start a thread for this purpose.

Is there some way we could have a thread, or wiki, or something, where we could try and make a list of relatively basic things that don't work at the moment, or alternatively, seem to be designed to work in a way that doesn't reflect how people actually want to use them? While it's really good to hear that some investment is being put into the development of the software, and that this includes for looking at improving older functions as well as introducing new ones, it's also really important that the people working on that actually know what it is that doesn't work and why. This implies no disrespect to the people working on this stuff - I can't begin to imagine how complicated it is to keep something like VW running amidst continual changes. It's also natural that if your main job is developing software then you don't necessarily see how that software actually gets used "in the wild". Maybe this already happens, but they should be working and communicating with a range of people who use the software in their daily work. Not, say, just with people who have transitioned from mainly doing architects to maily doing CAD consultancy. And with a proper cross section of the user base. So not just people who design newbuild office complexes or traditional style private houses in the US countryside, but people that do small projects and highly bespoke projects and projects involving old buildings and projects on awkward urban sites and so on and so on. And also VW users who aren't inclined to hang about and comment on forums! The plan for the "analytics" sounds interesting. If I understand correctly this is a way of recording how people actually use VW. I'd put some money on people at VW HQ being surprised to see how many of their users spend most of their time dealing with basic lines and polygons and have never even used the stair tool, say.

This is good news - the resource browser is one of my most hated parts of the VW interface!

Please please please, can you try and make sure a portion of those engineers are working on making existing VW features work properly, before they are let loose on new features. And actually properly try to understand how architects work once designing anything beyond a 1:50 level of detail, and recognise what the limitations of 3D modelling are when you get to this stage, and design something that lets us use 3D more but also takes these practical realities into account. It's rather less glamorous work for the software developers, perhaps, but it's the stuff that actually makes a really big difference for those of us trying to use VW for messy, real world projects on a daily basis.

See the attached image. I've made the stepped shape on the right simply by putting the three blocks on the left exactly next to each other. In the OpenGL view, the stepped shape looks like one object. But below is the "Hidden Line" elevational view and the blocks are still rendered as individual objects when they are exactly adjacent to each other. My question is whether it's possible to tell VW that I don't want to see certain edges in hidden line view. You can do something like this in Sketchup for example - choose certain edges to be "hidden". I appreciate that if I were to join the 3 blocks as a solid addition, then they would be rendered as one object in the hidden line view. But there are situations where this isn't possible. For example, they are on different layers but I don't want to see the join line when I've got both layers switched on.

That's basically what I've tried, as described further up the thread. But there are two problems which are visible on your attachments too. Firstly you can see all the joins between wall segments. It seems you can get rid of this by using the "merged cross sections" option in the advanced section properties dialogue but then you can't show construction layers within the walls like you can in a normal plan view. Secondly it doesn't show door swing lines. However, it seems that doing it the way I describe just above ^^^ (ie generating the section from a clip cube) gives me door swing lines. But it also gives me that line across the threshold that I don't want.

Ah, ok. I should investigate that at some point. Can you make it cut a hole in anything, or just walls?

Ok, so if someone imported one of your symbols, they'd import the class the symbol is in, but not a hundred extra classes for its various components. Presumably they could go into the symbol after import and apply their own classes if that's how they dealt with materials and textures and so on. But actually, why do they need to be in special classes anyway? Why not just have them all set to "none" - then people could import and assign classes as they wished. I too find myself fighting most parametric symbols, and have never been that keen on them. However with windows and doors I can maybe see the point, largely because of the issue of cutting a hole for them... I could make my own door symbol in the way you describe but then I'd have to manually cut a hole for each wall I wanted to put it into - and move that hole each time I moved the door. For things like, say, sanitaryware fittings, making home-made symbols works fine.

So...I have now updated from VW2011 to VW2016 (the trial version, anyway). I am pleased to see that it now appears to be possible to generate a horizontal section that shows doors correctly (ie with swing line etc). Well, almost. I've attached an image from a very simple test file. Top LH corner is the conventional top/plan view. Bottom LH corner is what I get generating a horizontal section from the clip cube. It kind of shows the door correctly. But with a thick line drawn across the threshold. Why? Is there some way I can get rid of this line?

Having moved from VW2011 to 2016 I've been trying to get my head around levels and stories. I'm finding them as confusing as most contributions to this thread suggest they are for most people. I see this thread is from a year ago. Is there any plan to try and implement any of the changes proposed above?

I get the idea in principle. Questions that come to mind for me - - would everyone using these symbols have to have, to some extent, the same drawing setup? For example if I import one of these symbols, will it contain a load of extra classes that aren't already in my drawing? So, say I organise my classes by material, and I've already got a "steel" class, then when I import a symbol with steel components am I then going to have two "steel" classes with slightly different attributes? This is already a problem I have with importing 2d symbols provided by manufacturers, etc. I often end up importing the symbol into a separate file, tidy it up, maybe change everything to class "0" then take it into my drawing before re-assigning my own classes as necessary. And by the time I've done that, I almost might as well have drawn it from scratch myself. And don't get me started on imported symbols that contain way, way too much detail (say, a standard section for a roof light in which every single screw and its thread is drawn, bogging down the drawing with millions of unnecessary lines). - would this have to be an all-or-nothing approach? I can see the attraction of being able to attach information to components of a drawing, in the way you describe. But if I start adding, say, paint colour details in this way, then do I have to record *all* paint colour detail in notes attached to drawing elements? For example, (currently) I might have a finishes schedule which would record the colour of a window frame but also of a wall or ceiling. That info would be fairly easy to attach to to a discrete element like a window but then do I have to work out a way of doing this for a wall too? Because, if I don't, and keep the wall colour recorded in a manually created schedule, then the benefit of having my automatically generated spreadsheet is lost, and potentially the situation is actually worse because I'm then trying to maintain two parallel systems of recording information. These are quite dull and prosaic points. But it's this kind of stuff that always seems to defeat attempts to record information in a more efficient way. A lot of stuff would be possible if we had one, agreed, standard way of setting up a drawing, which worked for everyone regardless of project type, and which everyone - including anyone making component symbols - complied with completely. But that's something we don't seem to have managed yet. I know that's partly what BIM is supposed to be about, but I think we're yet to see if it *really* works in real life and can work at all scales of projects and levels of detail.

This is very welcome. In the last few months, I've been considering very seriously whether or not it makes sense to continue investing my time and money in Vectorworks. This is in part prompted by an attempt to change the way I draw, moving more in to 3D-based information. Something I think a lot of people are trying to figure out at present. Whilst VW is excellent in 2D there are now many other packages which are in some regards superior for 3D work, and fast catching up in other areas. Some of these are less expensive than VW. Sketchup for example. There are lots of things that make me want to persevere with VW but at the same time a worry that it's an evolutionary dead end, and is going to get left behind by the competition. Letting us see that there's a path set for VW to follow, that will keep it relevant and address current shortcomings, will go quite a long way in moderating those worries, which I'm sure others share.

I might be interested in this... I sent you a PM, IanH.

The files I work with at the moment aren't huge (I'm making do with VW2011 on a modestly specced 2011 mac mini!) but I think that's going to start changing. I'd rather have a bit of spare headroom, so I don't have to worry about hardware too much for the next few years. Thanks for the pointer to Create Pro, has been very helpful having a look at their setup, as has been the guy from the company who's been answering my various questions.

(I should say a further option on the rebuilt pro is to go for a £1340 option that gives me a Radeon HD 5770 GPU, which I could start off with and se how it goes, and replace myself with an R9 at a later date for about £250. Then the savings, initially, are approaching £1000.)

Well, here's how I see my options having looked at this fairly intensively. Firstly, VW knowledgebase articles seem to suggest that a good GPU is fairly critical. And the recommendations for VRAM seem to hover around 2GB as a minimum, with 4GB+ being suggested as preferable. So, the way it looks to me, if I want to future-proof myself a bit I ought to be looking for something that gives me more than 2GB VRAM. And because iMacs aren't upgrade-able after purchase, satisfying that pushes to me the top-end iMac which can give me a Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB VRAM (all other options in the iMac line are 2GB). And the price for that is £2049. That's with an i5 processor, and I've seen quite a few comments around the messageboard threads here saying that it's worth going up to an i7 - which would make the price £2,249. On the other hand I can get a rebuilt mac pro for £1610 which as far as I can make out will give me a CPU with similar performance to i7, and an R9 280X with 3GB VRAM, which as far as I can make out ought to perform better than the "M" version cards in the iMac. And it gives me the option of upgrading the GPU in a couple of years without having to buy a new computer. Of course, the iMac comes with the very nice 5k screen, and the Mac Pro option comes with the risk that it might become unsupported in a few years. But I've already got a monitor that's good enough for now, and the price difference seems potentially to be around £600. Am I mad still to be contemplating that Mac Pro option (which actually comes with a 3 year RTB warranty that isn't voided by me adding memory etc)?

Is that including models which have a 64bit CPU and can actually boot in 64 bit though?

I asked the people at Create Pro about this. Their response: "The only time they have withdrawn OS X support is for 32 bit systems, our Mac Pros are fully 64 bit, just like the rest of the current Apple product line up. So we can’t see this happening anytime soon."

Well, that'll get me 3.46GHz 6 Core Xeon W3690 Mac Pro 5,1 24GB RAM AMD R9 280X 3GB 256GB flash drive 2TB HDD for £1685. So the question is whether that gains me any advantage over the new iMac above for similar price.