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I've arrived at this thread for the same reason as @Tom W. - there's not much in the VW help documentation to explain what this is. Have I got it right: this is used to set the height above sea level of whatever as I choose as the zero Z value for my drawing? Is this necessary to set, if I want georeferencing to work properly? In other words: Say I set top of my subfloor as +0 in my drawing, then set the project elevation as +18.734m AOD, as per Tom W's example above. Then I import something georeferenced, that is 20m AOD, that is going to appear a 1.3m above my subfloor level, not 20m above my subfloor level?

In the earlier pages of this thread it was suggested that the move to the subscription model would allow VW to invest more heavily in development and we'd see a significant increase in the pace of improvements to the software. Two years on, do we think we've seen this? We are still waiting for most of those core tools, the things like windows, doors, stairs, roof faces, walls, that have urgently needed attention for years, to be updated. As usual my criticisms aren't aimed at any indviduals within VW, but the company policy that directs how much resource is dedicated to developing the software.

Tbh I have my doubts that these surveyors know what they are doing enough to have published it in any co-ordinate system. In this case, I've managed to get things into an orientation that is good enough for what I need. It's something I'll look out for in future projects though.

How would I find out what coordinate system the point cloud is using? It's just an .las file and when I import it into VW it appears more or less near 0,0.

I'd say not always - for example sometimes I'll have done a simple survey myself and that's all that's needed for some projects. Or maybe I've been given some form of survey info that was done in the past before georeferencing became a thing.

I believe you can do this with the Geolocate tool too. In my case, I just have a survey without any external reference. So, I can import this, and (if I want) rotate it such that the building I'll be drawing is square with the X & Y axes. Then I can use the geolocate tool to view my survey/drawing with real-world satellite (or map image) behind it, and then move and rotate that background image until I get the best fit possible with my survey info. I think the survey point tool is only really useful if you have a survey with some point on it where the exact real world co-ordinates are known. Next time I get a survey done, I'll be making sure I ask that it includes some real world reference, so I don't have to do all the manual work I'm needing to do with the one I've got for this project, which is a rather ropey one.

I see. So effectively it lets you rotate the globe in the background by typing in a number, rather than graphically as you might do with the Geolocate tool.

I'm curious to understand what the Survey Point Tool changes about this. As far as I can work out, while you can place a Survey Point graphically (eg snap to something in the survey info) and then move everything to the location that you define by entering numerical values, the same is not true for the "reference points". It seems that you can only place them in the drawing by entering numerical co-ordinates. Therefore it seems that once you've placed those reference points in the drawing, the only way to get the drawing to align with them is to rotate the geometry itself within the drawing. I may be missing something here though.

I don't think there's anything in the file, not that gets recognised in import anyway. It's become clear this survey wasn't really properly done - I'll know better next time around, exactly what to ask for.

I have been having problems with this today too. VW2025. Even when using what I think is the default service. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

A question... When setting up a new drawing, what's best practice for the rotation of the geometry? (A) I draw the building in a convenient orientation, so X and Y axes are parallel with the main walls of the building, etc, and then all the rotation necessary to georeference it happens behind the scenes as it were (B) I draw the building such that X & Y axes match North-South and East-West, in which case I guess I'd generally be working in rotated views when actually working on the drawings.

The point cloud doesn't include any reference to the outside world. So I need to georeference it manually. Then in theory (I think) if I import it into an already georeferenced file it will appear in the right location. I think I have worked out how to georeference it - basically I use the "geolocate" tool, and match the point cloud's position & rotation as best as I can, with the background imagery provided by the geolocate tool. I know this is not very precise ... I am doing it mainly as a proof of concept for now, to get my head around how georeferencing works in VW.

I now want to get my point cloud into a georeferenced file, so that I can start bulding my site model and then my building model around it. The pointcloud itself isn't georeferenced - so I am going to have to do this manually. Any recommended tutorials for how to do this in VW2025? Some of the ones I can find seem to be based on previous versions of VW and I'm aware that some new stuff (Survey Point tool?) has been added in 2025 that is supposed to make the process easier. I haven't really tried setting up georeferencing properly before but want to try it out on this project.

That tutorial seems to focus on how cabling is dealt with - I think architects will generally be most interested in how fittings (lights, switches, sockets etc) can be represented. What we want is a sort of schematic plan, but overlaid on a scale drawing, so that the physical locations of the fittings are shown. Is there a tutorial that gives an overview of how that could look?

The "by distance" option where you can do it by directly clicking on points on the drawing is very handy though; saves a lot of steps.

That's what the OP is talking about. There's not a "by distance" option for scaling assymetrically.

But actually, being able to move the whole thing around is kind of critical to it being useful, at least from the point of view of dealing with situations where a lot of fittings are crowded into a small area, or are placed vertically above one another.

I've come to this thread just to reinforce the above - in the UK architects absolutely do make these kinds of plans all the time. And doing them in VW is currently a little painful, because (other than some slightly elaborate workarounds discussed in other threads) they basically have to be done entirely manually.

By the way - does the Spotlight bit of VW deal with this kind of issue? I'm entirely unfamiliar with it but it produces schematics doesn't it? Are there any tools in there that already do something like this?

I think I'd want to be able to move more than just the text around. Ideally - placing the 3d symbol in the model would, by default, place (in a plan view) the 2d symbol as shown in the left hand image below. So, at the actual X,Y location of the fitting itself. But I'd be able to grab the symbol and move it somewhere else manually if necessary, like the image on the right. I am imagining it having a kind of "rubber band" connection to its X,Y location, which I've shown as a dotted line here.

I think I'd initially imagined that the Data Tag somehow took the place of the 2d component of the symbol - so it would remain associated with the 3d symbol but could be moved around fairly flexibly in a lighting plan view in order to maintain legibility in complex layouts.

There is one - in the annotations space of the viewport on the sheet layer. I can see that if I move the light symbol in 3d space, the data tag that's associated with it in the SLVP moves along with it. However... duplicating the symbol does not produce a duplicate symbol with data tag attached. Presumably in this kind of work flow, you'd have to manually associate a data tag with each symbol that appears in the plan viewport.

Yes - something like this has been asked for on other threads - something that allows the user to build custom parametric PIOs when none of the VW built in ones are suitable for the job.

It's those "zoo" areas that are the main issue. The system I tried using works ok except when you need to manually adjust the location of the 2d symbol for legibility purposes. Especially when you want to make an edit to the layout under time pressure during construction phase of a project (and can't quite remember how you set it all up a couple of months earlier)! I may take a look at @E|FA's file to look at how it works. I'm not a big user of data tags (so far).

Do you still tell VW to import the .shp file only, or do you point it to the folder? If I point it to the folder, it does not want to import it.