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Thanks @zoomer I've tried as you suggest with the glass shader, but making adjustments to those two grayscale inputs seems to have no effect on my render at all. I am going to have to do a bit of troubleshooting to see what's going on. Maybe it is something in my render settings.

Yes. This kind of thing is very common in the UK at least.

Thanks for the reply. I think this confirms that the behaviour I'm seeing is a bug?

The problem is that they only allow architects to model the most basic of stairs. They can't cope with a variety of features that are quite common even in fairly standard residential buildings. Any architect who has tried to use them for anything but the lowest levels of detail will not tell you that they are "fantastic".

Of course, this messes up the ability to easily change floor-to-floor heights without a lot of manual editing of stair objects, so you lose a fair bit of the advantage of a properly parametric stair.

The image is an extract from a cutaway rendering. Kind of white card/balsa style. It's modelling a glass-to-glass corner. I don't want to see so much reflection there, in that corner. Partly the issue here, I think, is that these are triple glazed windows and they are modelled as such. So there are 3 layers of reflections going on. Of course I could replace with one solid piece of glass for the purposes of this rendering but would rather not if possible. I thought I'd be able to dial the reflections right down ... but I can't seem to find the setting that lets me do this. Here are the "reflectivity" settings for the material I'm using. I thought I could just reduce "Reflection" to a very low percentage. But even setting it at 1 or zero seems to have little effect. Where am I going wrong?

They really aren't.

It's very common for flights of stairs to have a couple of non standard treads at the bottom. It's not entirely unreasonable to expect a stair tool to be able to cope with these kinds of conditions. This is far from the only limitation of the current tool, of course.

Well, I use them all the time. It would be nice if they updated live (like it would be nice if all viewports did) but it doesn't make them unusable for me. If I am editing my floorplans, most of the time I'm either doing it in 3d or in a top/plan design layer view. If working in a fully top/plan workflow, then a certain amount of your model is going to have to be within autohybrids, and editing geometry within those involves extra steps. It's a trade-off either way of course. If you are dealing with large primarily rectilinear buildings then using HSVPs may still not make sense. However, they do allow certain freedoms that are very advantageous for certain types of buildings. One of those is the ability to use stacked walls without it causing too many issues.

As far as I can work out, the choice seems to be between some free stuff that is very limited and rather unreliable, and paying for quite expensive libraries. https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/44878-3d-plants-options-for-the-confused-architect/ Twinmotion is an external application, not something that works within VW. So you have to export back and forth. There is supposed to be a live link feature but it doesn't work properly and isn't maintained. Every time I try and add plants, I run into some problem or the other.

And in the currently existing "horizontal section" workflow you basically do have that option, whereas you don't with the top/plan approach.

Although I agree (from an architect point of view) with much of what you say about the purpose/interpretation of drawings, I would prefer that VW moves towards a more literal cut plane, which is what the "horizontal section" workflow is all about. It's still completely possible to choose to over-ride the literal cut with something more symbolic where that makes more sense. There are situations where the "literal" cut plane is more communicative than what top/plan would provide. For example consider a stacked wall buildup where the lowest section of the wall is plinth-like and thicker than the main part of the wall. I'd want to draw the section through the thinner part with the top of the plinth part visible in "elevation" below. Especially if that plinth had some kind of shelf or ledge incorporated. That's how I'd have drawn it in ye olden days by hand too. Top/plan struggles with this kind of thing whereas a horizontal section draws what I want first go. This is just one example, there are many others. I find that drawing with a literal cut plane as a starting point gets me much closer to the kind of control over what's actually drawn, that I had when I used to hand draw, than fighting the top/plan system does.

Horizontal sections are the way forward!

@Rick Berge I'm trying to do this in VW2025 but am not sure where to find "Draw all other objects: Normally". Is it the button that's now called "show"? If so, selecting this does not seem to allow the "other objects" to fall back to the viewport's class over-rides. At least in my case, where I want to use data vis to change the texture of everything in a certain layer, while having things in all other layers fall back to the viewport's class over-ride settings.

"Parent" styles, as suggested here: https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/119602-the-need-for-a-parent-style-to-rule-over-sub-styles/#comment-519002 would also make them a lot more useful. For example - I might have a file with a lot of viewports that show "as existing" or "as proposed" conditions. I will tend to use layers to distinguish between those. There will be a particular combination of layers that show the model in "as proposed" condition and as the project develops, new layers might get added, or I might want to change that combination in some way. It would be useful to be able to change the layer visibility setup in a viewport style and have that roll out to the tens of relevant viewports in the file, rather than having to go and do them all individually. However... I might also want to use a viewport style to control the graphic appearance of (say) all 1:50 section viewports. There may be many such viewports in the file but some of them are "as existing" and some are "as proposed". I can't currently do both things using viewport styles. Either I choose to control layer setup via style, and graphic appearance manually, or vice versa. Or... I have to create two styles (1:50 sections as existing, 1:50 sections as proposed) and each time I want to change the graphic appearance of all 1:50 sections I have to go and change the settings in two styles. And if I want to change the "as proposed" layer setup I probably have to go and change it in multiple vport styles too (1:50 sections as proposed, 1:100 sections as proposed, GA plans as proposed, etc etc) This is quite a similar problem as we see in other object type styles, like wall styles.

Viewport Styles are potentially very useful but there are various things they can't control which means that I can't use them for certain purposes. To start with, a couple of things that it would be useful if they could do: - Control class over-rides independently of class visibilities (note that I can transfer these things independently between vports using the eyedropper tool). In other words, I might want to have class over-rides determined by style, but class visibilities determined per viepwort. - Controlling which lights are turned on or off. There are other things, which I'll add to this thread as I think of them.

You should be able to click on the relevant points in the PDF even if you can't snap to them. I am quite often going through this process. You can zoom in to get your mouse click as accurate as is possible. If the PDF includes a scale bar I start from there. I'll click on the start and end of the scale bar ... zooming in as necessary (if it's rasterised then that means zooming in enough to see pixels and clicking as close as I can to what I judge to be the midpoint of a line). The fun starts when you realise the PDF has been scanned at some point and has ended up scaled slightly differently in X and Y directions...

What is the reason that you want to create a "new" model rather than just continuing to make further modifications to the original one?

I have had similar experiences trying to use the built in satellite imagery or maps - frequent failures to download or other errors. It shouldn't really be necessary to fiddle about with resolution to make it work. This part of the tools (image download from server) needs to handled much better I think. As it is, it can be very frustrating, especially when it can be a bit difficult to understand what's going on with the GIS tools anyway.

Ok, I see. It may be that you don't use the Structural Member tool in a way that is affected by its limitations. But I think there are many of us who do. Most of these limitations aren't necessarily bugs - I would call it something like incomplete implementation. And there are a few threads (like the one I linked to above) that outline these in quite some detail. This of course is a separate process from the bug submittal one - it's users letting VW know that the tool would be greatly enhanced if some time could be spent improving it.

Another example of an existing feature that desperately needs attention is the notes database & manager.

If this is the case, then the problem is exactly that: fixes and improvements being defined as "low priority". They should be a higher priority than the implementation of other, new, features.

https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/90654-structural-member-usability-improvements/

Exactly this. And the structural member is a good example.

The new features are fine and good. The problem as ever is the lack of progress in fixing all the "old features" which most of us would use every day if we could.