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Thank you for this - very kind of you! I've set it up (I'm currently on 2018) It works perfectly when I'm within a group - which is great. This will be very useful. When I run it outside of a group though I find that it first changes the projection to perspective, but I have to run it a second time to get it to change to OpenGL. This is not too much of a big deal as it's quite easy to just hit the shortcut button twice. Would it be straightforward to make it change the view as well? If it could also change to, say, left isometric that would be really helpful. I don't atually mind which direction the view is; what's more important is that I can see what's going on in 3d, and I can then easily fly around to the angle I want, if it's different.

If there is, and someone has the skills to write it, they would be very popular I think!

Yes, I've checked those too. This has always confused me. Now I realise why I was never quite sure what was going on: it's because it doesn't work when you're inside a group. I think this is a bug rather than a wish. I don't see why that behaviour would be intentional. Actually ... it is kind of mentioned in this thread, in JimW's post on the first page. That's from 3 years ago and pretty much none of that has been fixed as far as I know, so I'll put this on the long list of annoyances that will probably be with us for many years to come.

Thanks. This doesn't seem to work whilst I'm within a container object though. For example if I am editing within a group - I have those preferences set to openGL and perspective - but when I switch to a "left isometric" view, I get an orthogonal wireframe (in isometric view).

Here is something I often want to do: go from a top-plan wireframe view of something, to a perspective projection, openGL render, and ideally a "top left" or similar orientation. As far as I can make out, I need to go through three dropdown menus to achieve this. First I have to switch from top/plan to left isometric, then from orthogonal to perspective, then from wireframe to OpenGL. That's very tedious so I end up using saved views - however, this is also far from ideal as it will throw me out of any container objects, as well as to a viewpoint that is not necessarily centred on the objects I am working on. Am I missing something - is there a straightforward way to do what I want?

That seems weird - surely rasterising text shouldn't reduce file size - it should be the opposite. Suggests VW is doing something strange when it exports text to pdf.

Yes and some will say, simply wait until each version matures before switching to it , but what's frustrating is that just when a version starts to work... attention then moves to the next one, and any remaining problems with the 'old' one go unfixed.

Looks to me like ambient occlusion is cranked right up - this may be contributing to some of the 'shadow' you see.

Do you have a 'door style' attached to it? If so, it may be that the door style is set up that the 3d visualisation options are set by style rather than instance. You need to edit the door style rather than the door itself to change this.

Ah, I see the option is called "show all details" in the top/plan options. Different to the "show wall, slab and roof components" that is available in section viewport options. FWIW I don't use top plan any more, and use the "merge cross sections" option in horizontal sections when I don't want to see the innards of walls. That doesn't help you here. But I can see why what is described would be problematic. I use "material" classes, which means that I use the same class for a bit of plasterboard whether it's a wall component or modelled indivudually somewhere else in the building. So if I had to turn that class off in order to get my wall to look as I wanted, then it would be a problem if other objects with that class disappeared too.

If JimW were still on board, this is the sort of thing that would have been responded to and perhaps a tutorial video might even have appeared. As it is, it's simply been ignored by VW. Very poor show.

Are we talking about section viewports rather than top-plan viewports here?

I think this can help, yes, it's something that I do. Plumbing fixtures are a typical source of problems, and I often have a class that I can turn off in 3d which makes certain operations run much more smoothly (for example I find the push-pull tool in particular can stop working when there are meshes in the background).

No, I think what @David Poiron means is that it flips around whichever of your components is the "core". In the example of a cavity wall, it's less clear what the 'core' is, but let's say it's the inner leaf, as that tends to be the loadbearing one. So when the wall was flipped, the inner leaf would stay in exactly the same place but the cavity, insulation and outer leaf would move to the other side of it. It's hard to think of a use case that would arise using cavity walls - more likely with wall buildups where you have a structural component that is centred on foundations and then internal and external finishes are attached to it on each side. What I would find useful, and is similar in concept, is to be able to "replace" a wall style simply by specifiying that the core component stays in the same place. This would be useful when you are simply changing a wall buildup to one with a different kind of cladding, which might have a different build-up thickness. Walls are generally set out on the basis of the structural component, so once the design is progressed to a certain stage, in making alterations you'd generally want that structural element to stay in the same place. For example, if you change an internal stud wall from one layer of plasterboard each side to two layers each side, you don't generally want to shift the wall to the side by 12.5mm, you want to keep the studwork in the same place and increase the wall thickness slightly.

The push pull tool can sometimes fail to select surfaces when there's complex geometry in the background. That may or may not be a factor for you here. You could try turning off other layers/classes and see if it makes a difference.

Having now used this tool for a bit - I can confirm that I am seeing exactly the flipping behaviour described above. Working in VW2019. My hunch - not fully tested - I think it's related to situations where the invisible line that connects the start and end points of the undelrying polyline crosses the linear material object itself. And it perhaps something to do with the proportion of the object that sits on one or other side of that line.

Did someone actually decide that's a user friendly way to do something? Amazing. You'd think you might design it so you activate the window tool and then place the window directly into the roof object, like what happens with a regular window in a wall. But instead there must be several counter-intuitive intermediate steps with some traps to fall into along the way.

Well I guess the way I see it, there is not really an agreed definition of what BIM is, or at least it seems to mean different things to different people. Does something being represented in 3d make it "BIM"? Is some kind of 3d representation necessary for something to be "BIM"? I don't know. As @bcd mentions, some people seem to think BIM means "Revit model". How would you define it? Maybe it should be the subject of another thread.

"BIM model" doesn't really mean anything. Or at least, the scope of what it could describe is so wide as to be meaningless.

As per my question to @Wes Gardner, have you ever used the bimobject tool to import something that is then useful in a real world application? This is not a trick question; I just wonder whether anyone at VW has really tested it, in an attempt to understand whether it is actually of any use to users.

Yes, that would be a start. The move / move 3d is quite a good example. And what's with having an "edit" and a "modify" menu with no obvious logic as to what goes in each?

Actually, that was a terrible solution - it just generates more traffic and then you have choked interstates, air pollution and a nationwide town planning catastrophe. The solution is to reduce the number of cars by encouraging people to use more efficient and less damaging forms of transport. To force this into a Vectorworks analogy - don't keep fixing the clogged up dysfunctional parts of the system by building new parallel bits and bypasses and filling them up with new, badly maintained cars trying to get to to chaotic out-of-town shopping complexes miles away. Sort the problem by fixing all the potholes and building us some well organised shops stocked with the best version of each of the things we need, within walking distance so we can get there without trauma and wasted time.

@Wes Gardner have you ever tried there? Have you ever found anything in native VWX format that's actually useful?

Thought I'd call by at this thread to do the now annual update, and edit the title, so we can now make a futile wish for 2021 to be the one where existing stuff is properly fixed, instead of having new semi-functional stuff introduced.

There are hardly any. There are very few companies which provide BIM objects in VW format and that's unlikely to change. Sad but true.