John Whyte

Ive got a symbol (thats made up of multiple symbols, its a sink & tap so there is the sink basin, the tap body, spout and handle). I want to make them all unique (so they are no longer symbols) is there a simple way to do this ? At the moment im click through to edit the symbol, copying the elements and pasting them outside of the symbol, then peicing them back together and grouping the result but this is very time consuming.

Ive just exported a drawing as a .dwg to pass onto a 3rd party, before i sent it i tryed opening it in Autocad LT 14 and i got the following warning (see image). I was looking on the Autocad website and they have a whole section about 'trusted dwg' which basically talks about how autodesk product generated dwgs can be 'trusted' and dwg files generated by other software may have corrupt / incorrect data.. I guess that its just autodesk trying to scare people but has any one had a bad experience with vwx generated dwgs have corrupt / incorrect data ?

Quick question about the purge command - does it only delete items that are not in use, if i have a working drawing is it safe to run it if i only want to keep all the items which are still in the file

Thanks Monadnoc, after running the purge command on the "deleted everything - classes, sheetlayers, drawigs etc.vwx" file it came down to 126kb. That seems to have been the issue on all the drawings.

Im drafting the room below in 3D the room has multiple wall thicknesses, i know i can draft the walls using the Wall tool in the "building shell" tool set, and set wall thicknesses. But what about where there are multiple thicknesses like in the bottom of the left wall, i know i can draw another rectangle set it to the same hight as the wall and then use "add solids" but then it loses the wall functionality (being able to insert doors, windows etc.

Ive got 7 .dwg files that ive imported into 1 design layer in a .vwx file. The 7 .dwg file combined weigh about 23.9mb. When imported into VWX the file is about 120mb. This is not unusual ive previously found that 500kb .dwg files can sometimes weigh about 5-7mb when imported into VWX. What is strange though is that i cant find out where this extra bloat is coming from, i did a test where i deleted one floor (out of the 7) at a time to see if one of them was particularly heavy - hardly anything changed. (see the results in the images below) I also tested deleting all the sheet layers that were imported from the .dwgs (the design layer was kept the same) - again hardly anything changed. I did the same with deleting all the classes (apart from the ones that cant be delted None, 0, dims etc) and put everything into 0 - again hardly anything changed. I also deleted all the drawings in the design layer - again hardly anything changed, i think the file was 3mb lighter, thats 3mb of a 120mb file - This one was REALLY strange as this is where you would think the most weight in the file is. I also did a test where i deleted everything - all drawings, classes (apart from 0, none) all sheet layers etc - and the file was still 117mb - again Really odd. Also whats odd is that if i delete everything then save the file, then add the drawing from the design layer back in from an external file the file size hardly changes at all, which suggests some of the drawing information is remaining, although i cant see where. Any idea how i can slim these files down / find why they are taking up so much space, is there a command / function to see the size (mb) of each element ? You can see the results of my tests in the image below This is what the files look like as .dwgs pre import, see there is a quite a difference in size between them. I had to blur out the project name in the above image.

We get allot of drawings from a 3rd party that have allot of information on them that we dont need for our work, we turn off this info via the classes and save the class configuration in as a Saved View. We get allot of drawings from this 3rd party and their classes are always the same - is there a way we can export / save our Saved view so that we can just import it into any new file they send us so the classes will be set correctly for us. At the moment we are turning off the classes on a file by file basis and creating a new Saved View each time. I suppose i could make a "3rdparty-template.vwx" file that would have the Saved View in it and then import their drawings into this file, but ideally id like to be able to just add the Saved View to an existing file, rather than adding their drawings to a template file.

Ive got a 3D model that im generating sections and plans from (like the image below). I need to put dims and notes on the drawing, but if i put the dims and notes on the model itself the dims and notes will show up in multiple sections / viewports. Is there a way i can place them on my drawing so that they only show up in one viewport without them showing up in other viewports.

Thanks StructuralBIMGuy - could i clarify the acronym "NNA".

Is there a setting where i can set 3D / Section viewports in a sheet layer to automatically update if there have been any changes.. instead of having to click "UPDATE" in the viewports object info panel. I guess this is set to make you click "UPDATE" by default to save memory when loading a sheet layer, but with machines today it seems a bit unnecessary.

Im getting started with the MEP tools in vectorworks, im mainly interested in using the lighting, small power and circuiting features. Are there any good tutorials / guides to get me up to speed on these, ive had a search around but couldn't find anything.

Im just getting to grips with the 3d features in vwx (after using vwx 2d for years - previously all 3d was done in sketchup) Ive got a room with a sloping ceiling, the ceiling itself dosnt need to be modeled, all i need are the walls which i will later take sections from for setting out drawings. The room looks like this (see image below - produced in Sketchup). Ive used the walls tool to draw the walls and extrude them to the correct height, but how can i get the slope in the wall height to achieve whats in the image below ?

I trialed vwx on my mac (i downloaded this trial version from the vectorworks official site). I then purchased a copy from a reseller (again an official reseller). I deleted the trial version (by dragging it into the trash and emptying the trash - this is how you uninstall programs on a mac). I then installed the bought copy; during the install process it asks me for my serial number (starting E9) which i input - it all install fine, but then when i launch the program the splash screen shows the old serial number and then says my license has expired. Any ideas where its still picking up this old serial number from ? Is there a .plist file i need to delete on my mac or something like that ?