JMR

Thanks Matt, and sorry for the delay in answering. There is a worksheet function =ANGLE('ENERGOS') which I thought would return the orientation of the element in relation to project north. However, it stubbornly returns North-90 (Vertical 90) for all windows and doors, regardless of which way they are pointing: It seems that the Energos dialog window is the only place this orientation can be set, manually. I haven't found any "north setting" that would have an effect on these. In Document Settings / Georeferencing settings true north can be set, but it has no effect on these values, neither does any heliodon on a design layer. Perhaps I am missing something here...or is it not possible to query the orientation of an object in relation to true north? I would need this information for an energy consultant, they sum up the areas of windows and doors facing different bearings and use this data in determining the energy efficiency of the building. I did a workaround with custom data; gave all windows a special record with a pop-up menu of orientations; then used data visualisation to check this and finally pulled a worksheed based on these - problem solved, kind of. I guess one could query the rotation of the object and add/deduct this from known true north and thereby determine the orientation. I assumed that it would be possible to query the orientation into energos automatically, and also into a worksheet, but it seems I was mistaken. Thanks

Hi all, I need a list of windows/doors and their orientations for specialist energy consultation. I see I can manually set windows and door orientations in Energos project settings, but this is too laborous for a large project. Is there a way to get this information automatically, to a worksheet? Thanks.

As to VW 2024 project sharing, is it still recommended to create a new working file every day as described before in this thread? Thanks.

Thanks! I'm getting close but still get these white lines on the edges - even though both colours are set to black (for testing purposes). The same happens with any selected line and shadow color. BTW the shadows are not transparent...the viewport can be pasted as bitmap thus opening access to the transparency controls.

"Artistic render works - line and shadow" - where can this style be found? Can't find it in my resource manager libraries... Also tried the shadow catcher method but get really weird results (see below). The sample file works fine though, but can't figure out what is different in the settings.

Yes, if the core component was different than the other core component, the walls wouldn't join properly, just like in the first image in this thread. I didn't try with no core specified.

As of 2023 SP4 wall joins regarding this situation seem to work fine, although component join operations are needed to clean up some lines: The core component type doesn't seem to have any negative effect any longer. 1243255895_Walljointest.vwx

It would seem it has something to do with the core component:

...and if I save the 2021 file and open it in 2023, it works fine:

Something has changed between 2021 and 2023? 2021: 2023:

It seems to have something to do with the trimmed polyline location..."outside" the building the trim command works fine, inside it becomes very sluggish. As if it was looking for some unseen geometry. There are no spaces or other objects at the same location that I can find. Trim in a blank new file seems to work flawlessly. A bit odd.

Hi all, The trim command is extremely slow with VW 2023. Trimming simple, planar lines takes several seconds now, although not every trimming event. Anyone else run into this? PC machine and VW 2023 Desinger.

Yes, Exactly so. The referenced viewports of the schedules, on a design layer: The viewport-viewports on a sheet: The individual schedules need to be exact copies of themselves, otherwise the columns won't line up. First I tried to replace the existing worksheet in each file with the template that had the same name as the original; a bit surprisingly, this replaced the worksheet but not the column sizes. The solution was not to replace the original schedule worksheet but import a new one (the template) with a new name and use that. This way the column sizes stayed put across files. The crops of the viewports are invisible and a bit larger than worksheets, this is to make it easier to notice if drawings have been added to schedules. In this case there were ten referenced files.

Thanks. I tried the Title Block Manager but couldn't make it work/look the way I wanted. I ended up using dirty tricks: 1. Created a drawing schedule "template" and copied the worksheet to all files and put it on a certain DL 2. Made viewport references from each file to the master schedule file 3. Made viewports of the schedule DL viewports to a certain sheet layer and arranged the viewports tidily on the sheet Caveats: -Changes to sheet data have to be made in the individual files -The individual worksheets have to be calculated within the files they are in -The master schedule file references must be updated before publishing It does work, though.

Hi all, Is there a way to create a master drawing list that reads Title Block data/Sheet data from multiple files? I have six different files with their own drawing schedules, but would like to combine them into one. Thanks

Meanwhile in one of the other CAD packages world: https://www.the-nordic-letter.com/# There is much to learn there. As to the VW subscription model, the reported annual cost will be way, waaayyy too high. I'm afraid it will kill any chance of VW becoming mainstream in countries where it is not (which is most countries I guess). Software can also be leased or bought via 3rd party financing. Therefore the annual cost of eg. Archicad license paid in installments + subscription could be equal or less than annual VW subscription license, if I'm not totally wrong with the prices.

It would seem you are summing up data in some columns but not in those columns showing horizontal lines. Check what you have on "summarize values" tick box. I gather you want to summarize similar situations, look for these sigma signs: In general, worksheets are one of the most powerful tools in Vectorworks, once you get the hang of it.

About the pricing... Since VW market share in the architecture business is rather small, at least in the US and EU, one would think the new pricing/subscription scheme would reflect this. That is, I would expect the pricing would be set so that the market share of VW would GROW in the future. I would like to see this and in general it would be healthy for the Archicad-Revit duopoly situation. I don't think this will happen now. The annual price is way too high compared to Archicad, it's actually about one third MORE if you already own an Archicad license. Graphisoft also has the small-office Start edition, which sells for under 3000e, a perpetual license with the option to upgrade for a fee. Of course not all the bells and whistles are included. Considering the cost of training a new VW user versus buying an Archicad perpetual license with subscription and bypassing the difficulty of finding someone who dares to go down the VW career road (employees very much consider this, since software proficiency is their intellectual capital), it's not clear at all which path is most viable. IMHO the annual price should be set somewhere around 5-600e/usd at maximum...in order to attract new customers. While there is no initial license fee any longer, it has to be remembered that one has to keep on paying no matter what, in order to be able to use the software. It's a very different situation from having a perpetual license. I guess now the important question is what will Graphisoft do...will they keep their perpetual licenses or not. I'm afraid the amount of VW users is not going to grow due to this pricing change, rather the opposite. Hopefully I'll be proved wrong. As a side note, despite the pricey subscription model, some Revit using companies (large practices mostly) published an open letter complaining about the lack of development, I think a few years back. High price and constant cash flow do not guarantee anything as such. Of course they are/were in a market dominating position.

...Until I have to hire more people?

Jumping in a bit late but...am I getting it right, for us VSS customers the annual subscription price will almost TRIPLE ?!!! If so, this will KILL Vectorworks in the architecture business, at least in countries where VW is the minority software. Archicad subscription is about 1000e + VAT annually, Vectorworks will be €1495 + VAT annually. One initially has to buy an Archicad license for 6400e + VAT though, but when one factors in that almost no-one knows how to use Vectorworks and has to be trained from scratch, the costs cancel each other out very quickly. It's already a risk for an architect's practice to use a non-mainstream software since potential employees take this into consideration when thinking about their careers. Some have actually left because of Vectorworks and eg. project sharing bugs, back in 2017 and 2018. Now THAT is expensive. It's really a no-brainer then. Too bad.

Usually this error occurs if the DWG file being exported is open in some DWG viewer application or other CAD application. Might be worth trying a simpler export path on your local computer (if possible) too.

Is there a keyboard shortcut that would cancel Redshift render? Now that the rendering started I can see it will take 10 hours, but too late now apparently...thanks.

I just found out that the exact opposite can help, too 🙂 The file size went down from 3MB to 300KB...after checking the box.

We have developed a certain workflow that suits us well and has proven to be reliable, when it comes to exported DWG size and integrity with custom records and many other things like the LTS in Autocad. We export DWG's from saved views. Those saved views are also the views we mainly work in. We also create sheet layer viewports from saved views mainly. Only some elevation annotation etc. is added in the annotation space of the sheets. I'm sure there are other good methods as well but this is the one that works well for us. Some related discussion can be found here: I haven't encountered the beforementioned draw order issue for a long time, it seems something might have changed under the hood.

I haven't had an in-depth look at the settings for a while, but generally we still export DWG's from the file export menu and not via publish. With the exception of elevations which have a lot of annotation graphics, those we export via sheet publish. The custom records and LTS seem to export fine at least with 2021. 2022 I can't say yet.