zoomer

I have a similar but far less complicated basement situation at a sloped site. I divided Foundations over 2 Stories, the lower Foundations with Walls on top in between, the upper Foundations and all Walls starting from there. Then there is an extra non standard Foundation, so it will get its own (Wall)Style anyway and so it can also get its own Level. Everything else that does not match gets local overwriting in OIP. In your case it is a bit difficult. Generally it looks more like custom modeling with Solids. For IFC's sake you may want to put it on a Story and use VW Walls or just tag it manually. You can use a non level bound Wall Style for foundations and base Walls. But you can also add 30+ of your Levels to assign them manually to Walls in OIP, in case this can help organizing your modeling. I did so in some cases where I had not enough data of existing and had to correct some of the levels later over time when modeling. This was quite handy as when you adapt such a Level, all related bound Walls will update automatically.

I absolutely love Room Plan. I think dimension accuracy is pretty decent. But my problem is the quality of the Meshes. I mean the simple boxes from furniture are good. But everything more complex, like 4 touching Walls of a room or a Wall with a Window opening are a Mesh-mess. There are simple inaccuracies like Wall "connections" not meeting at the same point. More annoying are that the "boolean-like" construction of a Wall with a Window opening has slightly non planar component faces. And the organization of the Meshes itself. Some Meshes include a set of independent Volumes. I am not able to create any Solids from these important Mesh Elements, like Walls. And I had hoped that Room Plan would do an "idealization" and simplification of the scan. Like forcing everything reasonable rectilinear into a XY, XZ or YZ plane and round ugly numbers to a full cm and such. Is there any room for improvement from VW/Nomads side, or does Apples API not allow better Meshes ?

I have only scanned a single Point Cloud of a room so far. AFAIK working with even single point clouds or photogrammetry in VW always meant - scaling - rotating - aligning - cropping When I stopped scanning I got a warning that I will no more be able to continue scanning. Which I didn't want, but I also expected that Nomad that way would do some magic to keep location of the scans synchronous. But how could you realistically align PCs or find a special point to align both PC ? As soon as I zoom in a bit I lose overview. What do you expect to do with the PC, or better how do you create VW geometry from it, by creating a DTM from it ?

So that sounds like your memory pressure graph is still all green (?) So there should not be any lag. You can try if that helps but I agree, can't be a solution. It would have been easy if your memory would have got yellow/brownish .... We could have said you have too less memory/weak computer. And very likely it would work fine on a 128 GB Mac Studio. But if memory pressure stays green, I see no Mac limitation reason for VW suddenly starting to lag after exceeding a certain number of Spaces ....... Maybe you can send your files to VW Support, that they can check if everything really works as designed.

I read of issues where repair/update failed in a loop because the Updater insisted on first closing a running VW - which could not be closed as there was none running .....

When you have your project opened and it starts to lag, open Activity Monitor, Memory Tab and watch the memory pressure graph at the bottom. As long as the curve stays green, everything should be ok. But when it switches to yellow it will get slow and you will need more RAM. Easier said than done as there is no option to increase memory afterwards or my M1 Mini even was already maxed out with its only 16 GB offer. Does not necessarily mean that VW Spaces are the culprit. Could be that you exceeded the limits with your project in general. E.g. maybe when deleting 20% of the building, it may run fine - with Spaces. Or maybe that Spaces are memory hungry and work inefficient.

Not sure if there is a workaround. Yes, Selection is "X" key. I usually have keystroke "X" assigned to my Mouse Forward thumb button. (Fit View to Backward) And/or assigned to various 3DConnecion or Wacom input devices buttons.

Not really. As as it disturbs so much in screenshots render modes. On the other hand, Tools > Show Origin, that perfect shymarker is an often used feature for me. And I never understood why it is only available in 2D top plan. RGB axes are just to large and colourful. And to complicated to control their visibility. But it could be worse. Bricscad has a small nice RGB axes option ..... that usually marks 0,0,0 But first you can't snap to the origin and second, when panning/zooming the View away from origin, the marker will jump near to left bottom of the view and make you confident drawing near origin, no matter if you are 20 m or 3 parsecs away from origin ......

Should work fine as it works well here for decent project sizes even on my M1 16 GB Mini.

That is good to hear. I always preferred VMWare overall. But at that time frame it was unfortunately always overall slower and realistically not usable for professional 3D CAD work, at least wit Microstation. I am sure public ARM switch on Windows will not be as fast as with Apple. I do not really follow the Windows X86/ARM emulation nor Parallels/VMWare progress but would be excited when Windows-only Apps run reasonably on Windows ARM emulation and even VMs. Or VW running well on a Windows VW on Linux. While testing Windows 10 in a Parallels VM on Mac (during Apples most bad hardware offers 2012-2020) I was also sure I could easily switch from Mac back to Windows ..... No need to care for most hardware drivers, BIOS updates, ..... and super fast boot times. Once testing real (BTW great) PC hardware, Windows looked a bit different and I also tried Linux but decided to suffer a bit longer with Apple. At least since M2 or M3 I feel confident my patience with Apple was wise.

BTW, does VW run well directly on real Windows for ARM devices ? If, then the rest would be just Parallels or VMware not offering proper GPU faking support. DirectX in that case. My VM Ware and Parallels experience is a bit dated. I ran my Microstation via VMware and later via Parallels (2007-2009 ?) to avoid Bootcamp and be able work on OSX. At that time it was still OpenGL. But my experience was that VMware was super slow in general and OpenGL support was not enough to run Microstation reasonably enough, while Parallels was much faster generally and offered sufficient OpenGL performance for realistic 3D working on larger projects. But what did not work nevertheless ... older legacy OpenGL features like e.g. full screen crosshair cursor did slow Microstation down unrealistically. (Unfortunately I worked that way for half a year until I finally figured that out ...) So I think for support, running VW on Windows a) on a VM and b) with an extra ARM X86 emulation may add some extra layers of unreliability.

Yes, that is what I hoped for ..... or something in OIP on per object basis ....

Is there a way to manually switch between LODs in Design Layers ? (Or would I need to change my DL scales to be able to examine the LODs ?)

Oh, then you should also ask on the german forum .... https://www.vectorworksforum.eu As it could be either a setting issue or just a bug with their Windows for your special configuration. (With the VW US version, we can open files with german Windows, but we can't edit them or change settings to test) When Wall Closures were released, Computerworks needed one extra year to make their Windows and Doors compatible with Wall Closures. But since VW 2024 (or even 2023 ?) the german PIOs are meant to work well with Wall Closures. But I also tend to @Matt Panzer, I think it is the (here named) TypeRabbet : "innen / innen abgefast" Setting that does interfere here. Looks quite funny in a macro shot :

So is there another nice iOS App .... ? - non abo/subscription, one time paid App - saving locally on iPhone, not using any cloud and credentials - exporting suitable 3D output formats (like DWG, FBX, USD, ...) - max accuracy used of hardware sensor capabilitiy

Actually I tried the same today. As for the Point Cloud, I also wondered why I got and had to upload two 50 MB files. (why do I need the cloud drive at all ?) As I do not really like to work with Point Clouds in VW, I tried to open both in Bricscad. As I see, the one without VW in the name is rotated (Y's up or so) and the one with the VW suffix is rotated correctly ..... But somehow the North direction is off !? (Although all Nomads RoomPlan, PointCloud, .. scanning seem to use the same north offset, but each his own n*90° rotation here ? Or is direction just arbitrarily from where you start scanning)) I am fine with the simplified RoomPlan accuracy. It is about 1 cm off for around 4 meters. But when you come back around after turning 360 degrees, the furniture (boxes) it scanned are way off dimensions, although they initially looked reasonable. The OBJ is a not so practical single Mesh Object in VW, while it works fine in Bricscad, offering a separate Mesh for each part. I wonder why the overall accuracy or rounding is not possible. Is that an Apple API issue or VW's implementation. I mean especially the 4 Room Walls that scanning creates with reasonable accuracy but they don't meet corners where Walls should be connected. Even worse, each single Wall seems to have intersecting Faces which prohibits conversion to Solids in Bricscad - while all those furniture boxes convert fine. The USD is basically accessible for separate parts by Meshes in VW. But it is again hidden in an arbitrarily mess of unnecessary, redundant "Group" orgy. AFAIR I had to double click groups 5 times or more until could access Edit Mode of an arbitrary Room Wall, another arbitrary Room Wall vs all the rest of Walls and Boxes ... !?

Great survey-ing and VW modeling as always. I wouldn't have it designed that way too, but on the photo, overall it looks quite inviting with the garden work. Do you do only the survey or are contracted for some renovation and changes too ? I waste hours of my life watching restorations on youtube. Motor bikes, cars, Englishmen restoring french , Frenchmen restoring abandoned UK buildings, Americans restoring Portuguese ranches, Dutchmen renovating Italian stone houses .... What an gigantic mess in most cases - but so rewarding when drawn through .... I think it was just a later change, meant to visually adapt the garage to the whole ensemble. Should work reasonably for the owners from the whole property. Just the neighbor may suffer looking behind the backdrop ....

Is there any recommended VW Nomad "Room Plan"-like iOS App that works locally on the Phone ? Using Lidar and producing simplified geometry that can be exported to macOS CAD/3D Apps.

I like the garage Roof combination 🙂

But AFAIK there was also another problem with missing VW menus with Sonoma 14.1.x, discussed on the german forum. Which seemed to be fixed with the release of Sonoma 14.2

Yes, I had really a hard (hardware) time between 2012 and 2021-2022-2023. What a waste ....

Yes, other well known PC manufacturers ask for similar prices, but regarding the free market component prices it is ridiculous. Even regarding the longer use time or other Apple benefits. But Apple's default models, which are reasonably priced, do not meet the exceptions of pro or not so mainstream users at all. And since these are no more upgradable like they were in the past, this gets a bit of annoying.

I agree with @bjoerka I have the max 16 GB in my M1 Mini. It was astonishing about what ugly large files you can open. Even those that weren't much fun to work with on the unlimited PC and similar lagging there. While for normal usage with different Apps and things like memory demanding chrome tabs and such things, low memory M Macs will work great with small lags when switching between Apps. Nevertheless when needing the whole memory for a single App like VW, CAD or 3D, exceeding this (memory usage getting browny in Activity Monitore and will lead to such laggy behavior that it is no more fun to work with. For VW I would never recommend less than 32 GB, better 64 to be a bit future proof. The only problem is Apple's ridiculous Memory upgrade prices .....

Once a M3 Max and or Ultra Studio available (on the free market) we can discuss if at least my R21 will still run on my Mac ...... R21 (migrated from Intel Trash Can or installed but with 2021 MacOS ?) seems to still run fine on M1 Mini on Sonoma 14.2 (official, no more Public Beta now here) But I am not sure if it will install from scratch on Sonoma or an already available macOS 15 ? So M3 MBP C4D users using pre Subscription versions welcome .... (BTW, C4D still offers perpetual licenses (and maybe upgrades?), just that C4D is former full Studio Version only now, which entry price and upgrades means nearly two time the price of former C4D Architecture or 3-4 times of C4D basic edition interesting for e.g. VRAY4C4D users ..... but at least there is !)

Is this Twinmotion ? Via Datasmith export ? Is it the same for FBX or C4D export ? For the Wall, for me it looks like VW does this as a simple Wall, overall, could have 3 Material assignments, left side, right side and for the slim sides. For classic exports/exchange by FBX to Modo or C4D to Cinema, keep hierarchy worked great. As you usually worked with or changed geometry in the 3D App. No with never real time renderers like Twinmotion, I tend to a less editing workflow and more often dumb the geometry down to by Material.