Jeremy Best

I encountered this issue Michael, and as I recall simply restarting my Mac was all that was required to remedy it.

What a fruit-filled update!

I’m rather late to the party, but here’s my two cents. Based on my 8+ years of providing technical support for Vectorworks, I’d say your hunch is right on the money. Some network traffic security or antivirus ‘Real time protection’ functionality will be blocking either network traffic or the installer from doing its thing, respectively. Or both. Please post back here with what the solution turns/turned out to be

Hi Sean, I'm sorry for the teensy size of my contribution but needs-must (or should I say, time-allows!) Thanks for including a screen recording which goes some way to clarify potential causes. At least in my mind! Just shooting from the hip here, but I suspect the mirror is (wrongly) permanently cached with data associated with the Viewport concerned. You might be able to trigger its release by manipulating the viewport in particular ways, such as toggling the render mode (which I see you have tried) or some other way, but I suspect you'll just need to delete the Viewport and create a new one. If this Viewport is associated with a camera, you might need to delete and replace that too before creating the new Viewport [if using a camera as the source of the view]. Good luck!

It sounds like the actions performed have created a corruption in your document. If you have not added significant work to this document since, then the easiest solution is to open a Vectorworks backup file then carry on with that. If all your Vectorworks backup files also contain this condition, hopefully your files are stored in cloud storage such as Dropbox or OneDrive because then you can access historical versions of files, allowing you to go back in time this way. There are two other paths that might work to correct this issue, but they might be difficult to achieve: Pass your files through to Vectorworks Technical Support. If deemed necessary they can pass them through to Vectorworks engineers who have tools to examine and possibly manually correct corruptions in files. Get online with a technically astute Vectorworks user who might be able to manipulate the file that produces the same result in a less invasive way. Good luck!

If some of Vectorworks' processes remain after such a crash, restart your PC to ensure this doesn't have a negative effect on Vectorworks after it is reopened. There are extremely few users on this forum who could make use of .dmp files are not likely to happen across your post, so reach out to your local Vectorworks distributor for technical support. They will pass such files on to engineers who can interpret them.

@gfyfe, Vectorworks might not be freezing, it might just be taking a long time to complete the operation. The more detailed/complex the mesh object is, the longer it will take. This object contains an extraordinary number of vertices. If you give it ample opportunity to complete on a sufficiently-equipped computer, you should get the desired result. If Vectorworks crashes during the operation your computer might not have enough memory needed to support the process to completion. Open Task Manager (on Windows) and Activity Monitor (on Mac) before you start the 'simplify mesh' or 'convert to generic solids' operations and keep an eye on Vectorworks' RAM/memory use. If they top out and then Vectorworks crashes that is the most likely cause. @Tom W. Just in case it is helpful now –or in the next year or two– there are a growing number of apps and online services that generate 3D models from a photograph. Earlier releases of this type of thing were clearly too rough for use in this type of work but they have gotten noticable better recently and will become very good and highly relevant in the coming weeks, months or years. Worth giving them ago and checking their current viability.

If you are manually arranging these images every time you update your design, you can save yourself a lot of time/effort using the following method if you create these images using Sheet Layer Viewports instead. It will make it easier to generate the same size and proportioned images again and again. If using the Render Bitmap tool suits your needs better for some reason, ensure you have the 'Enable Alpha Transparency' checkbox selected in the Settings dialog for this tool: If you have all the appropriate settings and it's not performing accordingly, make sure you try restarting your computer. Failing that, go through the usual troubleshooting workflow to identify the cause.

Having one or more objects far enough away from the file's Internal Origin ('far out objects') can create a massive variety of symptoms, most of which will seem completely unrelated to any object or action a user might be performing. You will find instructions to diagnose and correct this if they are the cause, here:

For anyone else that might find this thread: Seeing as this problem persists no matter the version of Vectorworks, the cause is most likely the file itself or a condition within it. (It is noteworthy that it doesn't occur on Mac, but a difference in computational efficiency or a difference in the software dependencies engaged might account for this). I suggest you check for far out objects in the file. It could be due to a corrupt object as well, but they're harder to isolate. You'll find instructions here:

Thought I'd add value to this discussion: I'm on macOS Monterey (12.7.4) and my Vectorworks crashes are recorded in the Console app. You can right-click on them to 'Reveal in Finder' which (currently) reveals that they are saved in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/

I follow the AI space closely Matt and I've heard many experts explain why they are not 'smart' enough yet to made proper, considered, design decisions. Someone posted an image of an AI generated image of a floor plan this week and it exemplified why the the image generating models are of no use for this sort of process yet and probably won't be for years. But, there are other types of solutions that can help with floor plans and other aspects. Maybe you can use them in combination with Vectorworks. Check out these 6 and 7-month old videos (really old in the world of AI development) featuring some promising looking products that might be useful in your workflow:

@Jen Casa, I've just been online with a user experiencing this exact same problem. The customer has two licenses. License A is installed on one computer and has this issue. License B is installed on two computers but this issue only occurs on one of them. All Windows computers. Have tried everything but a clean installation of Vectorworks at this stage. Have determined the issue: Is not fixed by restarting. Is not file-specific. Is not due to User Folder data. Is not remedied by the Vectorworks Updater's 'REPAIR' function. Does not appear to be due to software conflict (although not fully ruled out). Is not fixed by a clean installation of most recent graphics card driver. Is not subject to having multiple displays.

Hi @Elias B, Because Vectorworks was working but now is not, the cause of the problem is likely caused by something that has changed and because yours is the only report I've heard, at this stage it is likely caused by something particular to your machine. Because there are correlations / conditions relating to graphics involved –as @Dave Donley and @Pat Stanford's suggested– your graphics card drivers are the likely culprit. I understand you've applied the latest drivers, however graphics card driver installers only replace superseded components. They don't reinstall the whole thing so if one or more graphics card driver components have become corrupt, they won't get replaced. I suggest you run that graphics card driver installer again, but this time select the 'Custom/Advanced' install option, then check the 'Perform a clean installation' option offered on the next step. If this is on a laptop, you may then need to assign the dedicated graphics card for use with Vectorworks.

The new location for the Interiorcad Manual is: https://icmanual.scrollhelp.site. But choosing 'Interiorcad Help' from the Help menu in Vectorworks is working as of this moment.