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herbieherb

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Everything posted by herbieherb

  1. What you have to keep in mind is that the change is quite big, even if you already know Vectorworks in 2D. If you want to make the transition in self-study with learning by doing, assume a 5 year learning period that will not be productive at all in the beginning. If you have an employee who already knows the tricks and can do all the model setups, it will take about 1 year until you know the most important things. After about 2 years you are ready to set up your projects efficiently. The whole thing also depends on your talent, but you already have a very long 2D experience with Vectorworks. It is highly recommended to buy the know-how, either by a new employee, or by trainings and tutorials.
  2. When working in 3D, the question is not only whether it saves time or not. (Depending on how you work, it does.) It has rather a huge influence on the quality of the drafts and the execution. When working in 2D, thinking is often caught up in the orthogonal views of the floor plan, section and façade. One sees things as problems that only appear as such in these limited views. Conversely, by constructing the model completely in 3D, one is pointed to problems that would never have been visible in sections and floor plans. You therefore have a much more comprehensive idea of the project in your head, which of course improves the quality of the design. In addition, visualizations of all corners of the project can be made at any time at no extra cost. This improves communication with clients and planners enormously.
  3. Render the scene twice with different materials and then cut the two films together.
  4. Because our library is very large, we synchronize it from the server to the individual computers. Vectorworks then accesses the local workgroup library. This works very well, but only speeds up the program start. Very large files are no problem at all for Vectorworks, as long as they don't fill the RAM completely. For example, hidden geometry has no effect at all on the display speed.
  5. Best thing ever to work in 3D. I can't navigate without it anymore. Without this device, I feel like my right hand is missing (althought I use it with my left hand). Also its Driver supports Vectorworks very well for years now. I also use this mouse for a while. It's relatively big but when you have big hands its very comfortable. It has a scroll wheel and an additional middle mouse button. No more accidental scrolling while moving in the plans. And it has a super sick resolution of 8200 dpi. This means you can move your mouse pointer over three 24″ screens by moving the mouse less than 2″. Very comfortable for the wrist and you can still work extremely precise. If you increase the mouse speed so much, you will have to get used to it and others might not be able to work with it. They'll call you crazy. But you'll love it once you get the hang of it. Something you don't notice until you use the corresponding 3D-Connection mouse pad with the 3D-Connection Mouse is that you were suffering from static friction with your old mouse. With the 3D-Connection mouse you won't notice any static friction at all, you work much more precisely and comfortably. Before I got the 3D-Connecion, I was a big fan of Logitech mice. They were all very well crafted and I never had any problems with drivers and receivers. Meanwhile I would only recommend the 3D-Connection mouse for CAD. For my home the Logitech is enough.
  6. Make sure that you measure in the right plane. In 3D you can measure the distance on the screen-plane, on the layer plane, a custom working plane or an automatic plane. Don't rely on what you see in your model, as a line coul'd look right but you measure into an unintentional direction. When you are in a 3D-View setting the active plane as automatic is a good desicion in most cases.
  7. The German support indicated that it is a bug and reported it. Cast Shadows of Objects Removed by Section did'nt work for more than two years and no one noticed. 🙃 btw: very nice result @Christiaan
  8. I tried to make an example for you but it seems that the option Cast Shadows of Objects Removed by Section doesn't work atm. So you can't see any reflections. But the sample has a glass material with transparency, cloudy look and shadows. And as soon as the bug is fixed it shoul'd also show reflections. The file attached is a VW2017 file because this is the last version when the reflections did work. When you convert it to 2018 or 2019 the reflections disappear 😕 This is how it shoul'd look like: glass.vwx
  9. Here is a description of the material above: As color i use a noise turbulence shader to imitate a cloudy reflection. For the reflection of trees and stuff behind the cutting plane i use a common mirror shader: And finally there is a transparency-shader with about 75% transparency. Finally adjust the size of the clouds by the texture-size and activate the shadows for the material. In the settings of the section activate the shadows of objects behind the cutting-plane. Else you don't see any reflections of trees and stuff behind the cutting-plane. The glass shader doesn't work at all in an orthagonal view because it's math is based on the angle that you look at it.
  10. For orthagonal views i use a fake glass material. The glass shader only works in a perspective view as zoomer mentioned. Use a dark grey color, make it a little glossy with the mirror shader, make sure there are some objects to mirror behind the view (trees other buildings etc.) Reflections from hdri backgrounds don't work too because of the orthagonal view. When you want the window to reflect clouds, you have to fake them with a cloudy noise-shader as color. Now make the material a little transparent so you see some of the interior. This makes it look a little more like glass. The advantage of this method is that you get real shadows on the glass, which is what you want in facades, but is not what it looks in reality. Now only use this material in orthagonal views by overwriting the material in the class settings of your glass in the viewport.
  11. Is this also the reason that it takes longer to move a line than to move a polygon? Is the polygon already optimized and the line not? I found out that way: I draw 40'000 lines and measure the time until I can continue working. The same takes much less time with 40'000 polygons with e.g. 3 points. Actually, it should be the other way round, because I have to calculate more coordinates for the polygon?
  12. There is no tolerance. You have to draw the walls exactly. Also make sure that the stacked walls do not overlap.
  13. This error has not yet occurred with us. This seems to be more of a network-related problem. How is your network structured? Which operating system do you use?
  14. Users tend to think the problem is in the software when in fact it's sitting in front of the screen or in the hardware. We looked for the causes and eliminated them. This results in PS working stable for years now in our daily work. Some were in the software, some in the hardware, some in front of the screen. From our point of view the ones in the software are mostly solved since VW2017, at least for Windows users. Apple unfortunately has problems with the implementation of SMB, while AFP is not developed further. Not only Vectorworks has to struggle with this. I can't tell if that's better now, because we have no Apple computer in the office since about a year. Since PS is not only a tool in Vectorworks itself, but has to work in a network, you also have to do an error analysis outside of Vectorworks. Which protocols do you use? Where is the server located? What kind of device is this? Do you use a cloud? Dropbox? The easiest way to eliminate all these sources of network related errors is to make a local copy of the project-file and try to send/receive its changes to this local file. You can't completely rule out network problems yet. The file may have been corrupted before you took it off the network. Nevertheless some network problems can be excluded like this. If it has nothing to do with the network, you have to try to reproduce the error. All project participants have to communicate exactly what they did. Often someone just played with the admin rights without knowing it and shot down other users. In 2016 we had a lot of problems with PS until I found out that an employee kept linking his backups to the project file. Recently someone complained in the German forum, until he found out that a coworker regularly released his checked out objects with its admin rights. Many users also think that Vectorworks crashed just because it didn't respond for a few minutes. Then they quit the program manually. Depending on which phase they do this in, they may corrupt the project file. Simply blaming the software for the errors is easy, but not helpful. If you have excluded incompatible hardware and users as sources of error, you can still rightly complain to Vectorworks.
  15. If you use these alpha-channel pictures, don't use compressed jpg. The compression makes the holes look frayed.
  16. Any news on this? Is it a bug? Is it related to the threadripper processor? Is there a plan to fix it?
  17. In the same window where you change the class visibilities you can double click on the class. Then you can change any class settings for this viewport. You can also change more than one class by selecting them and hit the edit... button
  18. Just take normal metals. Draw your cuts-outs as black/white pictures. Use these black/white pictures as transparency map.
  19. That's more like another bug you uncovered there. Thanks for the extensive testing.
  20. This is a very strange behaviour that I never saw in our work.
  21. I'm pretty sure they spoke of the class overrides in viewports. With the magic wand tool you can easily transfer the settings, which have to be made quite laboriously, to other viewports. This option comes closest to Archicad's workflow. The only difference: In VW you override the classes, not the colors. I wouldn't be afraid to control all line types and fills consistently via classes. This is the best way to do it in Vectorworks. Several hundred classes are also quite normal if an entire project is in a Vectorworks file.
  22. I think in the standard configuration the associated dimensions is activated. This means when you change a dimension you also change the associated object. With this option you can change a wall without touching it. Your problems with walls may be caused by this.
  23. Sorry I don't use the english version so i may misapply some terms. I mean associated dimensions.
  24. We don't have such troubles with walls. Do you use relative dimensions?
  25. It's the single core speed thats bottlenecking. Not much network traffic meanwhile. When i open a file i hadn't opened for a week, where others had made a lot of changes i also have to wait about 10 minutes to get the changes. The only recommendation i can give you so far is to not postpone sending your changes when you do a lot of work on viewports in the layouts. This seems to affect the time to send changes the most. We've located most of the problems we had in front of the machines. You can do a lot of bad things with PS. Copying your workfile or getting a new one without checking out leads to objects, that can't be changed by anybody. Afterwards the users misused admin-rights leading to data loss. Deleted classes can be recreated by accident when others copy objects that had the class and they didn't received the changes yet etc. We had a lot of problems with vw2016 and PS untill i found out that one single employee regularly reconnected his backup files with the project file. You have to give your employees workflows a very close look to find out whats going wrong.
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