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Ross Harris

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Posts posted by Ross Harris

  1. I  find myself constantly clicking the wrong button in the OIP - I'm putting it down to brain rewiring from Revit (thats my excuse)!

    As a general workflow enhancement is it possible for the cooks to tab this dialog box with the preference to the front tab given to the button clicked in the OIP. You could do all your class/layer operations in on dialog rather than having to exit and open the other.

    Is it also possible to subgroup like the OIP dialog when you select a viewport to edit class info? It would certainly help being able to turn on/off groups at a time like design layer operations -  tabbed would be great here too.

     

    Cheers!

     

     

  2. Unfortunately that issue seems fairly prevailant no matter the specs. If you’re really needing rendering grunt, then multi core CPU is the way to go. Everything else needs a high per core clock speed which is generally a quad core i7 - i’ve Got the i7 7700k 4.2 ghz quad core processor with a GTX1080 and have the same issues. I think is a best of both worlds cpu - the program generally flies along, but there is a hit in the rendering time - or coffee time :)

    I’m keen to investigate or hear if anyone has one of the new AMD chips - the ryzen 7 1800x 8 core or the threadripper 1950x 16 core - they.ve both got good single core clock speeds ....and loads of cores for pumping out renders. I’m finding myself doing more and more rendering these days... so it looks like another pc build is on the way ;) 

  3. Its looking darn great... as usual things I could have used in the last project lol! Yes sigh... roll on sometime in November for the Aus/NZ version.... With the new features vids I've hopefully convinced a colleague to come to the light from the Revit dark side! If only one of the new features was an on request extended trial... its a huge amount to take in in one month when you're a sole operator.

  4. Yes - that tool and the site modelling capabilities totally sealed the deal to move away from Revit. But I like new stuff to play with.... :( lol 

    I hope that if ozcad ever decided to shut their doors, VW would pick up and integrate Windoor or pimp that e door and window tool to be as good or better...

  5. Totally agree - revit needs an army of people constantly making revit families for it to be effective and keep progress on projects moving forward. Modeling in revit is so arcane and the lack of any window or door tool forces you into either finding a family that will work or make one - and the clincher is you wouldn’t bother making a ‘dumb’ object in the family editor - you need to spend the time to make it parametric so it is useful beyond one use; depending on the complexity this can be vey time consuming.

    i worked at a small practice that wanted to migrate from Autocad to Revit (at the constant pressure of the reseller...) and the boss just couldn’t get his head around the paradigm shift, which was fast hurtling to a showdown... so I quit!

    This is really good news - I’ve still got loads of ‘dumb’ families I’d like to import - gas bottles, wall mounted instantaneous wasters heaters etc, but hadn’t taken the time to try out the import process after reading of the issues users were coming up against. If parametric properties were able to be converted that would be awesome; but I’m sure that would be either incredibly complex to the point of not being possible. One of my coolest families was a fully parametric manhole with three parametric pipe connectors... but boy, that took some time... with the modeling capabilities of VW it takes no time to knock up what I need, so one of the biggest fears I had with switching became a non issue. 

    Aside fromm bimobject, revit city is a fantastic community driven resource with tonnes of stuff available for free as well.

    • Like 1
  6. As a former revit user this was incredibly frustrating- top plan view shows everything regardless of the components elevation - Revit's view range control is an excellent feature and looked as though something similar was implemented in the cut plane feature; but it seems not and doesn't really seem to be a well documented feature...

    The best way round this I've found is a combination of classes for stuff so it can be turned off, setting design layers and doing some good ol masking in the annotation layer.

    • Like 1
  7. Thanks guys - the 'reduced price' here in NZ is still 9k for that machine. I ended up building a skylake 4.0 Quad core (for under 4k) and have since upgraded the ram motherboard and CPU to a Z270 and 4.2ghz Kaby Lake. I was having a tone of crashes with the skylake, so I upgraded the MB and ram to 32gb of Corsair 3400mhz retaining the skylake - what a difference that made over the slower GSkill ram the first incarnation had. Even though it doesn't technically need ram that fast, the difference was significant - but having said that there is likely to be some attributable performance to the new MB chipset I'd imagine.

    I've just put in a 4.2ghz Kaby Lake and again there is a noticeable step up in performance that you couldn't peg on an extra 200mhz; no doubt there are some architecture changes that have helped.

    With Native support for Kaby Lake coming in High Sierra, I'm all set for a new Hackintosh to tide me over until we get some info on the new Mac Pro's...

    To me, VW appears to be a heck of a lot smoother on MacOS than windows; My wife's 2009 27" iMac is much nicer to use - the OIP for one doesn't give me seizures when it flashes when a value gets changed (its almost a disco with windoor) in WIndows, but does go downhill pretty quickly one the model gets more complex - totally understandable considering its 512mb Radeon!

  8. @Alan Woodwell- yes that's what I currently do - but 4 or more of them can be time consuming and repetitive. Coming from Revit, this aspect was already in place and with live viewports it was quick and fluid - they only needed minor adjustments to suit the project. That's one of the few positives I can take from my time with Revit with the biggest single irk with vectorworks being the manual update to viewports. That being said, VW has allowed me to to so much more and quicker than in Revit :)

     

    Cheers, Ross

    • Like 1
  9. I had an epiphany (or brain fart!) knocking out some elevations off a site model of a house yesterday thinking this process could surely be streamlined... 

    Doing elevations off the site model with the house referenced in is a bit of a cumbersome task - rotate plan (to get a parallel viewport)>create viewport>VW jumps to sheet view times4x. It's only slightly quicker if you do a multiple viewport off a floor plan. 

     

    What if the amazing chefs could do some coding wizardry that would enable the user to draw a rectangle on the correct orientation to the house model and the four sides of the rectangle (or polyline) would generate the viewport? If it could have the same dialog box as the standard create section viewport with the ability for custom scales etc would be awesome. 

    Has anyone else submitted something like this before? 

    Cheers!

     

    • Like 1
  10. Ditto. A good online community is almost a must when looking to move to new software or learning an entirely new profession. I've used a number of digital audio workstation software over the years (thanks apple for buying emagic and killing the logic pc version!) and some their forums have been elitist and condescending... I lurk mainly, but the tone of the forum and its users generally has and presence of Jim and a few other vectorworkers fighting the good fight for users is the best online experience I've had/seen in the software I've used 😁.

     

  11. Full control over site contour heights would be awesome. Currently I have to change units from mm to m do a change to the site model then change units back to mm to press on - if you make a change to the site model, like a crop or something, and it's back to reporting mm. 

    A dialog or oip section to control units, decimals and a yes no to displaying unit would be brilliant.

  12. I was having considerable slow down issues and disconnected one monitor as a solution that seemed to have an effect - I've now changed the motherboard from a Z170 to a Z270 Chipset (compatible with 6th gen CPU's - bonus!) and changed the ram from the 32gb of GSkill Ripjaws DDR4-2133 I had in the old motherboard to 32gb of Corsair Dominator DRR4-3200in the Z270 - the difference has been dramatic. I still have the i7 6700k, GTX1080 and 512 NVMe HDD from the previous build in this one and it is now much faster and solid.

    I'm not sure in my case it could have been a motherboard issue or ram, but maybe investing in very high quality ram might solve the issue in lieu of a full rebuild as a troubleshooting step.

     

    Cheers!

  13. Hmm.. appears I may have been overthinking this - where I was getting stuck was creating a storey at the 0 datum; I made a shed layer with the floor level storey and another level for the roof, so I think its sorted.. the only issue I could possibly see is if the floor level storey should need to be changed - but I doubt I'd ever need to do this as they are all referenced viewports on the site model in any case.

    If there are are better approaches, I'm open to suggestions :)

     

    Cheers!

  14. Hi all - what is the best way to go about having multiple buildings in one project? I'm doing a rural project with a house and packing shed - I'm trying to set up different layers for the shed to keep it independent, but can't set up a separate 0 level datum for the floor. Is it best to just use to the current floor layer and set new layers for roof and foundations? It would be nice to have to have seperate layers so I can switch the shed off from the dwelling...

    I have come from a Revit background, so the layers/stories/levels paradigm has been confusing - Revit only has a level system that slices the model with a variable cut plane; it's dead simple and very effective, but doesn't have the flexibility you get with layers.

     

    Cheers!

  15. I have just inquired about the SP3 update to VW 2017 after seeing it is now available - but not for Aus/NZ versions it seems. I'm told it will be available "in the next couple of weeks" because it needs to "modified and checked". I was previously able to get a SP straight off the VW website, but now it's saying I have an invalid serial. 

    It seems bizarre to me that an update like this that would have been through a beta/release candidate phase and once released a distributor has to play catch up? Is there no co-ordination of updates with localized distributors so an update/major release can be targeted to a specific date? It's even worse (months) for a yearly release to be "modified and checked".. I'm not actually sure what the differences are aside from a few OzCAD plug-ins and local libraries, which are all downloaded anyway. 

  16. The Ryzen CPU's just announced look promising - relatively fast clock over 8 cores. Based on Jims comment above the difference between the 3.6 ryzen (4ghz turbo) compared to a 6700k should be fairly negligible in the math side of things, but give RW a good nudge along with the extra 4 cores for half the cost of a comparable Intel...

    • Like 1
  17. Wow... with one monitor disconnected it is working flawlessly. Even doing operations on the file I'm currently in that would just crash it now work (create joists)... i'm kinda attached to my two 27" Dell's tho...

    Re the cores, for more top plan/3d work a higher ghz per core is better than a lower ghz 6-10 core cpu? From what I've looked into the multi cores like the broadwells really only come into their own when rendering?

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