Wesley Burrows

It's worth noting that while this may work in certain situations, I've discovered (and reported) a bug where if any object in the space is rotated in 3D. For example a truss with a 90° hanging position for use as a truss tower, or a lighting device hung sideways on said truss, those objects WILL NOT show up on a worksheet as a member of the space that contains them.

This has been broken for years, and is still broken. I and others have reported it. Maybe it'll get addressed in 2026. It will work if you have a generic bumper with no tilt angle. if you're trying to use a symbol bumper or have a bumper tilt it will fail.

I'd like to make a request for the Elation Paragon M Lighting fixture. https://www.elationlighting.com/paragon-m Thanks!

Redshift will utilize GPU on both Mac and Windows. I currently use Windows for it, but my Mac Pro will also use the GPU's in that Machine (In Cinema 4D), they just aren't as fast as the two RTX 4090s in the Windows Machine. M series Macs are also able to use the GPU for Redshift. That said, Redshift also can use CPU, but it's no where near as fast. I'm not sure what Vectorworks uses (CPU or GPU) for Redshift. In Cinema it defaults to GPU's but can use a Hybrid of both CPU/GPU or any combination you select, but generally the CPU just slows the whole thing down and isn't true representation of what Redshift has to offer.

I primarily do corporate/concert event lighting/scenic renders. So being able to “focus” lights with volumetric haze while visualizing the results with IPR (Interactive Preview Render) in near real time is wonderful. Once you’ve done it, it’s hard to work any other way. Redshift isn’t the only renderer capable of this. Many are, but the standard renderer is not, or at least wasn’t last used it. It’s typically a GPU based renderer feature. Though Corona also does it and is CPU based. When I started doing this, I used the standard renderer, or physical renderer. And it would take a huge amount of time to get a decent result, and lots of wasted time rendering just for the result to suck. Red shift is incredibly fast. Final renders that would have taken hours at a time for me before, (I remember a Renderworks render I did that took nearly 12 hours). Granted, hardware has improved, but I can get superior results now, at much higher resolutions in 2-3 minutes with denoising. Or about 10-15 minutes without denoising. Versus hours long renders. Though I’ve done a small amount of animation for scenic automation moves, I primarily deal with stills.

A couple of further thoughts regarding this. It all really depends on your objective. If your main complaint is render speeds in Vectorworks on an M series device, but otherwise are happy, I might suggest making low quality test renders, just enough to show you what you need, but render quickly, and when you're ready to publish you could use Vectorworks Cloud Services to render HQ without it burdening your machine. I used to be pretty off put by the pricing on Macs, but they are essentially workstation class machines. I have some mac laptops from 2011 and 2014, the only thing I did to them was replace the factory hard drives with SSDs, and though they aren't able to run some of the newer software, or keep up in terms of sheer power, they still work great with no problems for the vast majority of users needs. I can't remember a time I had a PC that lasted that long and still operated comfortably. So while PC's "can" be cheaper, I feel like I've bought more of them in the same time as one Mac. The PC I just got, was NOT cheap. But in the GPU department it smokes any current Mac hardware offering. It could have been cheaper had I built it myself, but I don't have time for that anymore, and I get support the route I went. I used Puget Systems, which was a great experience. I also have spent quite a bit of time trying to make the Windows machine feel more like MacOS. Partly because I'm using a Mac keyboard on both machines, and I prefer Mac shortcuts. So keyboard remapping and stuff. Otherwise it's jarring to switch between OSes. Found an app called flow that simulates a spotlight like search. Etc. The biggest driver of pushing me to get this PC was Redshift/Cinema 4D. But for Vectorworks and pretty much everything else I do, I'm happy with my Mac. (Though as stated earlier, Shaded view on an M series is vastly superior to my Intel machine)

Hah, IMO, the Mac Pro became irrelevant when the ability to upgrade GPU's went away. The current M series one is a mostly an empty shell at more $$$ then an equivalent Studio. So, unless that changes, I don't see much reason for it to exist at all. (Yes I know there are a few applications that need the PCI-E card slots) The reason I have the one I do is for rendering, but it's showing it's age, and there's really not much of an upgrade path. And as more time goes on, I pretty sure there are less and less developers at Apple and even Vectorworks that put much priority on fixing weird issues that mostly pertain to Intel Macs. My M3 laptop smokes the Mac Pro @ Shaded view in Vectorworks. Super smooth, versus Chunky and sometimes hanging entirely. To the OP's original ask, the M3 Max does indeed support Ray Tracing, and there are solid improvements with Redshift in that department, but it's still got a ways to go.

Lately, Vectorworks has been taking it's sweet time opening files, hanging out on this step on file open: I'm not sure if I inadvertently changed a preference or what. If anyone might be able to point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful. Thanks! -W

I am also a longtime MacOS fan, and use that as my daily driver for Vectorworks, Omnifocus (task management) and most other things, and as ridiculous as it might seem 95% of my information exchanges and screen shot exchanges with colleagues are via iMessages. I recently got a Windows machine (AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7965WX 4.2GHz 24 Core) for Cinema 4D with dual RTX 4090's because my 2019 Mac Pro (Intel) with 2 AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo 32 GB MPX cards. (4 GPUS!) just can't compete for GPU rendering speeds. I loathe Windows as an OS, but for rendering this machine is orders of magnitude faster. I do have an M3 laptop that Vectorworks runs like a dream on, and I eventually hope to replace the Intel Mac Pro with an M4 (or whatever it ends up being) Mac Studio this summer. I currently use a 49" ultra-wide display (32:9) which I can use either machine full screen with (with the monitor acting as a KVM) OR I can run in side by side mode which basically splits the monitor into dual 27" monitors with no bezel between. In this mode I use Share Mouse to use each machine as an extended display from the other, so the mouse just seamlessly moves from Mac to PC and back. It'll even share the clip board between them. So, while I wish I could do all this on a single MacOS machine, this seems to be the best solution for me, for now. Until Mac can actually (if ever) compete with NVIDIA cards. -W

Almost 8 years bump.

I believe this will do what you're after: (#BrxHoist#.#WeightWithChain##prec_0#+#BrxHoist#.#RoofForceNoDeadloadWeight##prec_0#)*0.002205 You just need to update the prec_0 both places to however many decimals you want. Turns out you have to apply it to both variables.

I find it horribly slow even when it's working. Today I can't even get it to load.

Is this what you're after? If so I would just use a Data Tag. This requires you add the tag, but you can add it to all motors in one swoop and they'll insert at center. See attached file: Hoist ID 2D - With Data Tag.vwx

So, two visualizations work, however the problem then becomes keeping your colors synced between the two as fixtures change etc. So it works, but isn't ideal. Data Vis with Schematic Views and Equip Summary.vwx

@Scott C. Parker, So with that criteria, the 2D/3D geometry and the Equipment Summary shows the correct Data Vis, however, the Data Vis does NOT work on lighting devices in a schematic view. When I shift the Data Vis criteria to make 2D/3D geometry and the lighting devices in Schematic View work the equipment summary no longer responds to data vis. Is it possible to get it ALL to work at the same time?