Adios amigos

that, or if the software developer would provide clear and simple workflows for achieving desired results. I’m teaching a design studio this semester where students draw by hand and in VWX. 10 weeks in and one of my very bright students who is actually producing a good building and site in 3D just asked “why do they have to make this so hard?”, while referring to completing the Landmark and Architect learning paths. I explained my theory that it is a form of developer job security or customer hazing, perhaps a combination of both.

I think all you architects (and the software developers) should take a sabbatical and work on a federal adjacent site engineering team, like a DOT. Start with the survey crew and collect the site data. Then see how the survey crew prepares the data for engineering. Sit with the engineering team during project setup and design to create the project. Finally, rejoin the survey crew and see how this is all translated into real world construction setting out. Once you understand the processes used by large area land development professionals and how the data is managed for different processes, the bad habits you may have developed as building centric architects may start to be corrected. The problem with georeferencing and architecture starts with a small local surveyor who may not even understand the topic, but generates data that may seem to be correctly georeferenced. Once it hits the architectural pipeline, the damage is multiplied. i think the vast majority of architects would be best served by designing their pretty little boxes in a virtual space that is orientated to the screen and leave the site orientation to the folks best suited to deal with it. Everyone would probably be happier as a result 😉 It seems to have been working that way for centuries. Maybe once the software developers connect better to how things are actually done, there will be a unified workflow that all the pros can use, but that is still a little ways out still due to lack of education or familiarity with how the work is done.

Busywork creation or lack of training on how to efficiently execute a project usually. This is not limited to things like georeferencing of course. I’m sure we have all run across some bizarre workflows that have no reasonable explanation for existing.

That is good advice if you can budget that in for training purposes. One of the first things I did was model my house and property. This avoided deadlines and design allowing focus on tools and workflows. Then, I did a site model of a job I had already drawn in 2D to see how the software would solve some specific grading issues, again avoiding design and looking at the software behavior. I started drawing some details to master the 2D graphics and to make productive practice. This gave me a good foundation to build from. Now, after 9 years, it looks like I’ll be moving on to another platform soonish.

lol

Who is doing the encouraging and why? Do they understand the all of the costs associated with the descision? Your assets from Sketchup would need to be completely redone from scratch in vectorworks if you hope for them to be functional and efficient. Your labor and software costs are going to rise. You turn around time will increase, dramatically for many months, perhaps a year or more before things get efficient. The most effective strategy is to keep using sketchup and slowly implement VWX on some smaller tasks. If you can live with effectively throwing away 5 years of work, then maybe the transition is worth it. It’s hard to imagine that is the case in the situation you describe.

I thought my post was clear on the topic. You said existing plants and trees do not need to be separated, I disagree. The current situation gives us one tool for Existing Trees. It could be improved for handling all existing plants inventoried on a site with data and graphics capabilities to address our needs for reporting, tagging, and graphics. The current existing tree tool is not robust enough to cover existing shrubs, heritage trees, cacti, or other special plants. The current Plant Tool is good for new stuff, not appropriate for existing use. If I hire a plant inventory company, they produce a .csv file I can use to import as Existing Trees. I can have them include a field for plant type/form. Unfortunately, VWX does not have a simple way to address the aforementioned examples and process valuable data to simulate other plant forms. It does great with trees. The other part of true existing plants is how we manage them over the lifecycle of a project. I have advocated for years that an existing plants should have location data associated with them depicting their inventoried, nursery, staging, and transplanted locations (perhaps there are other positions that would be useful too). Why, well it’s pretty common to produce inventory and salvage plans that depict how plants will be handled. Then, our landscape plans depict where they land in a final design. Wouldn’t it be great if the symbol would automatically display in the correct location without having to duplicate symbols? The tech exists!

That’s the key issue with these workflows, no matter how you do it, there will be compromises. The example I shared seems to be the least error prone and most likely how architects and engineers are used to working and sharing information (for the most part). The big issue with geolocating your building is the chaos that can ensue when your building or the site moves. It is not uncommon for geolocation to change due to survey refinement or jurisdictional requirements. Also, it is fairly common for commercial projects to be developed as site agnostic prototypes, speculative to acquire property, or well in advance of a survey being commissioned. And then there is the case of one building being repeated multiple times on a site….

Almost every architect I work with does their building in Cartesian coordinates, square to the screen. Then they reference the building(s) into the site plan for orientation. This works for projects of all sizes and scope. The ones that geoposition their building model always do something wrong that gets fixed by civil or structural in my experience. I get that small residential projects might get located off an architectural site plan, but I’ve never seen an architect produce survey grade data for staking out a site, hence the responsibility lies with Civil, and they largely do not touch VWX. I guess architects are going to architect and make things more difficult than they need to be 😉

They aren’t doing anything to inspire loyalty on the landscape front, especially in the US. Shedding small offices as clients while not making significant inroads in large offices is an interesting strategy.

While not optimal, you can stack viewports to get this effect.

…Churches that don’t add to their flock close as their parishioners die off. This can be further expedited by passing out the koolaid. I feel like that is where we are at. Things were looking so much better under the old management.

So you are talking about switching between design layers and not having desired view retained? If so, you need to activate “Separate Sheet Views” in VWX preferences in the edit tab. This is unchecked by default. When activated, each sheet remembers the view you when you switched to a different sheet of design layers.

I think it is marking the beginning of the end for Vectorworks in AEC. All of the reasons I switched to VWX from Autodesk have been killed off by VWX oddly enough. It’s a big ask to get people to switch, you have to offer something better (price, tech, user base, etc). A perpetual license and tools that follow industry workflows is all you needed after the big open letter to Autodesk from the AEC community, lost opportunity.

Buy a 1 month subscription, update your files, export to dwg, PDF, etc. If you had a license before, why didn’t you have tech remove the watermarks for you? They have always been kind to Student to Pro customers, you should call them and see if they will help you out, I doubt many on the forum would be willing to use pirate means to satisfy your request. They put that watermark in there for a reason.