Jeff Prince

Anyone interested in helping out on this thread?

I think the tricky thing for me is trying to figure out how to take a constructible plan and section and making it into an accurate model. The contractor needs drawings with control points for layout. These curvilinear pools are based on center points and tangent arcs, something I really struggle with drawing in VW, but came easily in AutoCAD. I need VW practice too, hence my interest in your question. Hopefully some of the real gurus here will chime in and give us a hand because the sample I made in VW does not lend itself to creating useful drawings for construction.

Thanks man, that was the first time I tried to make such a shape in VW 🙂 I used to do a lot of this kind of thing earlier in my career. He's the first pool I modeled in AutoCAD, in 1999. I had to make all those freak'n boulders by hand and the animation took over a week to render on an ancient pentium pro. There's gotta be a better way in VW, it's been 20 years! My first ever computer animation with all of its glorius flaws.

Yes, I have a paid membership. I just emailed Jonathan to see what is wrong. **Jonathan got it fixed 🙂

@fabrica can you actually log in and see that content? I just tried with my account and the whole site is locked down for me for some reason.

The detail is just like your typical concrete paver build up. Which build up you use is a function of how the sett surface will be used and in what environment. Example, in a residential or low traffic application, you will usually have a base of compacted aggregate and a sand setting bed. In a vehicular fire lane, you will likely have a concrete base and a mortar or sand setting bed. Edge details vary with your design objective, but concrete banding, grouted in place pavers, steel edging, or plastic edging are common, depending on the strength requirement. Marshalls in the UK probably has details and specs on their website, as they are a good manufacture of such products. Pavestone in the US usually has good details and specs as well. The Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute (ICPI) has reference material for designing base and bedding profiles, based upon loads and slopes. In terms of drawing it in VW on plan: 1. draw your hardscape shape with a poly line or other suitable shape. 2. Right click on the shape and choose “create objects from shapes” 3. Choose “hardscape” 4. Configure the hardscape as needed. You won’t have to draw all those joints and the border, VW will do it for you based upon your inputs! Hope it helps, Jeff Resulting geometry in 3D and 2D thanks to the hardscape tool. There are setts in the resource browser, look at Cambridge’s stuff...

I don't know of any tutorials, but I made this today after seeing your question and wanting to challenge myself. Typically, I design a pool in plan and section and do not worry about modeling it. However, these curves can be used to loft or revolve a surface and then use the reshape tool restricted on the Z axis to pull the shape into a desired form. Alternatively, you can extrude solids and do subtractions/intersections and fillets to get what you need. I would like to know a good method for doing this because mine was tedious and resulted in some geometry flaws that I couldn't fix. Plus, I could not figure out how to develop the floor of the pool. There's gotta be a better way.

Yes, most BMW bikes are thermally throttled and tied to a propriety engine management system. You are starting to sound bitter about this whole Apple thing. Just buy a bin of parts and make your own if none of the manufactures suit your needs. That's what I used to do back in the day. I don't need or want one of these fancy monitors and stands, but I can appreciate the design and engineering. The world is a more interesting place with quality design, something you would think all of us using VW would agree on.

Yes, I own an off-road motorcycle touring business as a side project. BMW and KTM are the Apples of that industry 🙂 In case you are interested... https://advrider.com/f/threads/motorcycle-rental-tours-southwest-usa-joyride-rentals-llc.1122502/

Yeah, I have the same gripe about BMW motorcycles 🙂

@JRA-Vectorworks-CAD thanks for sharing your configuration. That’s one thing I love about this forum now that I don’t have an IT department supporting my decisions 🙂

I think what you are doing is amazing, the work is always beautiful. I also think there is a huge market for teaching your elegant modeling techniques to the people in the trenches. It is common for BIM and CAD technicians to go to an extreme level of unnecessary detail at the expense of efficiency and production of quality drawings. I think this is due to software marketing and the technical nature of those doing the work. I ran into this problem in my previous role. The technical staff was making models that would bring their computers to their knees. I tried to teach them how to achieve an appropriate level of detail to get the work done, but they typically didn’t listen out of fear of underperforming. So, I started assigning tasks to them and then duplicating the work in parallel, showing them the results. Slowly, things began improving. Training is essential.

I’m no expert, but wouldn’t that be dependent on your OS and graphics card(s)?

I would drop a couple of grand on the display you describe, but I doubt they would make it because there are so many quality offerings by other companies. I was at Costco earlier in the week and tried out a consumer grade 32” LG for $350. Displays are amazing compared to 5 years ago and inexpensive. I suspect Apple’s interest in competing in the high quality/value end of the spectrum.. Remember the days of the $2000 21” CRT that would require added structural support to your desk? No we can hang a 32” on a gypsum wall like a picture frame.

I think display quality is the single most important thing in a computer for what I do. We spend so much time staring at these screens, it pays to have high quality, if not simply for the joy of looking at something beautiful. Big screen with high resolution = less eye strain. VW looks great on an IMac or a 32” 4K display on the MacBook Pro.

I would be hard pressed to find an architect who needs the kind of power this new Mac Pro offers, especially the display. I think it falls exclusively as a want for those of us in AEC and an amazing value for video editors. The main selling point of this new machine is the video production capabilities after all. In large firms with dedicated 3D Rendering, Video, and GIS departments, it is not uncommon to see $15k to $25k workstations. In those workflows, the machine cost ROI is rapid. This new Pro is not for typical BIM or drafting technicians, the softwares are not really designed to take advantage of the power and the work itself is generally not that taxing on the computer (if you train people how to model properly). For the rest of us who spend most of our time on design or design administration, an Ipad would likely serve 90% of our needs 🙂.

I'm glad this Mac Pro came out for the video people, it will be an amazing tool for them. It also finally puts to rest the rumors of the Apple Car since this computer costs more than a nicely equipped vehicle with it's optional wheels 🙂 It also tells me that if I need a workstation for my needs, I should just pop for a nicely configured IMac Pro now at under $7000. I'm guessing one will easily serve me for 5-6 years for my vectorworks, video, and photo editing needs. That's an acceptable price for lifespan and performance for my needs. I'm using a late 2015 Macbook Pro right now on a 70,000 square meter 1 GB site model referencing in 20 other 3D building models and it works smoothly, except for rendering a viewport with artistic effects. I can't imagine having to work on anything more complicated and expect the software will eventually catch up to the hardware capabilities.

If you can’t figure out how to do it, adding it in post with After Effects would be easy.

I'm impressed with what they mentioned for video editing. Real time rendering of effects on multiple video streams is going to be pretty cool. They mentioned that Unreal was one of the supporting partners, so perhaps this is good new for those using Twinmotion. The creation of IpadOS and being able to natively use an Ipad as a second touchscreen monitor for the macbook pro will a nifty addition w/o having to buy a third party app.

https://www.vectorworks.net/inspiration/industry-webinars/algorithmic-design-in-bim-software of particular interest is the segment on Norbert Roztocki’s work.

Why wouldn’t you make the “doors” part of the script as your own custom plug in object? Or teach the wall how to react to the insertion of the door? Keep in mind I know nothing about how to execute this, just doing a thought exercise. One of the examples In the video was actually folding doors that inserted into walls. I think you just have to think about the problem a little differently, your wall has rules based geometrical design and is repetitive. If you were to model it manually, you would follow those rules, why not make the computer do it for you?

I just watched the "algorithmic design" webinar to become familiar with marionette. If you are doing a lot of this type of construction, it seems to me that a script in marionette would allow you to accomplish your modeling and data requirements. The presenter had several examples of very complex geometries that behaved parametrically. It would probably be a bit of work to get it off the ground, but might save time after a few projects. Check it out.

Thanks for mentioning this. I found a little time today to try it out 😉

Hopefully this helps more than a simple verbal description... I did a quick mockup to test the process in VW and to try out the terrain sculpting tool for the first time :) Wow, that is a cool tool. Keep in mind, I am just learning VW, so there may be faster, easier, or automated ways to do this. This is just what I know how to do from many years of AutoCAD. 1 - Here's a roof deck I imagined based on your description. Note the different slopes, elevations, and parapet wall. 2 - Here is a VW "site model" I made using terrain sculpting that is confined to the interior of the parapet wall. To create it, I drew a polyline on the inside of the parapet wall and converted it to a site model setting vertices at 6" so I could get smooth features. 3 - Same VW "site model", just represented as extruded contours 4 - No image, numbering error 🙂 5 - Same VW "site model", just represented as 2D contours, turn the elevation tags off before exporting to DWG. 6 - I exported the site model to DWG and reimported it into a new VW file to obtain polygon contours, perhaps there is a better way to do this. I then went into the resulting VW symbol and copied and pasted them into my parking lot document. 7 - Polygons adjacent to the wall will need to be closed and now is a good time to check that all are closed. You'll build a layer cake out of them essentially, just like making a cardboard model. 8 - By putting the polygons on layers by height, you will be able to easily extrude each height easily without error. 9 - My lowest top of roof face was set to 0, so my terrain is build up from 0 10 - check your works by comparing to the VW "site model" on the right. 11 - combine the individual solids of the terrain you have made, then subtract the roof deck from it. 12 - and here is what I believe you were looking for, from the underside. 12b - And how it looks from up top. From the "model" menu, you can choose "volumetric properties" to obtain the data shown here. Finally, you could make a solid representing a rootball of a tree, place the tree, and then rotate the model to see if there is a clash with the roof (if you see it poking out of the terrain model). Alternatively, there is clash detection software for such things, but this usually does the trick just fine for me.

How would one go about 3D printing a vectorworks site model created with the native site model object? Are there any best practices?