Jeff Prince

yes

I don’t think you will find design layer viewports will help with speeding up your drawings if items are still visible. What does help is turning off different design layers or cropping site models while working in a file. That seems to give Vectorworks less to think about, resulting in better performance. You want to keep your plants and site model in the same file if you want them to land on the surface. The only things I typically reference in regularly are outside consultants drawings and models. I like to keep them quarantined to preserve my work, which I recommend to everyone. How big are your file sizes and how long and wide are your site models? What do you think is causing your slowdowns and why? Oftentimes the culprits are how your model is built and where it is placed in relationship to the origin. Frequently I see site model problems due to the data used to build them. Other times it is a video card or other driver issue. I have made models as large as 50 miles across with 100s of buildings referenced in without issue. File sizes in excess of 1GB are pretty normal for me.

Very true. A few months ago I used it to write some marketing copy. I shared my version and the AI version with some colleagues in a blind taste test… they could not identify which was which. I spent over an hour writing mine, AI took less than a minute. The scary thing was I asked ChatGPT to “write a travelogue along historic Route 66 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff”. The result was striking as a human experience, referencing the character of the drive including the weather, specific landscape features and stops along the way. Writers are certainly being impacted like how newspapers and journalism are nearly dead due to the internet.

Nicely done 🙂

That video was working the design AND explaining how to use the tool AND relevant tangents with commentary. A "follow along and do as I say and click where I tell you to" type demonstration with helper geometry already drawn should result in a 5 minute chair with SubD, mostly spent on the casters. It's jaw dropping faster to design and create things from scratch compared to those old NURBS and Poly based modeling techniques once you get comfortable with how the tools operate. And if you use Vectorworks instead of Rhino on these types of models... well that's like swimming in your prom dress compared to riding a jet ski 🙂

I think Rendermall went out of business or something. Now Vectorworks is pushing the terrible "Lagwerk" plants.

@Kevin K I imported via simple .obj to VWX. When I rendered with Custom Renderworks, I don't get those artifacts you did in 2023, but did in 22 & 21 😞 I downloaded the .obj, Rhino, and Blender versions of the file. I don't think there is a difference in the meshes or the textures for each. Which makes sense... why would they build separate exporters for each program and convert to native geometry? Too much work. I did notice they provided a Vray version of the Rhino file so you can use it with that rendering engine. I also noticed the textures used for Rhino, Blender, and .obj were all interchangeable without mapping issues. It's like everything found its way out of their proprietary software via .obj. Anyhow, the Blender, Rhino, and Vectorworks all look about the same to me, but I did notice an Easter egg in the attached .vwx version. See if you can find it. mia.vwx

Great! Some Renderworks Textures and Vectorworks Materials in the VWX library include hatches as you have found. I've been a bit lazy in creating hatches for the textures I have created, when you need them they are great to have.

I don't know what to tell you. Are you zooming out with your mouse wheel? Zooming via "fit to objects" button doesn't work within geometry like this if it has no content. Once you add some stakes to it, then "fit to objects" works because it has something to zoom to. Confusing? yeah.

with the "custom selection" tool and then selecting a new style in the OIP for the selected objects. It's not as elegant as simply right clicking, but it's hardly a hardship either. Almost a safety precaution against less talented operators being able to destroy a drawing by accident 🙂

I downloaded your file, selected the site modifier, hit the "edit surface modifiers" button, and had to zoom out to see it.... I then added some stakes to it. Everything behaves as expected. Here it is with a little ridge added to it....

To reduce labor costs and squeeze more production out of fewer people. To make commodity architecture even more boring than what CAD and Sketchup has done (rectilinear boxes within intersecting volumes anyone). To create a new generation of architects who are even further removed from understanding the importance and effort needed to create great spaces. To manifest more complicated forms of Pop Architecture that will serve to frustrate contractors who have to build it. To create some of the most amazing and emotional connected spaces ever built. It's a tool, it's a technology. Like any, it will be used for good and evil, profit and enlightenment, simplification and complication, creation and destruction. I think the negatives will far out weight the positives though seeing how society generally seems to appreciate commodity over creativity.

You just need to zoom out. When you enter the object to change the modifiers, the origin centers on the boundary of the site modifier. If you are zoomed in too close when making this selection, it seems to disappear because your origin is off to the right of the scene. Did you copy and past this modifier from a different file? I noticed it has a rotated plan orientation embedded in it.

Wow, rereading my response is confusing too, something happened during the editing. I meant to say "I doubt you will need to add another record... Have you tried using multiple data visualizations for your viewport?"

I think Grant gave you the granddaddy of selection tools "Custom Selection" in the Tools menu. It is very powerful, a bit clunky, and you really have to know what you are trying to do. It's not as quick as Revit's right click example you shared, that would be nice to have. Perhaps if you describe a few real world scenarios of what you are trying to accomplish, we can then give you a recommended Vectorworks workflow to solve it. Depending on what you want to do, there may be one or more ways of going about it, just like Autodesk products. In the example you describe in your first post, there may not be a need to search the entire drawing for a particular window in order to replace it. You just modify the style and all your windows using that style will update.

@Kevin K I can’t believe the legend who models cheese plates with grapes and wine glasses with wine models in them would resort to such trickery 😉 People are tough to draw and model.

If the entourage could weigh in on this topic...

Yes, and they could probably thin the current herd of people. The 1980s looking 3D people look like the product of a failed ceramics studio. The 2D line work people are generally not very well posed, like they were traced from a poorly framed photograph. And then the description make it hard to find what you would be searching for…. Man in wheelchair? Good luck. Oh, and why are all the black folks in the casual collection sitting? Would be helpful to have people tagged by ethnicity and age in addition to apparent gender to help diversify a scene quickly.

Habit from pre Data viz workflow adoption 🙂 You can completely turn off stuff in the data visualization by changing fills and pens to none. I think I was a little sloppy in the demo plan viewport in that regard because I neglected to turn off the fill for the new walls, which you’ll notice if you turn on the “new” design layer in that demo viewport on the bottom.

in all seriousness, here's a good source for 3D people that work in VWX.

Hey, that guy on the right is Brian, included in Vectorworks as a 2D image prop... I use him and Alon (Elon Musk's long lost brother) for all my serious posts here on this forum. Unfortunately, the Jay-Z model was not as easy to come by.

Speak of the devil, check out the lightwave news dropped today... I think crypto might be a better investment. But if you get in on this... you'll get a hoodie until Disney sues them for infringement. So many of my former lightwave people have moved to Blender, I can't see how these guys are going to make it work. Really, check it out, their website has a password and everything. Uber exclusive.

Yeah, your description is a bit confusing. I don't doubt you will need do add another record, it's probably just a matter of setting it up correctly. Have you modifying the viewport to use multiple data visualizations instead of just one? Best thing to do is to post your file and someone will take a look.

That, and scale. I see a lot of people in my area using 1/8" to 1/4"=1'-0" site plans. Those guys probably need to admit to themselves it's time for progressive lenses 🙂