Jeff Prince

Use "poly vertex placement" to place your plants instead of "single placement" mode. This does what you want in terms of plant placement and effectively makes them a planting group from the start. You can edit the placement after the fact by using the reshape handles, add plants by adding vertices. Datatags update automatically too. Save the scripts for something more difficult, unless you want to give Pat something to do 🙂

You are creating more questions than answers 😉 @AndrewBeres there are a bunch of write ups here in the forum covering various methods of doing what you hope to accomplish. I’m biased towards my method obviously. Not only do you have to consider the file management approach, but also Stories vs Design Layers, layer/story bound vs discretely defined features, and a whole host of other complications.

Here is one approach as a starting point… The site is one vectorworks file. Each unique townhouse building is a separate vectorworks file. Other structures and site amenities can also be separate files, as required. You then reference each townhouse into the site for positioning the buildings, copying and rotating for any duplicate units. Within each townhouse building file, the geometry can be orientated based on your documentation needs rather than real world position. If the guts of a building have repeating features unique to the building, these should be symbols. If the guts are repeated between multiple different buildings, these should be reference files. There seems to be some debate over this, so you’ll have to decide for yourself. When done correctly, this approach can save a lot of effort. Your annotation question… data tags and notes work fine in the annotation space of a viewport.

@Tom W. It would be nice to know what drives the site model clipping. I made some adjustments to my boundary and suddenly my "clip it good" method worked again allowing me to have a high resolution site model for my area of interest and a low resolution one for the surrounding area. You can see my thin cut into the site on the left side and the dense site model in the middle. Making my cut 10' wide worked when 1' did not. There must be some math rules dictating the behavior. Would be nice to know what they are.

and tore the vellum or gouged the mylar as it skid across the media without ink...

Reminds me of the old pen plotter days 🙂 Print a sheet of details... enjoy a 2 martini lunch. Once you get burned having all your eggs in one basket... hosted on the cloud... people return to the tried and true methods.

This just in from marketing.... Vectorworks Subscription Select with Loyalty Discount.

For future reference, all you have to do is put the title of the tile into the search field and select the product category to search In this case "USGS Lidar Point Cloud AZ_MaricopaPinal_2020_B20 w0394n3745". Or I could have just provided the link LOL.

That is exactly what I was interested in finding out. I think as long as you are centered on the internal origin, the “5KM rule” doesn’t apply. I’ve had far smaller site models misbehave in the past because they were far from the origin, yet this giant one seems to be well behaved. Yes, I have 3 different site models in this file, (north, south, and a small high resolution one of my site). Originally, I had two models, but my “clip it good” method for cutting out a portion of the overall site to hold my high res portion did not work on this particular model. Glad you enjoyed the animation test. Twinmotion kicked that out in under 5 minutes.

Here's a little test of the site model resolutions and low resolution aerial texturing. Slowing the camera and adding some motion blur on the final production should smooth things out nicely without having to go to crazy on the detailing. Video1.mp4

Seems like it is about 55 miles x 55 miles today using 3 different VWX site models. I'm building a context model to simulate distant mountain views. In the image below, the center of the model is centered on Twinmotion's cylindrical background (to be removed). The area behind that is another 25+ miles. What's the largest site mode model you have made?

Nope. It still behaves the same. You have to update your site model to get the image to load whenever restarting VWX. I prefer to make my own site model textures as a result. Site mode is white and needs reloading for the GIS aerial to show, background is from the built in GIS image feature. I kinda like the white shaded relief compared to the low resolution/grainy GIS aerials 🙂

hey @JuanP thanks for reaching out. I tried the file you linked and it came in as expected. The ones I have been having problems with are the tile described below and to the east. USGS Lidar Point Cloud AZ_MaricopaPinal_2020_B20 w0394n3745 Published Date: 2022-03-31 Metadata Updated: 2022-04-01 Format: LAZ Extent: Varies Strangely, they all open in other GIS & lidar viewers, just not Vectorworks.

I'm trying to import a .laz from the USGS https://apps.nationalmap.gov/downloader/#/ Vectorworks 2023 & 2022 on Mac or Win 11 Pro are kicking out the errors below out. The file in question can be opened in other .laz reading softwares, so I'm thinking there is something wrong with Vectorworks. VWX 2021 just closes without warning when opening one of these files. I seem to remember opening files from this source last year without issue. Any ideas???

You gents must not work with buildings that are repeated around a site or prototype building that are placed on multiple sites 🙂

lost the rest of my responses.... You don't just do that once the references are set up. Changes to the building happen in the building file and magically update the site. I position building on the site model to let the architect know where they belong. Once this is done, you just lock them and there is no risk of movement.

Right, but it does not have to be tied to real world location and orientation, just a common agreed upon system. I don’t think we are going to convince each other of the merits of our respective systems 🙂

Hmmm. I still don’t get it. must be a case of different strokes for different folks. Within a building file, copy/paste works fine. On a site, sliding and rotating different building references around works fine. Seems doing real world orientation within a building file just creates a lot of work for other consultants, especially if a building moves.

Best way to deal with the multi story building is the use of an xref for each floor. That way they can be stacked and compared and best corresponds to what you would export from vectorworks. Essentially, this is using an autocad xref like a vectorworks Layer.

Yuck. I don’t get why anyone would want their building files tied to real world orientation, that’s what site models are for. I’ve worked on international airports and university campuses with multiple buildings being constructed simultaneously… everyone preferred the buildings to be located on the site, not their building file. Why are architects wanting to do this in recent years?

Single layer workflow? You must be speaking vectorworks. if that is the case, your AutoCAD person will need to create an xref for each Vectorworks Layer you provide as an exported DWG. As far as your orientation statement, I assume you are referring to the traditional practice of having buildings and structures orientated to the sheet instead of the real world. If that is the case, simply say what you want, people in AutoCAD have been doing it either way for decades, BIM systems did not reinvent anything here.

Landscape area set to “texture bed on…(existing or proposed)” will stick it to the site model. You don’t have to set the elevation, landscape areas and plant objects adjust themselves to the model when they are over a site model. Just update the site model to see the change.

Click on a database row and pick “set criteria.” Maybe @Pat Stanford has some time to walk you thru it in more detail.

this will be easy then given you have the doors on different design layers. What you want to do is set the database criteria for each worksheet to look for doors on only those design layers for a given zone schedule. This means you will have 1 uniquely named, but virtually identical, schedule for each zone. The only difference is how the database criteria is set for each.

There are several ways to do this, you just have to make those doors unique by zone and then set the worksheet criteria to filter against that. Some various ways of doing this: 1. Each zone as a different design layer 2. Attach a record to each door and set the value = to the zone. 3. draw a closed polygon delineating the zone. 4. Use the door numbers 5. use some other door attribute