Jeff Prince

A reasonable person might start to thing they are not interested in customers input, feedback, or criticism. My tech support issues have gone ignored for years, but when I changed my avatar to “certified critic” with a graphic play on their Vectorworks certification program logo, I was contacted within hours and asked to remove it. I had that Canadian architect they hired publicly try to shame me here for daring to criticize something, actually telling me how to behave here. Both situations were simultaneously amusing and worrisome. Priorities, they have them and they are not aligned with ours ….

Is it a value when compared to the last intel iMac made with 96 gb aftermarket Ram and the AMD video card it came with? That was about $2200 this past summer IIRC. I’m really wondering because site model updates don’t seem to happen any faster on the mini and TwinMotion does not appear to be an option there either. I don’t know why, it just seems to be the case. We just picked up an i9-10900x based machine with an RTXA4000. I’m expecting the same results with site model updates, but interested to see how the rendering performance compares against my iMac. I think some voodoo love is needed from Vectorworks to extract better performance with site models, regardless of the hardware used.

@Pat Stanfordi think you’re right. My old MBP 2015 w/ 16GB Ram does most typical tasks fairly well. The new fancy machine I use only proves its worth when rendering. The attached example has a lot of highly detailed 3D plants, which gobbles RAM & VRAM. The actual VWX model was pretty easy to make from an imported 2d autocad file on a moderately powered machine.

Sure it will. You might have to go digging into those nested symbols and groups and change some attributes to get a desired behavior... but such is the penalty for drawing byobject instead of bylayer/class.

There is an option to turn everything black during the dwg import. Otherwise, you can do it with Class and Attribute control.

I just tried replicating this behavior on 2022 SP5 & SP6 on Mac OS... ...and experienced the same results as you. FYI - This does not happen on 2023 or 2021. I skipped 2022 for mysteries just like this one 🙂

yes x1000. When teaching people it's impossible to justify this behavior and immediately a concern for new folks. Oh, and it drives me mad too 😞

No.

I’ve never understood the desire to use “hand lettering” when making computer drawings, even for illustrative work.

Wow, that is decidedly terrible.

@line-weight I think the points you raised are good. I wonder if filing a bug report with a link to the thread(s) detailing the problem would work. Better would be to have a flag on the forum for reporting these threads to the bug reporting system. In the past, I have sent email to tech support with links to threads detailing problems. Sometimes that has helped. More typically, the emails stop and a solution is never provided 😞

Surely you jest. Is there a metric ISO for screen resolution? I know this is a rare and strange possibility, but have you tried adjusting your output size to something with more square proportions or with whole numbers. Your print size is a bit odd and I have seen that cause errors in the past. I don’t know why this is, just have seen it. Perhaps worth a try.

Very happy to hear! Thank you for your efforts.

Hey @Katarina Ollikainen Do you have any recommended best practices for making hardscape styles today that will survive these planned enhancements to the tool of tomorrow? Reason I ask… when the plant tool was “improved” it required fixing all of the plant styles individually by editing to the by style/ by instance settings. It would be nice to avoid similar efforts with hardscapes and LA areas.

I think the only value I’ve added is being another voice of frustration 😉

I don’t typically have to change the model once I go into Twinmotion. What changes do happen are usually Twinmotion based content or architecture with pre baked textures. It would be nice if changes were accommodated easily though.

I have experienced this too. I don't know how you prevent it, so... I place my plants directly in TwinMotion or I do not use data sync and instead use an export to c4d or similar workflow, never returning to Vectorworks for the remainder of the project. There is a video on the Twinmotion website which shows a workflow where you use cubes from your modeling software as placeholders for objects and then use the replacement feature. The benefit to that method is you won't have two trees for every vectorworks tree 🙂. The downside is that it does not seem to keep the choices you make for replacement and puts you back to square, or in this case, cube, one. When I try their method, even if I use a nice mix of cars or trees, it always ends up replacing everything with the first selected model (of car or tree) and placing them with the same rotation direction instead of respecting the rotation I set in Vectorworks. It would be nice to know why this happens, especially since this behavior is not exhibited in their video and I am using all the same settings. Finally, there is a replacement option that I have yet to try. Looks like you create a csv file and use that as the basis of replacement. Maybe that is a better way to manage large amounts of object replacement because you could just re-run it and get the same results presumably.

I don't what to tell you. There must be something wrong on your end. As you have not posted a file of the problem, it's pretty hard to determine what is causing your issue, or even what it looks like. The built in textures, people, plants, image props, and user created content all display transparency in VWX 2022, also works in 2023.\ Here's what it looks like on every computer I use... Perforated metal, glass, even a tree made from an image prop with an alpha channel with 50% transparency. This is shaded mode, not rendered.

15 years later? This is impressive thread resurrection…

Publish to PDF and printing from your PDF software is going to be the best route to good fast output in my experience. Plus you will have record of what you printed for additional copies or emailing.

Set your document's units to "feet & inches", "feet", or "inches" Set your viewport to an appropriate architectural scale Update the scale for the sheet in the titleblock's Sheet Settings by hitting the update button for scale. Your title block should be using linked text "Sheet Data.Scale" If your units are not set to the above, you will get a scale ratio instead of the traditional display you desire.

Yes, you can switch between methods of depiction. It's easy.

I do not believe they have updated the getting started guides in a while. You just have to use what they offer and deal with the discrepancies.

To be fair, the people at Vectorworks have changed far more fundamental UI features that negatively effect use than the simple naming conventions discussed here... The changes to color management are terrible and a step backwards, IMHO.

Problem 1 - Edit Current Graphics select the image prop go to the OIP and change the texture in the render tab to your desired image prop, which will be show as a texture. alternatively, if you are starting with an image instead of an image prop, just use “create from image”. Problem 2 - Open files you want to acquire resources from prior to editing 🙂 I keep all of my plants in a single master file I call “plant builder ______”. I’ve got a few of those files organized by major type such as palms, desert trees, cacti, ground cover, etc. I then construct my plants in the appropriate file and copy them to my project. This keeps things organized and centralized for future use. Plus, if I just open the file, I can use the resource manager to import them to my current project, which has a manageable amount of plants to browse through. Bonus, I can choose to view elevation or iso of the image prop this way too.