PSArchitecture

Wierd behavior that occurs after installing 3d pack...Occasionally, I "clean" my windows XP installation by a complete reinstallation to a new partition (I also beta test XP, so I frequently need to do a complete re-install). Anyway, the gist is that I install 9.0.0 (w/ Architect and Renderworks), and work my way up through the chain to 9.5.2. It all seems to work fine up to this point (though I have quite a few Vectorworks installations by the time I'm done). Now I finally install the 3d powerpak. It appears to install okay, but... I open "Add/remove programs" from the control panel, and all of the version of Vectorworks are there, as is Renderworks, Architect and 3d. So I want to delete the earlier versions of VW, but the uninstaller indicates that the 3d pack is the program being "uninstalled", though it's not. Continuing with the uninstall(s) screws up the latest (9.5.2) installation of VWA. Is this reproducible behavior? Does 3d pack write to the registry some bad info? Also, installing the 3d pack seems to remove a file used for importing and exporting dwg and dxf files (Adinit.dat, I think). Well, after going through this 3 or 4 times, I decided I could wait for 3d pack until I knew why it was behaving this way. Any suggestions? Paul Skidmore

The DTM works only intermittently in Architect (I wonder if Landmark is a bit more "robust"). I must admit however, that when I was investigating DTM, it was with VWA 9.5.0, so perhaps it's more functional with 9.5.2? Anyway, DTM was so quirky that I eventually gave up on using it...Problems included error messages saying "DTM data not found", "No 2D polys available to generate data", that sort of thing. When I did any DTM's of relative complexity, unusual results occured--the DTM itself was screwed up--the triangulation of the points were willy-nilly (bet you haven't heard that phrase in a while!). So I just can't spend the time to make use of the features in DTM. Currently, I do topo using meshes.