_James

Did this ever get resolved? I am on VW 2019

For the first time in a project I am using the space object to display finishes, and then using a worksheet to report areas etc. as well as using the space object to display the room name, area and dimensions on other drawings. One problem i've come across is in bathrooms. The floor is tiled and it's easy to report the total floor area of the room. This would not happen in practice however as one wouldn't tile under a bath or shower tray for instance. Is there a way to modify the finish area of the space object only so that only the true finish area is reported or would this require a separate space object to be made to report this?

Hi @Tolu, thanks for the info. We were using project sharing with a direct connection to the NAS but have now switched to dropbox. I think our issues were to do with 2 things: - no VPN connection - slow internet speeds Everyone's home internet obviously varies quite a lot but I know for myself at the beginning of lockdown it was about 15Mb/s. Are there speeds you would recommend or recommend nothing less than X Mb/s for example? What is a fast internet speed relative to file size, perhaps you could give an example as a ratio? Finally to be clear, is working via dropbox better than working with PSS? Or will the performance and stability be roughly equal on both?

@JuanP or @Tamsin Slatter - could you explain a little more about the benefits of using this? We have a NAS in the office but unsure if it's worth the effort to install the Project Sharing Server on to it in a docker container as has been illustrated. What are the benefits of doing this vs. remotely connecting to the NAS and working on a project file that is stored on there? At the start of lockdown we found that remotely connecting to the NAS and working with project sharing this way was not very stable. Does project sharing server help with this?

It looks like this is now possible in 2021 (around 30 seconds in)

I'm looking to use the space objects in our model to calculate the areas of the walls around each space object. I can then use this on a finishes schedule for contractors to price. Is there an easy way to do this? There is no 'wall area' record attached to the space object, maybe the best way would be to multiply the room perimeter by the height of the room? Thanks in advance

Vectorworks has a current cap of 3 cores that is being removed in VW 2021 as confirmed here: This however does not apply to Renderworks which has a core limit of 16 cores, again confirmed above. It seems that anything over 16 cores in not worth it as VW cannot use more than this. I am currently using an iMac with VW with no issues and I don't expect to have any in the near future. My specs are: When we bought this around 9 months ago we looked at the iMac pro but these seem to favour higher core counts rather than higher-speed cores. In the end we decided they were not worth it as single-core performance is always going to be a factor as there are big chunks of work that simply cannot be parallelised across multiple cores. You haven't mentioned graphics cards but these are very important also as in recent releases VW has been offloading work traditionally done by the CPU to the GPU. I would recommend getting a high spec. graphics card for future proofing. Finally, since you're on macs it may be worth looking into apple's Metal technology as they are dropping support for Open GL and going with Metal. VW will support this from 2022.

For the core count, it sounds like the supporting library @JuanP mentioned last year got taken care of in this release.

I also thought it was cool in this video to see what looks to be the same example file being used to show speed improvements for opening large files (around the 6:50 mark) when demonstrating 2018 as they are now demonstrating 2021: VW2018: 70 seconds VW2019: 21.8 seconds VW2020: not clear from the video, fades out after 10 seconds VW2021: 3.14 seconds On paper it looks very good, especially such a dramatic decrease in 3 versions, let's hope it translates well across other real-world examples.

It would be cool to bring back these Q&A sessions, any plans to @JuanP?

@Josh Loy Cool! So theoretically if you had a fancy AMD processor with 64 cores and you had a theoretical process that could be parallelised across these cores (not including renderworks as I think that could already use any number of cores) there is nothing in VW stopping this from happening? It sounds great and hopefully results in a big improvement.

@JuanP What is the total number of cores VW2021 will be able to utilise? Am I right in thinking up until now VW's limit was 4 cores?

Thanks, I will try it. Can you do this for multiple sockets on multiple walls? Or just all the sockets on one wall? One thing i've noticed so far is the socket inserts facing into the wall, meaning one needs to flip it via the OIP. Is this because the symbol is set up incorrectly or something? Attached screenshot is what happens when I first insert the symbol into the wall.

Thanks @Tamsin Slatter, whilst i'm happy to see this is possible, i'm also a little sad as it would have saved me a lot of time had I done this in the first place! Lesson learned!

I was wondering if there is a way to stick a 2d symbol, or any symbol, to the inside face of a wall. My situation is that the wall construction has been altered halfway through a project. The electrical plans have all been drawn, but with the wall type changing, all the symbols for switches and sockets now sit 50mm out in space. It would be great if these could be stuck to the wall so that they move with the wall. Of course the best thing would be not to change the wall but such is life. Thanks

No problem, there is also a webinar on VW University about it now - https://university.vectorworks.net/mod/page/view.php?id=748

Vectorworks' link with NBS - the main specification provider in the UK is quite interesting. We're not actually using it yet but plan to in the future. NBS have a cloud platform that can be opened in VW -

This has been mentioned on this thread: But it would be great to just have a checkbox to automatically centre Window and Door Tags when displaying them in 3D. Presently my process is: 1. Select door. 2. Scroll down in OIP to check "Display Tag in 3D" box. 3. Scroll up to find the height of door in OIP 4. Enter this figure in "Vertical Offset" dialog with /2 suffix to half the value. 5. Scroll up to find the width of the door in OIP 6. Repeat step 4 for "Horizontal Offset" This could be reduced to clicking 1 check box. I know you can use the wand tool and edit many objects at once, but if you have many different sized windows it's a pain. Particularly if windows/doors get changed in side, having this done automatically would keep it centred always. This would be one less thing to remember!

Thanks Nikolay, this worked. Unfortunately the script messed up my issues a bit (I think it's more the way I was using issues rather than the script). Is there no way to see all the issue data to review it in one place, such as viewing the record format some way? Sounds like I should just shift up to 2020 and then I wouldn't have this problem!

@Nikolay Zhelyazkov when I go to "Tools" > "Plug-ins" > "Run script" the .px file is greyed out and I can't select it to run it

Hi @Nikolay Zhelyazkov, Are you able to send me this script? I am having a similar problem and the file in your original message downloads as a .px file. If I change the extension to .py the script doesn't run as there is a syntax error.

It is for both 3Ds Max and Cinema 4D. Whilst it's encouraging that Redshift is coming to VW, Redshift currently only works with Nvidia GPUs, counting out most modern macs.

Hey Nikolay, There is an option to cancel, but I get the spinning beachball and unable to click it so I just have to force quit. It was opening up before pressing 'select sheets to use' however. I just tried to make a screen recording but can't repeat the error causing a freeze, but it does show how it quickly looks for files before opening up the TBM without pressing 'select sheets to use'. TBM1.mov

Perhaps a question for @Nikolay Zhelyazkov With home-working, our connection to the server isn't as quick as being local. Occasionally in files, even when they have been copied to the desktop, when selecting the title block manager it tries to collect data from a lot of files that are on the server, leading vectorworks to freeze/crash/require force quitting. Even when locally connected to the server, I do not need to update the titleblock information of multiple files simultaneously so would be happy to turn this feature off permanently if it is an option? This is on VW2019.

Did this ever come to fruition?