Tim Olson

any fixture orientation other than to the top or bottom of the screen needs a different label legend. what gives me grief is the inconsistency! some identical fixtures on the same truss (at an angle in reference to the top /bottom of the screen) behave differently. I'm tearing my hair out! I have legends "fixture left, label left" , "fixture right, label right" and etc to deal with these angled fixtures. why can't they just be the same all the time???

@ Ben Miura,

I use a logitech K750 keyboard and an M570 wirelss trackball.

Hi folks, this just popped up for the first time after a Vectorworks update. I'm on os x 10.15.5 Has anyone else seen this?

There a few situations where I've wanted the rendered fixtures to be different than black; for example, a plot I received from the designer that had hundreds of fixtures AND those fixture placements were in various positions, many directly under others. Even with wireframe 3d, it was difficult to gain the detail I needed to engineer the plot. Black fixtues are basically blobs of black, and when the fixture density is high it was important to me to be certain that I didn't miss anything. I changed those fixtures to white and, for me, the decrease in visual confusion was a huge help. I could also see if someone were to work up a rendering that included fixtures, and wanted them to be more visible against the background

Hi Jason, I had a chance just now to mess around with this a bit. If you've found the visualization tool set, and placed a light tool (that looks like a light bulb) on the drawing, say at a 50' z height, and still see black fixtures, then the symbol has been drawn with a black fill. To change that, find the symbol reference in your resources browser, right-click and choose 'edit 3d'. select all, and ungroup until you've reached the point where you have objects instead of groups. Then, go ahead and fire up opengl rendering so you can see what your symbol will look like. go to the attribute palette, and under the bucket icon change the color from black to whatever you want. The symbol should re-render at that time and I go ahead and group them back up again. when you choose exit then all instances of the symbol should change. if they don't, try refreshing instruments. Here's a screen shot of the attributes palette. This is why most people keep a favorites file of symbols that they've modified to fit their own situation. peace, TimO

Scott, I know it's not a fresh topic, but this happens when the file units are off. If the file is metric, for example, and you have feet/inches, then a 25cm par becomes a 25 FOOT par. You can scale the results, bit imho it's more accurate to get the units lined up at the get go

Hey Jason, welcome to VW! Looks like your jpg is rendered. Truss shows silver cause it has a silver texture. Fixtures render black bc there is no ambient light. This is norm. If u zoom up to the fixture, should look normal. Are you trying to make an image for a pitch and want them to look 'IRL'? See if this helps http://app-help.vectorworks.net/2016/eng/VW2016_Guide/Rendering/Ambient_Light_and_Sunlight.htm If it doesnt matter, leave it alone. Making it look pretty in render mode just wastes resources, chews up CPU and GPU

@sbarnett I thought about the 4k laptop screen and went 1080 instead; I guess if you're doing video or gaming it would make a difference, but for me it just makes everything more difficult to read

@ScottLebsack I went through the same thing, got w VW tech support and let them take over my laptop. Turns out the scaling has to be the same on both screens for it to work normally. I'm curious to know if that solves your issue

Have you recently went with a new laptop for VW? If so, please share your experience and if you think it's whiz-bang, meh, or bad. Here's mine: I settled on a Dell G7 15" 16 g 2666 mhz ram gtx 1060 max q gpu 8th gen i7 6 core cpu at first, I was very unhappy. The Nvidia graphics didn't seem to be working on the laptop display at all, only the external. I couldn't get past the scrolling lag on-site, on battery power, just to pull up a dimension. Vectorworks service select came in, connected to my computer, and found that the scaling was different between the laptop screen and the external. once they made those the same, it was a lot better. Dell has very affordable premium 4 year service plans, so I went with that. I've had their techs connect 4 times now, looking for possible causes of the performance issue and tweaking settings. I was shocked to see average cpu and gpu temps around 50c, however they say that's normal. I'm also a bit freaked when the fan turns on for simple web browsing - but once again, that's normal. my old MBP sure didn't huff and puff like that but then again, it doesn't have a gtx 1060. so, I only have a few days to choose whether to return or not. I think I'll keep it, and that it'll last at least a few years. It has not been three times as good, maybe not even twice as good, but it is better performing, albeit never as silky smooth as mac os. 😞 I'd be very interested to hear your recent story; have you been impressed or meh? peace, Tim Olson

Just read an interesting article about Apple ditching Intel in lieu of their own ARM chip, possibly as soon as 2020. Would that force Mac users to migrate to Windows, or would VW rewrite for ARM?

Andrew, everything I've read claims the eGPU only works if it's the only thing on your thunderbolt port, and uses a special tb3 cable. USB c and thunderbolt 3 both have the capacity to run your 5k monitor, but you'd need to check w the mfg on specifics. I'm also very interested in the discovery process and hope it can be a great solution to power in the studio and light, portable laptop on site

I found this website, https://egpu.io/. It contains a wealth of information and successful builds for just about every type of thunderbolt computer out there. The level of detail is highly specific. I was surprised to learn that not all TB3 endowed laptops have the 4 x PCI lanes enabled, and that there are various other considerations to know. Also, it seems that Apple's new high sierra update will ONLY work with TB3 macs - something to do with unreliable sleep and booting with TB2. Since I have a late 2013 MBP with TB2, I'm mostly convinced that I need to either get a laptop with something like a GTX 1050 for on-the-go vectorworks use, and the ability to attach a TB3 eGPU for work at home, or an 8 pound behemoth that's basically a desktop replacement. I don't think the Tb2 > eGPU function in my existing machine would make enough of a difference to justify spending the dough, but that would be impossible to know for sure without giving it a try

Hi Neil, I have the automatic graphics switched off and only use the dedicated card. I noticed a big difference as soon as I installed sp3 the only difference here seems to be high sierra

This is one of the options I'm looking at for a new VW machine, curious to know if 2018 has the same issues

I've noticed much of the same. Beach balls, sudden - as in instant - crashes when doing flyovers, slow overall