dcEcho

Just my experience with different RAM levels... Recently I switched out my RAM from 16GB to 64 GB. Rendering view ports in sheet layers can take up a LOT of memory(specifically with high detail in open GL), so that's where I most appreciated the performance changes. With 16 GB I could render most VPs on high, a few crashes here and there, though it could take a few minutes (not including full project views). With 64, I almost never crash, except the full project views on high detail; even then only once in a while. Most renderings now take up only a little of the RAM and complete in seconds, but larger, full project views, can max out the memory space on my computer (when doing high detail render), but gets the job done after a bit. The first few months I was using Vectorworks 2018, I had an older computer with only 8GB RAM, which was nightmarish. If it didn’t crash, it would take forever to render simple VPs. I’ve learned that even with 64 GB, saving is essential, both before updating the VP, once layers and classes are set, and after its finished rendering. It's so basic its easy to forget when I get into it. And also its better to keep VPs on medium detail in general, since it takes less memory and most views don’t need such high detail anyway.

Yes, I was thinking about rotating 3D space, but thanks for that info too, Kevin. Wow, very good to know Cris, thanks for all that, I found the “rotate 3D”, don’t know how I missed it, its an awesome addition to VW.

I'm gaining new appreciation for symbols and insertion points...this project used quite a few hinges, among other objects, and I found myself rethinking the orientation of insertion points a number of times, since the objects geometry may be updated in the future. I feel like it would be useful to have a control in object info to edit/rotate the insertion point of a symbol cleanly, instead of creating new symbols of the same object with a different insertion point(or having to rotate them in the project and messing them up when geometry changes in future). Maybe this exists and I have yet to discover it... either way, using symbols sped it up immensely and allows for building resource libraries that can be used across future projects, which is pretty handy!