Mickey

Very good. Thanks that's really helpful. I milk my desktop computers for close to 5 years. So if I spend the extra money now on a higher spec multi core processor (looking at Intel 6800 or 6850)that will have a longer life when the VW software takes advantage of the extra cores. I plan on getting one video card now with a mother board capable of supporting crossfire, and another card in a year or so when the matching card is half as much. Brilliant. I'll post some pictures when it's done. Thanks again. -mickey

Thanks that was helpful and confirmed what I thought. Now how about objects that are very database heavy? For example I work a lot with Spotlight, and every light fixture is tied to a database. If I make a change, especially if I have to move a fixture it can take 1-2 seconds before the change takes place. Heaven forbid I have to grab an entire lightplot and move them 1'. Go get a cup of coffee. I'm sure that hard drive speed effects this as VW is writing to it's internal database every time a fixture is adjusted. So SSD drives in RAID 0 is in my build spec, but does having more cores and threads help this type of behavior? My suspicion is no. All of the 2D work is only using 1 core so a higher clock speed, and memory speed will effect this more than multi core processing. From this Article KB Article on 2016 specs Faster or slower processor clock speeds have a predictable impact on Vectorworks performance. Yup, faster clock, more speed but no mention of cores or threads.

I was so close to pulling the trigger on a new system build but then Intel released the new Broadwell processors and now I'm rethinking the whole build. But before I get to far into this I want to know how many cores does VW use? My assumption is that in drawing it only uses 1, and leans on the GPU, but in rendering it might take advantage of more. My budget is not going to allow a $1700 6950x, but the 6800 is only a little more than the 6700 and has 6 cores instead of 4. http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6800K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6950X/3607vs3604 Jim can you shed some light on this? Thanks -mickey

Jim, Thank you again this has been very eye opening. Although I do not use ESP I do us MA3d on occasion Now all I have to do is spend lots of money.

Jim, I'm going to push this a little further. I started out just buying a PC, but now I'm going to build one from scratch more suited to my needs. AMD R9 390x Vs R9 Fury What I'm reading is that in the gaming world the Fury only becomes better than the 390 when running very high resolutions. So if you're playing Fallout 4 at 4k then it will start to outperform the 390. How does that play out in the VW reality? The old adage was buy the best video card you can afford, but the Fury is $200 more than the 390 and if VW is not taking advantage of the high bandwidth memory then I'd prefer to save the money. Plus adding the second radiator that comes with the Fury (I'm already planning on running a 240mm radiator for the CPU) pushes me into a full size tower instead of a mid tower. Not to mention the planned upgrade next year or so of adding a second card in crossfire needing room for a 3rd radiator. Have you tested VW with the R9 Fury and is there any advantage? Thanks Here's the theoretical build list http://pcpartpicker.com/p/dMdPmG

Here I am shopping for a new desktop rig, and I was reading all about Quadro cards vs Geforce etc ... I'm glad I saw this thread because I was leaning toward the more expensive "Workstation" cards. The info about Renderworks vs OpenGL is eye opening. I would have thought the rendering engine would lean on the GPU. OK back to the shopping board.

Thank You. I came here today to look for an answer to this question. Since my desktop machine had VW2014 I still have quicktime and I remember it being integrated into VW. Now I know it is not. Away it goes.

I finally had a chance to come back to this, and yup I can still crash it every time I go to page 3. Desktop System: W10Pro AMD FXC-6200 Six Core 8gb RAM Asus M5A78L-Mlx Plus motherboard AMD Radeon HD 6800 1GB Monitor resolution 1080x5760 Driver 15.201.1151.1008 My laptop has no crashing problem Laptop System: W10Pro Intel Core i7 4710HQ 2.5ghz 16gb RAM MSI G60 Pro motherboard Nvidia GTX970M 3GB Monitor Resolotion 1920x1080 Driver 364.51 I know my desktop is an older rig, but it's still not a dinosaur yet.

Why do ballrooms have to have such large ugly chandeliers to start with? They just get in the way of every show that comes through.

AS long as I've been using VW this has been an issue. I don't know anyway around it. I have found that if you select the offending objects and "use class line weight" it fixes it. When I import a file I'll select all and set this. Sometimes you have to dig into a symbol or 3 but eventually it goes away.

I can crash VW2016 every time with this file. I just saw this today and was really excited to see the generators and powers distro. There's some nice looking stuff. Page 1 Ground distro. I'm a big fan of Power Pagoda's Page 2 Generators including Studio Generators Page 3 Crash Oops Reopen program, and select layer 3 again. Crash Reopen program and using the navigation pallet select layer 3 Crash. OK I give up. Can someone else try this and see if it's just me?

This is probably more a Windows question than VW question but lets see if anyone can help me. I ignored this for awhile, but now it's getting to me. 2 tools that I use a lot. Rotate Move page They trigger the annoying Windows 10 "chime" Same sound you hear when there's an error in Windows. This happens when I use the key command for me those are ALT + = for Rotate ALT + Z for move page. Well after typing this out I see that it's the "ALT + anything" command that's doling this. Somewhere deep in Windows 10 I have to be able to turn this off. I'll take any suggestions. (no I'm not buying a Mac)

Yup reports are definitely broken. How sad. I'm glad I gave Nemetchek almost $4k last month. Attached is a file with some variations of the same symbol. I did not edit the symbol. That's not what broke the counting. By simply giving the symbol a different class than it's native class it no longer is counted in the report. Another example is a duplicate version of the same symbol. I edited the symbol and gave the root objects a class of none. When you look at the records. The sheet that has no criteria counts everything. The sheet that has a criteria only counts symbols not lighting instruments, and the last sheet is counting only objects with the native class. This last sheet tells the real story. Even though I have removed all class information from the symbol it is still being counted in the 3rd sheet with the native class. That means there's some piece of information deep in the fixture that I can not edit that contains that class information. In my earlier drawing I deleted all of the native classes and opted to assign all objects to none. Therefore they now will not show up in any reports unless I give the report no criteria. This is a major failure on Team VW. I think this problem lies more in the people that work on the spotlight portion that the worksheet portion. I will submit this bug and pray they fix it fast, but that means VW2017 most likely.

Well you don't get the option when right clicking to edit if what's in the browser isn't the current file.

OMG Nemetchek you're killing me. I run a lot of reports. They're really simple. I like to count things. I use a lot of classes and then use reports to count them. My current document I have a stage lighting design. All lights are "lighting instruments" I have created a report, checked the boxes for counting plug in objects, and set the criteria, as Layer Lighting. All my lights show up. Add a criteria for a specific class, like "Stage Fixtures" and half the lights with the given class are gone. Specifically the lights that disappear I have imported from the native VW Libray. But those fixtures come with the baggage of native embedded classes. (what ass hat thought that was a good idea) I have deleted all the stupid native classes and replaced with none (as they should be) It's these symbols that are not being counted in the report even though when in the working layer I select all the units and make sure they are the correct class and they are. I've dug into editing the symbols to make sure they are in fact none (please see my post about crashing when right clicking on symbols to edit) and all the items in the 2D, and 3D objects are the none class. So what gives? Anyone having the same issue?

There are so many things in 2016 that are pissing me off, but I'll save that write up for another time. Here's something I can get to happen frequently but not every time. I'd like some other people to try and see they can recreate it. Resource Browser Pallete Right click to edit a lighting fixture select 3D - crash But it doesn't happen every time, but often enough that it isn't just bad luck

No love. Here's my versions. v2 deletes all of the ACAD original stuff. Not 100% accurate, but close enough for lighting.

Has anyone seen or made a Solaris symbol? I downloaded the DWG file here http://www.tmb.com/products/241-solaris-led-flare#cad But before I take the time to create my own symbol I thought I'd ping the board and see if anyone already had one. I checked the service select site and there's nothing there. Thanks In Advance -mickey

The manual way to do that is to apply the same image to all of the TV screens and then to adjust scaling and horizontal and vertical shifts appropriately for each. Tedious, but it does work. I did exactly this last week. I ended up making multiple duplicates, giving each duplicate it's own class and assigning a different image to each dup. It took a little bit to get the images exact, and the first version each screen was an independent corporate logo all on one file. But once I was done adding new images it wasn't such a chore and I could create multiple viewports with the different artwork to show the client. I even did different screen configurations. The realistic lighting rendering: Now that was a pain in the ass.

That's exactly what I have. That's OK I'm faking it good enough so I can move on with actually designing my stage set now. Enough of this architecture stuff.

I'm game for a try. Here's another screen shot. I have a jamb and sash tab, but I don't see an option for Sash offset.

OK architect types lets see if you can teach me how to do this. I'm trying to draw out a 3D model of a venue I'm working in. It has floor to ceiling windows along 1 one wall. I figure out close enough how to make a window symbol look like the window in the venue. What I can't figure out is how to make the glass closer to the edge of the building vs the interior. Attached is a screen grab jpeg. On the left is my symbol. In the center is the 2D ACAD drawing that was imported. You can see that the glass portion favors the outside of center. On the right is what happens when I change the "Plan Wall offset" value. Is there a setting that would allow me to change where within the wall the glass part of the window falls? This is by no means a show stopper. The way I have it now is just fine for me to build my show model, but I'd like know for the future, and to make this venue drawing more accurate. Thanks -mickey PS: if you tell me I have to have a different module to make this work I will be very put out.

It happens a lot with the Video Screen tool. The tool has lots of options in the OIP so that's where I noticed it first. I have found that hitting the escape key while scrolling will kill any changes inadvertent scrolling might have caused. Not doing it all would be much better.

Yes I'm very familiar with that procedure. It's helpful for sure, but if someone else started the document and didn't do that or I just want to clean up all of the sub classes then I'm out of luck.

If you search in help under mapping and classes you'll find this Mapping Classes and Layers Then cry. Like me.