Mickey

The new project sharing feature isn't going to work for the entertainment industry. I've looked into it, and thought for a moment it would, but so far as I can tell not yet. To point of the topic. There is no perfect solution, and all the versions I work with are subject to the discipline of the users, but I'll share with you how I've done it with the teams I work with. First of all I hate dropbox because of the way their pay structure is. I prefer Onedrive, but since most people use Dropbox I have to play along. All files are stored on the cloud drive let's say Dropbox. After the show is over files are cleaned up and moved to the company server. The trick is for everyone to use workgroup references. You create the master file. That master file contains no original data. The master only has references to other files. For example: Venue Scenery Rigging Catering Lighting Audio Video I've worked on shows where each of these is a separate file being worked on by an individual. Of course they can be combined into whatever workflow is best for you. This is great but only if you don't change the name of the file so all the references stay connected. What if you want to do versions? You create an archive folder, and you save as today's date into the archive. Don't forget to close the file and reopen the original. (yes this method creates a massive storage footprint with all the archives, and backups, and backups of archives. Dropbox will love you for it) That's all fine and dandy when only 1 person is working on each department. What if you for example have 2 lighting guys (or girls) working on the same plot? Depends on the work being done, but we use Lightwrite http://www.mckernon.com to manage database changes. One person can be doing drafting while another is doing circuiting and stuff, but it can go really wrong if you don't pay careful attention. Instead we mainly use the "football" method. It's kinda like rugby. Who's holding the football? When a person opens the drawing they send out a mail or text, when they close the drawing again a message goes out so others know when the drawing is open. One good thing about using the desktop apps for Dropbox, One Drive, and Google drive is you can see the .lck file when someone else has opened the file, but that only means something if you open the folder and don't just open from the software. Like I said this takes discipline. All it takes is for one misinformed person to decide they don't need all this junk in their folder on their desktop app and delete it for all hell to break loose. (sadly I've seen it happen) Thankfully Dropbox does have backups now because of this issue. I don't think the other services do. Feel free to PM or email me and I'll send you some pdf's that outline the file structure. -mickey

Dear Nemetschek, I have been longing for a way to mass rename classes because I have to occasionally interface with AutoCAD files and hundreds of classes those files infect into my drawing. I recently saw a thread that described this tool. I looked all through my menus and tools only to discover that it is only available to the Designer, and Architect modules. I have Fundamentals, Spotlight, and Renderworks. I have paid thousands of dollars for this software (and the company I worked for before 20x that). I've been a user since the title Vectorworks was created having come from Mini-CAD before that so I think that's 16 years on this platform. I have been critical of VW in the past because of buggy software releases back when I told people not to upgrade until the x.5 version came out, but nothing in the past has bothered me as much as this. Why is such an important tool buried behind a pay wall? This tool should be a part of Fundamentals not locked into a module for one particular discipline (since it's in 2 of 3 modules why not add it to spotlight?). I have seen some great scripts that help with the class renaming, but they are a mass renaming tool and can't do specific groups or sub-groups. Does anyone else out there in the VW community have this issue? Probably not since it seems it's only Spotlight users and Fundamentals that are left out. Thanks for your time. -mickey

WHAT? WTF!!!! Why would you bury such a fundamental part of the program in a module? Can anyone from VW Tech comment on this?

OMG I've been dreaming of a tool like this, but I don't seem to have it. I looked it up in VW 2015 Help and read all about it. I'm drooling waiting to use this as I have many files with convoluted ACAD classes, but I don't have this tool. See attached screen grab. I tried changing workspaces. I tried editing my workspace to see if the tool is in a menu but I don't see it anywhere. I have Fundamentals, Spotlight, and Renderworks. Where is this tool?

Something to consider in your build spec is video card. Maybe this will be different with VW16 but I was told on the sly that VW plays better with AMD based video cards than nVidia. I've been able to prove that as my coworker and I had exactly the same rigs in our office, or so we were told by IT. They were fairly upspec Dell workstations, etc ... We had noticed that when rendering in OpenGL I was cussing less than him (note cussing still prevailed) We started to goof off one day (oh the joys of being employed at a company) and started doing unofficial bench tests by opening the same file and hitting the render button at the same time, and I always beat him.At first I thought it was a driver issue as I keep my drivers fairly updated. When I went to update the driver on his machine I discovered the nVidia card. We did some research and the 2 cards were comparable spec and price. I pestered the tech support people and was told unofficially that yes the AMD cards do play better with VW.

I have lots of thoughts. W8.1 was a disastrous POS. W10 is supposed to be leaps and bounds better. I have read good reviews of it, but I'm really hesitant to jump right in for fear of compatibility with various hardware software ect ... I have a design jet 1050 plotter and I worry about drivers. W10 is supposed to be a free upgrade for the first year. I think I will wait awhile to see how things settle. I'm do for a new destktop machine next year so I'll probably start with the new machine on W10, and when I'm satisfied I'll upgrade my laptop.

Aww drats. I was almost excited there for a second. I'm an entertainment industry person and most of my collaboration is with people in different cities. Even if we're in the same city we're rarely in the same building at the same time until we load in the show. Multiple users working on the same file is one of our biggest headaches. File sharing services have made life better, but most of my collaborators have adopted the "football" method. Who's holding the football? That is only one person is actively using the file at one time so we don't have version collisions in the cloud services. Our biggest wish is to get away from this.

I was really hoping with 2015 they would bring this back. I use a lot of linked text. Nothing fancy that links to a database just symbols with data fields that I can type into. Like my Title block, and a table #, or the name of something. One of my drawing tricks is to duplicate a symbol and edit the new symbol, and maybe I want that link text to have a different class so I can turn it on in different viewports. Maybe sometimes I might make a symbol and have the wrong class turned on when I create the linked text and don't realize it until I go to make my viewport. Now If I want to assign that linked text a class I can not, and I have to create new text and relink. Most of the time I don't lose the data I've already entered in the symbol (most of the time). Here's what kills me. Back in VW2013 we could change the class in linked text, but with 2014 that went away, and here we are with 2015, and still not there. Does anyone else have this issue or am I the lone person that even uses this? -mickey

Thanks, I'm going for this laptop. http://us.msi.com/product/nb/GS60-Ghost-Pro-GTX-970M.html#hero-specification&sku_no=341 I think I'll get a new desktop video card too so that my laptop doesn't have more VRAM than my desktop

I know that VW 2014 and older would only use 4gb of RAM regardless of how much you have in your system. I'm in the market for a new laptop and before I spend the extra money on a 16gb system RAM, and 6 GB VRAM laptop I want to know that the software will actually take advantage of those resources. How about running in 64bit? Thanks -mickey

Thanks Steve, Yes Mythos and SS share the same body, but have different internals so for drafting purposes they are the same. I tried reaching out to ACT the US distributor and they don't have anything and had suggested I try the claypaky website. Yeah I did try and they only have autocad symbols. It's funny but to me I would think that as a manufacturer, and distributor you'd want to have your fixtures available as a symbol even before you could buy the lights. Don't you want designers to design with your gear?

While we're at it how about the B-eye units

The Clay Paky website only has autocad files. I tried importing the ACAD file but the sharpy was 300' wide. That's pretty super! At least Martin has VW symbols on their site. Since VW is almost the industry standard you'd think the manufacturers would want to get their symbols in designers hands.

That was almost helpful. The only thing I want to do is set the Prec: to no fractions as a default, and that's not an option in the dimension standards. SO I have to click that drop down for every dimension. lame

I would like to set some dimension preferences. Things like no fractions, witness lines, style etc. However when I select the dimension tool and click the settings button I only get a dialog box for "chain dimension preferences" No matter what type of dimension I pick this is the only dialog box that opensd. This can't be right. Anyone have the same problem?

This might be enough to get my IT team to get us some better video cards. We're stuck using these Dell workstations that have good processing but not so good video cards. Thanks

To throw some fuel on this fire I opened the file on my home computer and it renders just fine. No memory issues. My home rig has slightly better processor, less ram, and relatively good graphics card W7 64b 8gb Ram AMD FX-6200 Six-Core Processor 3.8ghz AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series 1gb vram I render the whole screen in OpenGL Hi Res, and I can do Render bitmaps very quickly. No out of memory issues. I know Windows hardware is infinitely configurable, but there has to be a link. Is my home rig not using all of the ram because the video card is processing it rendering better? edit: now I'm trying to break things. I've upped the Render Bitmap resolution from the default 72 to 200, and no drop in performance.

Well that did it. We have a projector symbol in our show template. It's not from the Video Screen file, but it has the same name. We'll need to change that and see if it still causes problems. To test this theory I opened an older version of the file, and changed the Video screen tool settings to Projector Large, and the tool worked just fine. Thanks Andrew for helping figure this out.

I searched. That file only exists in the one place. However on a different note. I started a new blank file, and tried using the video screen tool and funny it works just fine. I went back to the file I was working in and tried using the Video Screen tool, and I get the failure notice. Now what does that mean? The tool should not be file specific right?

I looked and the files in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vectorworks2014\Libraries\Defaults\Video Screen" are all 2014 files. I can open them. When I do I get a diaglog box that says these are read only files do I want to open a new version. So now what?

I will have to investigate. I installed a full version. I'll check the library files. My desktop at my office works fine it's my home machine that has the problem. Curious what's different. Thanks for the lead.

Wow that's stupid. How do people do complicated renderings with full lighting? I don't even have a lot of lights, and very few textures. I'll try to reduce the settings, but that just sucks.

I've seen this before in 2013 but after installing 2014 I didn't have a problem, yet here I am again in 2014 and the problem persists I select the "Video Screen" tool in the Spotlight tool set I immediately get this error message "The symbol you have chosen is not a valid projector model. Please select a different one" Yeah thanks guys. Where do I select the projector model? After I click OK another dialog box opens up talking about height to lens not readable in the chosen symbol. Yeah duh, because there is no symbol. anyone know how to fix this. I like using the projector tool when it works.

Please see the attached jpeg to support this conversation. I have a bit of a WTF question. My workstation is not the fastest corporate computer out there but it doesn't suck. W7 64b 16gb ram Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-1620 @ 3.60GHz (4 core) Nvidia quadro K600 1gb ram I have a model that is fairly complex, but nothing I think is exceptional. I'm trying to do quick renderings in OpenGL, and I get this "out of memory" error. I opened a couple of system monitors to see if any of the cores, or gpu, or memory were maxing out. They are not yet still I get the error. When you look at the attached jpeg on the left is the model and the error message, and on the right (my second screen) is the task manager, and the Nvidia maximus utility. You can see that the system is not taxed very hard. So I ask. What gives.

I've been using VW for a long time and this is something I've never really gotten my head around. Maybe I can get some clarification once and for all. If I start a blank document and draw an object at 0,0 I can view that object using the standard views in the View menu, or using the 10 key. The views rotate around the 0,0. In other documents I have, usually started by someone else, when I use the standard views the view does rotate around 0,0 but my model in this case is 150,000' feet away from 0,0. If I set the view to top, there's all the objects where they are supposed to be. I click on an object, set the view to say right iso then there's some 2d objects still at 0,0 but no 3D objects. I click to center on object selected, and I'm transported to another time zone. In this case 146,000 feet from 0,0. With the same object selected I go to a front or rear view. Again at 0,0 there's nothing but 2D objects. Click to center on item and I can see my X is at 0, but my Y is at 174,000 That tells me all my 3D objects are half way to the moon, and all new objects created are being put there. WTF?