D Wood

There may be a problem with needing to have different textures on the pillar sides.

It's an interesting problem, mainly because I think our eyes can see an range of sizes, colours and textures which computing can't reproduce. The physical mesh for instance is probably round wire, which if you draw it that way slows rendering engines to a crawl, but in real life causes glints and textural shading that our eyes can pick up and recognise from past experience as a fence, even when the wire is so thin and so far away. All you can do is what you are already doing, look for a work around that represents reality but the components of which are actually hugely exaggerated.

Ken In your wall class, have you selected textures for each side via the walls pull down menu? In the OIP, have you made sure each wall has class texture selected for each side?

I have been asked to take over a house alteration project which has been drawn in Archicad. I can get the data via YouSendIt, and it comes as a collection of .dwg & .Shx files. On my iMac, the .dwg files show up as SolidWorks eDrawings, which is a program I have - should I try to import the .dwg directly into VW? The name of each .dwg file seems to have a sheet number included (ie A03, A04) but some sheets have multiple files - A10 for instance has 4 files. There seem to be 18 sheets (27 files), which seems a bit OTT for a simple house alteration, and will take forever if I have to import each one by one and adjust the scale each time. Does anyone have experience of importing files like these?

Serbuncle My heart skipped faster when I read your post, but alas, all the little green button does is make the pallette bigger, not the items within.

VectorGeek I also run VW12.5.3 on OS10.6.8, and it's been fine. I haven't been convinced by anything I've read on this board so far that the various upgrades to VW have offered much improvement for me and the work I do. However I think Lion (and the end of Rosetta) will be a step too far and I am going to have to consider upgrading to VW2013 when I update my iMac. It sounds like backward compatibility under Lion is difficult. This is extremely irritating, as Apple and VW don't seem to appreciate the need to be able to access old files - it seems like 12 months is a long time in the computer industry, and 5 years is positively prehistoric! I already have an iBook running OS10.4 to access really old VW and ClarisWorks files, so I might have to keep my present iMac to do a similar role with VW12.5.3 files. I think you should consider keeping one iMac at least running on your present setup to access archive files, which is what I suspect all our VW12.5.3 files will become. In the meantime, maybe the way to do it is to keep VW12.5.3 jobs and their iMacs on OS10.6 going until they finish, and as Christiaan suggests, start new jobs in VW2013 under OS10.7. HTH.

Cadplan Roof fascia: I put roofs in a Roof class, which is set to show solid white with a texture on the top face. This results in a white fascia in 3D mode. Gutters: I draw the profile I want and then either: 1. extrude in elevation mode and get height above floor correct, go back to plan mode, mitre ends with split tool, copy and paste to make each length of gutter in turn. 2. use the Extrude Along Path tool. I put gutters in a class which is set to texture in 3D. Doors and windows: you can make the styles you want with WinDoor. Internal walls: I have a class for internal walls which is set to show a fine white stucco texture in 3D mode. Make sure each wall is in this class, and in the OIP is set to render Class Texture. Grass: I use the standard texture Nature Grass - hopefully there are better ones available in later versions of VW.

Lucylou Welcome back to the forums! So how did your hissy-fit declaration a few months back that you were going to "revert to using another package" actually work out?

Christiaan Just an idle thought, but what happens if you overlap the walls by a tiny amount? What happens if you move one wall to the front or one wall to the back?

That problem/bug is still around? I make brick columns out of 4 brick textured walls.

It can be tricky. Sometimes I have had to check the dimensions of every part by adding .0000000 to each dimension (we use metrics here). If you go in and enlarge a junction as far as you can, sometimes there is a incredibly tiny discrepancy, which generates the line. Eliminate the discrepancy and the line disappears. That's why Peter puts EXACTLY in caps!

Lindsey Slightly off topic, and apologies if you already know this, but on a Mac you can hide the dock to give you a little more screen real estate. Go to System preferences>Dock and tick Automatically hide and show the Dock. The dock will then reside out of sight and only appear when you put the cursor near the edge of the screen, and you can expand the Vectorworks page down close to the bottom of the screen. You can also have the dock at the left or right hand side of the screen if you prefer.

Does it happen with all job files? If no, were the problem ones created with an earlier version of VW? Have you Repaired Permissions? Do you Secure Empty the Trash frequently?

Tekton Pro is an Adobe font, which you have to buy separately.

AJ Pages is good, you can download it from the Apps store. Please keep us posted on progress towards a crash-free life .............

Robert Inestimable, even.

AJ Yes, I use Retrospect, it is set up to back up at 10pm every night to a portable 500GB WD external hard drive. I should really have 2 and alternate them, so one is always off-site, they're pretty cheap these days. Maybe you could get one, download a free back up like Carbon Copy Cloner, do a full backup to the drive, and then try turning TM off. Or do as Benson suggests. I doubt that your problems are the fault of your Mac or Vectorworks (although I think you could do with more RAM), it sounds like some sort of corruption. Find those crash logs, get the RAM modules checked, don't give up.

AJ Time Machine and iTunes: I had problems with TM - it interfered with my internet connection and eventually Mail and Safari would be "unable to connect to the internet", so I stopped using TM and the connection problem has not recurred. Running iTunes causes VW to freeze - this may be because I'm using an ancient 12.5.3 version, but it might be something to try. RAM: the RAM you installed may be faulty, and also I have seen some discussion over whether RAM should be equal in all slots (3GB implies you have 2 + 1). I'm also a fan of DiskWarrior.

These are user to user forums (not Nemetschek to user) so I don't know which seminars you are referring to but they are not "ours". You have been given some good suggestions here from people all round the world, not only for this request for help of yours but all the requests you have ever made to these forums. There are some extraordinarily knowledgeable experts on here that you have had free access to, if only you had the patience and good grace to listen. Ah well, good luck with finding a better program or more supportive user forum .......

Cadplan Have you repaired disk permissions, verified disk (HD>Utilities>Disk Utility)? Have you Secure emptied the trash? Do you have any other programs running while using VW (Time Machine, iTunes)? The files that crash - were they started in a previous version of VW? Who installed your 3GB RAM and when?

I've never seen that either. You can of course edit the wall as djb says using the 3DModelling>3D Reshape tool (might be called something different in later VW versions) if you want the gable wall to be different from the wall below, but it would be good to find out why it did this in your file. I wonder about the process and sequence of inserting the window - did you create the roof with the gable wall (in plan view), insert the window then check the 3D look? Is the window a symbol or import from another file? Could it be corrupted, was it created in an earlier VW version?

Will VW12.5.3 is running just fine on my iMac with OS10.6.8. Michelle A newer version of VW will probably not open the file if the version the file was created with won't. Some suggestions/questions: Do you have other VW files on your Mac, and do they open without problems? How was the backup copy created? Is your version of VW 12.5.3? This was the last version of VW12.5, and you can upgrade to this on the VW site for free. Do you use Diskwarrior? Further to Will's suggestions: empty the Trash, turn your Mac off, wait a minute or two and turn it on. Then run Repair Disk permissions, and Verify Disk. Next, open VW in a new file (HD>Applications>Vectorworks) - does it do that? If it does, close that file without saving then try to open the file you are having trouble with - post back and let us know if it worked or not.

Stop it doing what automatically - not fitting the gable wall properly, or not placing the window correctly?

When I started out on my own, I had an Apple LCII with a separate monitor, and a desktop A4/A3 printer. The LCII had Clarisworks and Clariscad, and that was all I needed to run a solo practice. Clarisworks morphed into Appleworks (which I only gave up last year in favour of Pages) and Clariscad ran into copyright problems as soon as it became successful so I gravitated to Vectorworks just when it had changed from Minicad. Steve Jobs had an extraordinary ability to see the potential in ideas and technology, and he has done more than any other person in the world to show that good design is more than a veneer, an idea dear to every architect. His products have always resonated with me because they looked right, not just good, and they worked, and they didn't get in the way of what I was trying to do. My current iMac is simply a joy to use and I am so grateful that Apple products came along at just the right time for me. Here is an Apple ad, voiced by Steve - see how many faces you can name. I think SJ himself belongs in this group he calls The Crazy Ones. http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-narrates-the-crazy-ones/

One more thing: When you're deciding how to set up your walls, you need to consider the texture you intend to apply to the wall or walls. Some textures join seamlessly at vertical and horizontal joints, some don't.