Chris D

Note also the support for composite roofs

Item number one on the Properties pane (equivalent of our OIP): Base Level Item number four is offset from base. The point is that basic settings like this are always visible.

Heck, it shouldn't even be hidden in the Settings dialog. I want the basic geometry to be visible in the OIP so that I can check at a glance that it is correct (or not). The OIP for the roof tool is completely underpopulated so it's not like there is no space.

No, I've got the same version as you....I figured out that you need to double-click on the roof once created to get back to the Settings dialog where the bearing height is hiding. Why the heck this can't be a SETTINGS button on the OIP I have no idea??? It's not like VW has consistent double-click or right-click actions. There is normally a Settings button on the OIP for other tools, like the door tool.

I've never used the architectural objects in VW very much as I've always found the learning curve too high for any gain in productivity, but....now we're going down the BIM route we're looking at the tools again. I'm flabbergasted that some of the tools are so bad. The roof tool is simply laughable...it's clunky and dumb and I'm not sure what purpose it's supposed to serve?! When you select a roof you don't even get any info in the OIP about its insertion height / bearing level....it's simply assumed you want it at Z=0 on the layer on which you insert it...but then still it doesn't behave...it actually moves up if you reduce the fascia height. I can't even draw a McMansion roof with this thing!

The Move Origin command is a poor imitation of the UCS system that AutoCAD has had for 20 years. It is so bad it should be removed from VW or replaced with proper multiple, nameable origin/coordinate systems that are unified in 2D/3D and actually work for all tools consistently, including hatch and texture origins.

On here is best, for sure.

How about getting rid of some of the lesser used forums on here...some have hardly any activity and could be folded back into General Discussion. This could make way for some new forums, like country specific forums. I'd like: - a BIM forum I know this overlaps with the Architect forum but it would encourage focused discussion of VW as a BIM tool - a UK users forum This could cover issues such as localisation discussions, regulation specific practices etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumb-bob Second paragraph, Etymology Never known your English falter before D...

Yay, visual door schedules...that's what we do...manually at the moment. I hope this comes to VW in the near future. I also love the fact that schedules in Revit appear to be user friendly...with a simple dialog box for adding database fields to existing worksheets...you couldn't design a more opaque system than the VW worksheet interface if you tried.

Interesting development from Nemetschek: Allplan officially running on Macs, via a bundled version of Parallels: http://www.nemetschek.eu/more/allplan-on-mac-preview-program.html I wonder if Autodesk are watching - they don't support Revit on Parallels at the moment. Maybe the BIM options on the Mac are broadening beyond Vectorworks / ArchiCAD

Yes please. Materials with multiple attributes, like hatch and texture set centrally.

Anyone know why triangulation lines appear on the face of 3D objects in Open GL views? Funny thing is that the same file appears differently across my machines - on my laptop it doesn't show them and I get nice clean faces, but my Mac Pro shows these lines, which is rather annoying...

Yep, this old chestnut. Nearly 300 mentions on this techboard according to Google.. Long term I want to see hatches/textures/tiles/image fills all combined into building materials, but what I can't understand is why we can't have 3D hatches. I want to be able to produce quick 2D elevations from a BIM workflow, but this rendering roadblock is a pain in the a** Give us the ability to have hatches on 3D objects and we're done.

Only seems to work with 3D polys for me. You can also only do this on the proposed site model rather than the existing, which kind of assumes your site model source data is complete when you begin, which is rarely the case.

I need training...to learn things like this... A single class may not be ideal but at least it's a workaround.

Indeed.

When I'm in a design layer, with Open GL turned on, my textures look great (brick, roof tiles etc). - crisp and clear. When I go to my sheet layers, I'm having to set the sheet layer DPI to 2400 just to get anywhere near the crispness of the textures I get in the design layer. This takes ages to render (Open GL only, no foreground render, no lighting). I can't understand why this discrepancy exists: Design Layer: instant Open GL rendering, really crisp clear textures Sheet Layer: really slow Open GL rendering, fuzzy textures Now some experimentation leads me to believe this is simply inefficient programming. If I change my Viewport Scale from 1:100 up to 1:20, I get crisp Open GL rendering at 300 DPI, with pretty quick render time. This leads to a bizarre workflow, where you are better off doubling the scale of your sheet layer drawing sheets, then printing at 50%... OR...worse still...it's quicker to screen grab a design layer and import the bitmap back to your sheet layer than to actually let the viewport do the Open GL render. Why can't VW use whatever technology is making design layers so slick and crisp with Open GL to do quick sheet layers? This is absolutely essential for a BIM workflow.

For those without WinDoor, how do you show existing and demolished (bricked up) states of a window in 3D? Do you need a little patch of matching wall (symbol?) on a special class?

Hate to quote myself but wondered if anyone had experience of this? We've found that textures are like hatches in that they set themselves out from the file origin upwards, so you can't use a 75mm brick texture unless your building is a multiple of 75mm above the file origin, etc. It appears that local attribute mapping doesn't work on textures like it does on hatches too. One more reason to unify hatches/tiles/textures/brick shaders into consistent Building Materials... http://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=32542&Number=160145#Post160145

Tamsin, I see you do training on site modelling - I'll get in touch. As a firm who use the VW Architect package, without Landmark, how useful/thorough are the VW site modelling tools to us? I have tried to use the roadways before, but like all 'automatic' tools it dies in the detail - we do lots of quirky road/street layouts in the UK as you know, with HomeZones, shared surfaces and the like, and hardly any of it could be drawn with the VW tools as far as I could see.

If you like 8 colours of lines on a black background. Like in the eighties. I used AutoCAD for 10 years before moving to VW and what a revelation is was, filled colours, white screen. I realise you can set ACAD background to white too, but nobody does because every file you receive has lots of yellow and green lines. The only nice thing is the dark palettes.

This is a great idea. A delta server would solve the problem that with BIM, the project setup is more likely to involve fewer, larger, files, which are more difficult to split up so that more than one person can be working on the file(s). This would also allow remote working too. Compelling reason number one, for sure.

Interesting start. Can't see anything compelling in there just yet, except maybe the cloud rendering. If the cloud workflow is PDF based though (albeit with auto generated PDFs, which would be handy) then doesn't Dropbox work just as well? Sent from my iPad....