Chris D

Funny, I was asking about GPU rendering yesterday in the Renderworks forum. Twinmotion sounds interesting, but it's a pity it's DirectX rather than open standards. The Twinmotion workflow is export/import based which kind of defeats the object of 'real time' rendering, but it sounds like real time rendering inside 3D design apps isn't more than a few more years away. I hope VW doesn't get left behind.

The constraints feature doesn't currently work with 3D objects except walls. I'd like to see parametric constraints available for all 3D objects including 3D symbols and PIOs. Imagine a furniture object that is constrained to always sit a certain distance from a wall for instance Or objects that are constrained to sit a certain distance from other objects on a trigger class. Another step towards intelligence basically.

I attended a briefing today about ActivePlan which opened my eyes about the intelligence of spaces. They have developed a system that links with AutoCAD/Revit to associate objects and data to Room Spaces. The thing is that Vectorworks can almost do this itself with just a little more intelligence. http://www.activeplan.co.uk/overview.asp One of the key things to make this work is that if you put a piece of furniture (or any other symbol or PIO) in a space, then it should know that is in that space. This should be very easy because space volumes can be defined in their settings - does the insertion point of the symbol or PIO overlap with the volume of a space? You can probably write a script to do this now. The other minor thing is that spaces need to report which storey they are in. This opens up a whole realm of being able to schedule: - Spaces by Storey - Fixture and Fittings by Space and with intelligent objects, or even with Record Formats attached to symbols, you have a lot of scheduling power at your disposal.

It is a little "trigger happy" with a magic mouse isn't it... I'm using Lion / 2012 / magic mouse at home. Best to include your setup in your signature by the way.

Now the spinning beach ball of death (on a mac)...I certainly get that quite a lot...

I was very interested in the apparent round-tripping of NBL objects out of Revit, via IFC, to the carbon assessment web app and back again. Item 3 on this page: http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/ecobuild-2012-day-two.html

Not sure if this overlaps with Issue Registers but we need these within VW at some point. http://needleandmortar.com/wiki/Drawing_register

2008 was a good release for stability. I haven't managed to crash 2012 (SP2) very much though yet either

Intermittently. A few years back there was 'Katie' who used to respond to almost everything, but there is less in the way of direct support on here now. You'll usually get a community answer to most queries though so stick around.

Background: As I work in an office where our whizzkids in the corner traditionally did our visualisations, I haven't done much rendering. Now that we are moving to a BIM workflow where rendering is essential just to get elevations on a sheet, I've been playing with the render settings in Renderworks. What amazes me is that I never knew that the CPU does all the rendering work while the GPU sits idle. One quick google later.... GPU Rendering: I note that NVIDIA have produced a GPU rendering engine called iRay, that is now available for Cinema4D. GPU rendering is a magnitude faster than CPU rendering and realistic views can be generated in seconds - google for the videos to see for yourself. So my question is when will Renderworks support GPU rendering in some way?

I read the other day that ArchiCAD has 65,000 users which doesn't sound many. Haven't seen the figures for Revit (was over 500k 3 years ago), or how many of the 300k VW users have the Architect licence. Seems like NV Inc have a decent installed base to work from and add value.

I notice that in one corner of Ecobuild the NBS launch the National BIM Library, whilst in the other corner of the hall Barbour announces support for BIMstore...a competing initiative. My money's on NBL (that's not basketball for US readers...). The trouble is that having two initiatives may divide manufacturers' focus when they decide to make BIM resources available. (I wasn't there by the way....just got the two launch emails)

The Vectorworks windows and doors haven't appeared, but I've seen the drafts so I know they're coming... A bit embarrassing that the reason there are no pitched roof composites for VW is that...er...Vectorworks can't do composite pitched roofs...

Except turn all of those small offices that adopted Vectorworks into large offices with more seats, through the competitive advantage of good software..?

I'm also interested in how people are coping with brickwork. In our 2D workflow we use hatches that are correctly scaled and coursed, so a window head and cill will always coincide with a bed joint on the brickwork. We're struggling to do this with textures for the BIM workflow, as for one thing we're having to render sheet layers at ridiculous DPI just to get bed joints to show consistently at 1:100

I've seen the recent discussions about the merits of section viewports versus elevation viewports. What I'm interested in is how users are dealing with any 2D overlays. We'd prefer not to have to draw in the annotations part of a sheet layer, as that should be reserved for notes. There doesn't seem to be a way to set up a design layer section viewport that remains static and rendered so that you can draw over it though. 2D overlays will be required for things that aren't worth modelling or you have insufficient 3D data for, such as adjacent or distant buildings, or for shadows that can't be cast by ghosted buildings etc. Surely you want these assembled in the design layer?

Farookey - just a note that you can display attachments inline by editing your post, inserting an image from the toolbar and using the attachment URL..

This argument is kind of like "why build art galleries when we need more hospitals". The two are not exclusive. As a small player Nemetschek has a vested interest in open standards so that they can play ball too.

You don't do modesty very well.

It is, yes. But please don't think I was questioning this...I just wanted to cut through the waffle that passes for an announcement these days. You have advanced the definition a fraction, but really we all knew that NV Inc supports IFC based workflows, so what's new? What does Open BIM mean in practice?

And while I've got the attention of a real Nemetschekian can you request that the forums are updated to accept zip files without having to hide them, and that inline images can be posted directly without having to attach them and re-insert the image from the attachment. Pretty please.

Jeffrey - sample 2012 file attached from a colleague. This is a zipped file so change the extension from .vwx to .zip then unzip it. Pick any space and try and turn on 'auto boundary' and then try and do something else - it will spin for at least a minute even in this stripped down version (machine spec same as my signature). Or try and edit a wall and update a space and you will wait for 30 seconds.

Nope. 2012 has this problem.

We're using it on similar sized school projects, but these jobs are still in VW2008 rather than 2012. It's not as bad in 2008...same old VW...going backwards.

This certainly works...took me a while to figure out what you'd done with that file...but it's definitely a workaround and not a desirable workflow.