Chris D

I found my old photochop... But I would want to add a tick that does what the little arrow on the bottom of the current palette does - set everything by class - and when it is ticked the attributes are all locked to class, so users would have to untick to manually edit...

I'm over 40...my eyesight is failing!

Stop trying to sell Windoor with these persuasive screenshots ;-) ! I know it looks good, but this stuff should be in the main application!

I hate the Attributes Palette with a passion. I've argued this before on these boards, but it is now high time that it was shot and buried! I mean, it's so deprecated that it's now shrivelled up into a shadow of its former self anyway, just look at it besides the 2008 version (2012 on the right): You can't even see if your lineweight is set by class anymore! (try it!) But this is just cosmetic...it doesn't need fixing it needs annihilating! In the CAD world it was an annoyance that line colour/style/weight was separated from the other attributes of an object, but in the BIM world it is surely heresy! The attributes palette should be folded into the Object Info palette where it belongs. CLASSES should be what determines an object's properties 99.9% of the time. We should not be using MacPaint style little palettes to set colour and lines of individual objects. Having the attributes palette separate just encourages people to use it instead of selecting the right class. And I don't buy that 'it's people that shoot people, not guns' argument. Fine, ok, you can have a tear-off palette if you want it, but it should not be separate by default and it should be better than the crappy little thing in the 2012 version anyway!

I find that new wall types are sufficiently distinct from existing walls anyway on most projects. Demolished would be a dashed outline of the wall only. Interesting how people tackle phasing or 4D though. We usually layer for existing, demolished and proposed. No idea how we'd go about it in a BIM workflow within stories though...? Does IFC have a 4th dimension?

Thanks Dieter. Do you use Drawing Registers (issue sheets) in Belgium? http://needleandmortar.com/wiki/Drawing_register Can these be created on a Worksheet?

Yes my colleague had drawn the building at the real world Ordnance Survey coordinates, when it is better to model at the origin and then reference to the OS position. Odd that there is a feature to centre the Sheet Border on the Page Boundary, but nothing to centre an automatically-created Viewport in the same place!

What about Create Standard Viewports? We tried it on a test job with multiple stories we are dabbling with, but it seemed to create the viewports miles away from the sheet borders and we had to move them all back by hand!

YYYY-MM-DD as the default date format within Vectorworks, for use with the revisioning system / issue manager etc. This is the ISO international standard date format. Parochial formats like the differing US and UK ones are too easily confused.

You'd think they would hard code things to international standards! ....the point about the ISO date format is that it cannot be confused, unlike the US/UK date formats which are easily mixed up.

Also, how do you get VW to respect your date format preferences? We use the ISO date format YYYY-MM-DD for example 2012-12-31, but the revisioning seems to omit the first two YYs and omits the leading zeros from the MM and DD.

Are you finding the automatic Sheet Borders, Titleblocks, revisioning etc worth while? Wondering if it's worth the trouble to set up our regular sheets (with plain old Record Formats) as custom sheet borders / title blocks?

These tile objects are odd...the stud positions can be controlled to an extent in vertical walls, but flip a wall horizontally and they behave differently! They also don't behave at all at wall joins. Tiles might be clever but I'm not sure they are wise...we don't need further abstraction...we need a framing tool within the wall type. I'm surprised that a North American company like NV Inc hasn't made this a priority as most of your houses are timber framed.

Are you sharing?

That sounds enticing but is it true? I mean, say I had a space with four walls around it...could I just throw a four-way elevation marker on like below and get 4 viewports of the internal elevations of that room? The help files are not really helpful...is there a way to use the create section viewport command to do this?

Make sure you change the colour and thickness of all levels, not just the selected one. You could also use a fill.

By the way, why can't the Transom be called a Transom? Calling everything Mullions is confusing. I know you Americans call fanlights transom lights...but you know why?...because it's the light above the transom rail at the top of the door!

We're trying to model a relatively simple building with a curved curtain wall than runs up several stories. No compound curves, nothing fancy...should be able to do that right? - When using Stories we want the WindowWall tool to be storey compliant so we use storey height spans. How do you get it not to duplicate the transom (horizontal mullion in US speak) at floor level? - Why can't you set Transom and Mullion independently. They are hardly ever the same section in reality. We want deep mullions and skinny transoms. This can't be done right? - Why can't you turn off the top/bottom transom, like you can turn off the first/last mullion? My own conclusion...by the time you've learned the tool, learned of its limitations (practically everything), moaned about it on the techboard, tried a few workarounds....you're better off just drawing the bloody thing in primitives. BIM? hah.

I use Vectorworks as my tool of choice for a surprising number of tasks....things that other people would do in Illustrator, Photoshop, Word, Excel, InDesign....but I would love it to have better text capabilities too. Better still, tables would be a really cool addition as well.

Yeah, those are the funny ones....where the doors don't cover the carcass edge, they include tops (as if they weren't to go under a worktop) and they are all drawer-line...no full base doors.

You know, one of our guys came back from a BIM seminar last week announcing that Sketchup was the future of BIM. We all laughed. Then today I googled 3D models of UK kitchen cabinets. Yup right there in the Sketchup 3D warehouse...full UK kitchen units range in standard sizes: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=2dfae1545547790d65224ccd01ad35d4&prevstart=0 Now Sketchup is starting a long way behind Revit in BIM functionality, but how far behind Vectorworks is it?.....

Oh, you americans with your funny kitchen units. I love that the default content provided with our UK copies of VW is american style cabinetry, but in metric dimensions...what's the point of this?? Can we do better with the next release please. [Comments about our local distributor doing this are not welcome]

I think this again illustrates a point about BIM that I've said before...BIM is all or nothing: In 2D, lines and arcs can draw anything you could ever want to build, but in the BIM workflow, if your door tool can only do a very limited range of doors, the workflow breaks down and you're in to workarounds - non-intelligent, non-parametric, non-reporting, different-scheduling dumb symbols made from primitives. That then isn't BIM. So, despite it's miniCAD origins...CAD for the smart sized firm...etc etc...you can't do BIM on the cheap and Nemetschek should recognise that. If you're going to sell a BIM tool it has to do the job.

Our feelings exactly.

I do see what you mean...I like it. It appears to be an AutoCAD font so it should be supported in DWG exports and PDFs.