Chris D

what font is that...it looks like my old Rotring stencils!

OK, we've tested this more extensively this morning. We can get it to work, but it's definitely buggy. What's happening is there is some 'stickiness' going on with the component fill displays that the 'Update' button of the viewport is not changing. One wall type we created this morning had 3 components and we could easily override the outer two component fills, but not the inner one. We cleared the stickiness by changing the general class fill for that component in the main Org Palette, to verify that the component was displaying by class in the viewport, and lo and behold the override suddenly took effect. I'll amend my bugsubmit.

Unless there is something in inherited (VW2008) wall types that is throwing it off. Will check tomorrow. I've now bugsubmitted anyway.

Definitely, as we are testing with our standard walls which have classed components. We don't deviate from class generally and use viewport overrides (sheet layer) extensively.

Can others replicate this behaviour before I do...?

Tried that, but Viewport class overrides don't seem to work on section viewports when showing individual wall components.

BIM workflow. So, after several years our office has a nice library of scaled hatches to represent masonry in plan, section and elevation. Move to BIM and we naturally want 3D representations of wall fills, in plan, section , elevation and 3D.....in Open GL working view....AND in renderworked views. Trouble is, there is no correlation between hatches and textures. Not only that, but textures can't be made the same way, so that brickwork will course and coordinate. Sure, with trial and error of image imports for your textures, you have a workaround...but....it's a workaround. What we need is not an old fashioned analogy of 2D CAD 'hatches'....and separate 3D modelling 'textures'....what we need are BIM 'materials'! You seeing a pattern?

BIM workflow. If I'm right, a section through a wall with several components can either show a generic fill or use the component class fills. The trouble with component class fills is that there is only one class allowed per wall component, so we can't display the wall differently in plan and section........because in the 2D drafting world we would show masonry coursing in our hatches. I'm not planning on drawing 2D lines on my sections when I have perfectly good hatch patterns to do it for me! My wish is either for separate plan/section fills for walls.....OR for building material definitions within VW which can have attributes for plan/section and elevation.

yup

those look like old links...it may have changed.... The point is this however: Autodesk don't need to play ball if they think they are big enough to force everyone to use Revit.

To extend the discussion a little further: I think here lies the way to less abstraction too. If there was a generic 'parametric element' PIO that were customisable to the extent that you can create whole new building components that were nameable, scheduleable, parametric, etc, there would be less overhead for the NVInc engineers, as we could create components and elements and share them. The Object Info palette and the Worksheets would report them directly as building components. This might be a bit open ended, but some of the technology is already there....i'm thinking semi useless tools like the linear material tool, as well as the door/window tools and the wall tools - they all have generic behaviours which could be repurposed - linearity, repeating units, hole forming, joining behaviours, limits, associations, etc. Where Types then come in handy is that if this was an available function of all PIOs, then any new parametric element created could be used by Type, which would be extremely powerful.

I missed this in 2007, but count me in. I was idly musing the same thing earlier after the discussion about window/door types.

Pat, thanks for the input. You're assuming I know about schedules in Vectorworks, but I don't. After experimenting with them in the office a few years back we gave up...nobody could understand how it was supposed to work so we stopped trying. We're now at the point we want to have a go again, but so little seems to have changed, the spreadsheet in VW still looks like Lotus 123 from the eighties, but is less user friendly. Your workaround might work, but I suspect like all VW workarounds it takes a lot of manual handling. I really dislike how as a solution it further abstracts building components into general symbols - this isn't the future of BIM. Having said that...any chance you would post a sample file to the board so we can see how it works?

Been posted before and hoped we'd get it in 2012, but it didn't arrive. Without it, there is no point to the window or door PIOs in Vectorworks: if you have to make symbols for repeating types, you lose the scheduling. Stick with the PIOs instead, and you get the scheduling but you act like a CAD monkey...manually updating every field for every instance of every door/window in the crappy Object Info palette. We need door and window types yesterday.

I really dislike this answer. Fragmentation.

If it's that easy why do NV only implement half-solutions when writing their tools? The Custom Modification tool COULD be a really powerful and useful feature, but without being able to edit symbols it's almost useless.

Nope.

Is there still no way in version 2012 to make the Custom Modification tool act on objects inside Symbols? I've got an AutoCAD drawing with hundreds of symbols, each with objects that are off-class coloured....in yellow. I don't want to edit each one so that I can change the lines to black to see them. Workarounds using black-and-white view are not helpful.

My colleague recommends this link: http://www.cbscores.com/ And suggests that for raw performance on Vectorworks you want a liquid cooled overclocked chip, such as a Boxx box: http://boxxtech.com/

My more learn'ed colleague (our C4D guru) has the following to say: Our new machines are CPU: Xeon W3565 @ 3.2Ghz (4 cores in 1 processor) GPU: Radeon HD 5870 Cinebench 11.5 scores: CPU score of 5.68 GFX score of 29.76 We also have some older machines which were bought for C4D CPU: Dual Xeon E5520 @ 2.27GHz (8 cores in 2 processors) GPU: Radeon?HD 4870 Cinebench 11.5 scores: CPU score of 8.16 GFX score of 24.73 The CPU is doing the rendering work in C4D, so you see that it's horses for courses - the older machines are better for rendering because C4D is using all of the 8 cores, while our newer machines have fewer cores but faster clock speed which is better for Vectorworks.

It's funny that my comments came across that way. I'm a big Apple fan...check my signature. Sure, there was a premium for the Mac Pro over a PC box, but reliability, resale value...and OS X are worth it. My gripe was not with the Mac, but the way Vectorworks doesn't use the resources you throw at it! It needs to address more than 4GB RAM and to make use of multiple cores before they can EVER claim that their product is suitable for BIM.

By viewport would be preferable?

We've just ordered Renderworks licences but they haven't arrived yet. We've always used Cinema 4D for presentation rendering, but the BIM workflow really needs renderworks.

We have plenty of experience with iMacs and it's mostly bad. We use our machines with netrender overnight and we hammer them all day. They can't cope with heavy use and the motherboards eventually fry (the cost of an iMac motherboard + fitting is more than a new machine). i5s and i7s are also not as robust for pro use as Xeons, that's why there are two chip lines. The graphics card options on the iMacs are also very limited.

2008 for 2D work (the other 30 odd users in the office didn't get an upgrade) 2012 for the BIM trial..