JungleBoy

I have similar issues and I just wish the pdf function was fixed.

I had a run of bad luck when I started with VectorWorks. The source of my trouble appears to be 2 things: - Autoclassing of symbols, I thought I was placing the symbols on the active class, but they were going to a predefined class which did not exist in my drawing. As the class did not exist, they went to the none layer. At that stage I had only studie the Landmark CD and the main manual so I didn't get the autoclassing of plants until, I found it in the landmark manual. - Make sure that your layers are at the same scale, otherwise objects that are reassigned to another differently scaled layer using the object browser will just disappear. This was an issue as I couldn't move plants that had been plonked onto the wrong layer across the the correct layer. I think that there is also an issue with the classes of fills and lines within the symbols and this will catch me oneday. The symbol can be made of parts that are belong to different classes and if one of these classes is not visible, then part of the symbol will dissappear. It is powerful stuff when you understand it but rather confusing if you get mysterious behaviour in the early part of your VW career.

I can report the very similar behaviour. I haven't quite worked it out. Whilst I haven't crashed the program, I have regularly had the 2d plant symbols disappear from the plant catalog and also from the resource browser. I don't think that I have done anything wrong. My only theory is that because most of my base plans start life as imported dwgs/dxfs, some type of corruption occurs at the import stage. Fully native VectorWorks drawing seem to be a little more robust.

I have go through all of KevinR's dramas with the plant placement tool and more. I am a new user but have been a power user of GIS and graphic software for years. The issues that I have had with the plant placement tool are: - multiplant placement tool locks up when esc is pressed (don't use escape - use delete); - symbols in the plant catalogue disappear; - plant symbols include elements that belong to more than one class. - plant symbols sometimes end up in the none class when the active class is something else. - plant symbols sometimes include stipples (bloats pdf files) - plant catalog sometimes put hash symbols in plant names. I am frustrated enough that I am making my own plant symbol library and accessing it directly, not via the plant placement tool.

I was badly burned (16 hours) by the same issue in V11. I placed the symbols on the plan only to find that they were invisible. I eventually tracked them down to the none layer. I must say that I don't like the idea of having the plant graphics in the none class as this class is also a trash can for any deleted classes. My last job had 307 AutoCAD layers, so there was a lot of trash.

I use Manifold GIS for my DTM preparation, it is cheap and powerful and exports data in a format that is readable by Vectorworks. I have found however that Vectorworks V11 is easily overwhelmed by too many points, even quantities that GIS can process in a microsecond. Particularly deadly is pressing the undo button on a rendered DTM. One then has to sit and twiddle whilst the detroy list does its job. For the programmers information, I see Vectorworks as a means of doing whole of subdivision land analysis. Absolute scales for this work vary from 1:100 to at most 1:10 000. At smaller scales GIS is the way to go. The size of the area to be modeled can be up to 5 km square (eg resort complex with a couple of golf courses). A surveyors detail survey normally results in a 15 m grid being place over the terrain, with break lines at the tops of banks and in creeks. This is the spatial resolution of the data. GIS generally is not very good at working with models of structures such as buildings. Therefore I would prefer to use CAD for showing buildings placed in landscapes. Can Vectorworks drap a photo over a DTM as a texture bed or perhaps just as a draped photo?

I had the same problem. The only solution that I know is to select all of the plants in a given area, and then shift click each plant to deselect it. If a plant is hiding under the deselected plant, then the object handles will not dissappear. You can then delete the duplicates