jmcewen

My laptop is in my signature. I have been very happy with it. The only downside is that I wish I had more usb ports, but that is easily fixed with a cheap hub. When i am away from power and need to stretch battery life, I can turn off the GPU and get by on the ARC graphics most of the time as well without a hitch. I have a friend who uses AutoCAD that has almost the same machine without the dedicated graphics card. He claims that he can model for 10 hours on battery alone. I recognize Vectorworks and AutoCAD don't use resources in the same way, but it is still impressive. It was a great improvement over my giant Lenovo Thinkpad. I would caution against the big workstation laptops. i have done my share of international traveling with 8 and 9 pound machines and the giant power supplies you need to run them. It is nice to be able to sip power from a little GaN charger. Since i don't need to carry that brick of a charger, I can carry my giant streamdeck and giant mouse instead.

I like this one. Would not have thought of tapering to 0. This whole thread is just another example of how we have tons of ways to reach the same result, and the method we end up using reflects what tools we are most comfortable with.

Totally understood. For me sometimes these basic modeling methods help inform the process of how an object can actually be made, though. in the past I was often told by someone on the fabrication floor that something doesn't work and that just because I can draw it with fancy tools doesn't mean it can be built. But I can save my skin if I can show exactly how it can be machined because it was part of my modeling process in the first place.

the inverse of this would be if you intersected 3 extrusions-- one triangular from your side view, a trapezoidal extrusion rotated 60 degrees form your side view and one more that is a mirror of the second view across center line. facet study.vwx

The artist in me says that it could be done subtractively. plot the desired rhombus and extrude to 1.18" mark loci at the 2 points that define the peak-edge. rotate views to allow yourself to use the split tool to remove the unwanted portions of the block by cutting a line from the loci to the appropriate corners. it looks like 3 view changes with 2 cuts each. Surely there is a better way, but I think I could model the item with my workaround faster than researching other methodology. It looks like you may have a lot of these in your future. Have fun with duplicate array after you get it modeled!

Deform is a powerful but flawed tool. It is like surgery-- it might save you or it might kill you. I advocate for its use more than most people around here. I spent a whole summer pushing its limits in every way I could think of. It takes a while to understand the many ways it can fail you, and I am always finding more. If it is needed, it should almost always be one of the last steps in a process

32 is pretty big if you are using 2 monitors. I currently have a 32@4k in landscape and 32at 4k in portrait. In retrospect it probably would have been wiser to have 27 for each. I look awfully silly in zoom meetings when i need to look up at the top of the portrait monitor... I do love having the portrait aspect though. It is great when working on things that are tall and skinny, and when i am working in the main landscape monitor, I can have 3 landscape aspect windows open on the portrait monitor that are each still larger than my laptop monitor-- one for an internet browser, one for email and then one for pdfs, Quickbooks, or Excel or whatever else I need running at the time.

Also works if you convert to group instead of convert to lines. The bad thing is curves of course. all curves become a series of tiny straight lines.

Can you show the settings for your glass texture?

I am sure that is true! Mostly I am talking about upgrading from the typical 16GB or 32GB I see on most off-the-shelf Windows PCs these days. They are all focused on people who do spreadsheets and check email or on people who use them for gaming. Having more RAM for those purposes is pretty useless. But drawing and modeling has a way of becoming a multitasking pursuit where you need to have designer specs, cut sheets, research photos, a window for zoom, YouTube tutorial, several webpages for things you are purchasing for the project, and Slack open at the same time; suddenly 32GB is spent. Also, if you already have a lot but decide you need more, it isn't cheap on a PC either. But it is cheaper than replacing a CPU or GPU-- and far cheaper than replacing the whole system.

Oh, it is so easy to make your self spend way more than 30% extra. a video card can cost more than the core machine itself. A ram kit can cost as much as a whole computer from when I was in college. and the development cycle of hardware and software seems to keep getting shorter so the time that anything is worthwhile before obsolescence is shrinking. The question only gets more important, but also it is always harder to answer... I am fortunate in that i have been able to lean into overkill for the time being. From what I can tell, it seems that just clearing the bar for GPU may be enough for most uses, but that a fast single CPU clock is important, and that you always need more RAM than you think. RAM is the biggest deal to me, and also one of the easiest and least expensive things to upgrade. Please, anyone, feel free to correct me if I am off base here!

When I started my own business after almost 20 years at my old job, I decided I didn't want anything slowing me down. my business costs almost nothing to run-- just me at a desk with a computer most days, so I indulged! the 4090 is super overkill for most of my purposes, but it is really nice to have for the 2%of the time when I need it! And the RAM-- if you ever have the option for more, take it. I was always bumping up against my RAM at my old job. it is nice to have so much headroom. Peace of mind from a simple upgrade is definitely worthwhile. Here is a little info about boost. Mostly, it throttles down when you don't need the power just to save-- like the cars that turn off automatically at stoplights these days. you don't need to do anything to use it. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/turbo-boost.html#:~:text=How Does Intel® Turbo,to download or configure anything.

Forgive me if any of this sounds to elementary. Sometimes it is hard to tell how experienced users are. Ignore anything that is too basic or obvious. The RAM very well may be a bottleneck for you. Depending on how your laptop is made the RAM may be a moderately easy thing to upgrade, or it may be impossible. Sometimes they put it right inside an access panel on the bottom; sometimes it is buried deep inside and soldered in place. Your CPU is pretty good. The base clock is not high, but the core ultra 7 should boost to just und 5GHZ if I remember correctly and that is pretty fast. Things to try so you can free up some resources include: eliminating unnecessary geometry you don't necessarily need to eliminate your furniture just because it is a mesh. Some meshes are pretty simple. you may just need to simplify the mesh (modify>simplify mesh.) and if the furniture repeats, use symbols instead of new instances. run a purge (under the tools menu) with the remove coincident objects boxes checked. look at your classes an layers hierarchies. If you are not using these, move objects into some classes and layers so you can turn off things that you don't need. if you have tons of electrical info and you are only wanting to look at wall finishes, you can turn off that class. If classes and layers do not narrow focus enough for you, you can also temporarily group all the objects you are working with, then enter the group. This can remove all other geometry from view while you work on a detailed part. I am assuming you are navigating primarily in Shaded. Shaded uses your GPU. Redshift also uses GPU. Pretty much everything else is handled by the CPU. If you are bottlenecking on CPU, try to avoid any other rendering settings. It may also help to turn off anti-aliasing in your Shaded options You can turn down the 3d conversion resolution (tools>options>vectorworks preferences>3d tab on the left) but this may start to cause some new problems. you can reduce the number of undos available (tools>options>vectorworks preferences>session tab on the left). this might be getting a bit extreme though, and again it may cause more harm than good. you can turn off animated view transitions (tools>options>vectorworks preferences interactive tab on the left) but this could be jarring and will probably have minimal effect. As you noted, workflow efficiency makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, my background leads me to stream-of-consciousness modeling more often than i like to admit. Let me know if any of this helps (or if it doesn't at all!) I have done more computer buying in the past two years than i have in the past 2 decades, but I am certainly not an authority. Someone here will know more than I do.

THANK YOU! I wish I had known this ages ago. i have been decomposing my polylines for no reason just to gain access to the clipped areas for editing for far too long.

This happens to me sometimes, too. It is a terrible answer to your question, but i typically end up tracing the curve of my extrude in the annotations tab of my viewport, setting the pen and the fill to "none" to make the tracing invisible, then snapping a dimension off of the traced curve. it is a work around rather than a solution, but it works for me. The other thing that happens is sometimes the cursor wants to snap to another coincident object rather than the curve. I run into this more often with the arclength tool than the radial dimension, but itis worth mentioning. for example, if you have a line that terminates on your arc, sometime the cursor snaps to the endpoint of the line rather than the point on the curve.