IanH

Simple fix, buy a Windows PC.

I believe that the problem is that some printers do not understand transparency so a number of work arounds are used, not always 100% successfully. The proper solution is for printing technology to catch up and implement a reliable rendition of transparency but in the meantime there are some workarounds to reduce the issue. It's all in the knowledgbase and detailed towards the bottom of the article.

I'm sorry Ian, i am a one man show. Firstly I don't find a 1000 dollar yearly upgrade specifically expensive... But we are not all Architects needing the functions that you crave. Remember that Designer is also for landscaping, machine design, spotlight etc where we are not so flushed with money that we could absorb a doubling of software spend. VW is priced at the lower end and I know a lot of people even at current price point that cannot afford/justify the cost even now where pen and pencil works just as well for many and CAD would probably be 20% of ones workflow. Unfortunately individual VW design series products don't totally support all of our needs so Designer is necessary for many, not just the functionally crippled Fundamentals. I use bits from architect and spotlight and by the time functionality from a second design series product is needed, then Designer is needed. I'm sure not wanting to pay for all the extras of Architect that you want to add. How about a Vectorworks BIM Series at twice the price and leave current Design Series at current price point. I don't see it happening, as it would put Vectorworks right in the mix of many other products. I think people need to appreciate that a budget range product is not going to offer what the premier range products do. VW is a sheep, and dressing it up in wolfs clothing still wont make it anything other than a sheep.

No problems that I have noticed opening another designers vw2008 files.

That is a very good point. Fundamentals/Spotlight/Landscape can remain cheap. It's Vectorworks Architect and Designer that need a price correction in line with BIM development requirements. Unfortunately at VW's price point, it appeals to many of us one man bands who cannot afford, nor need anything more substantial. Just because you don't personally put your hands in your own pockets, it doesn't mean that there are not many others that do and would prefer that you don't make moves that make VW more expensive than it already is. If you don't like what is already offered, go tell your bosses to buy something more expensive and suited better to your needs rather than tailoring a perfectly reasonable and functional application into something that it isn't.

Couple of comments Seems to take up a lot of screen real estate. Maybe that's just the navigation palette that I don't use but possibly also top/bottom of drawing screen being filled with what are currently floating palettes. Current attributes palette also set drawing options as well as object properties so do not fit entirely in OIP. NB. Attributes palette much bolder on Windows version.

I've modified the generic 150mm wall style slightly to give me better default options. I changed the default class to be one of my own (Building-wall), changed it to no end caps and also created a 300 mm version too. By default, my building-wall has a fill but when I am placing doors/windows etc I turn fill off so that I can see locus' etc indicating the positions of these. However when I insert the door or window into the wall, the fill disappears and won't return unless I make a change to the wall ie briefly toggle end caps on /off etc at which point the fill returns. This only affects the single wall that the window/door is placed into, not other joined walls. Has anyone else encountered this and is there a more permanent fix than the work around I use?

I use a logitech M500 USB corded mouse with my MBP OSX Lion 10.7.3. I am not running any Logitech mouse drivers, just vanilla OSX functionality. Up until today, it has been great, but for some reason, it is intermittently missing button clicks. The result is, that I am intermittently having to press the mouse button more than once to perform the mouse button click - probably 50/50 whether click is detected. This happens in Vectorworks and other apps that I tried like safari and finder so would appear not to be app specific. I don't think its hardware as I tried it on my Windows PC and I didn't notice the problem. My Apple Magic Mouse seems to work fine, but I don't like working with that. A while back, someone recommended me to use the MagicPrefs app to help tame my MagicMouse so I am running V2.3.2 which according to the app is up to date. Whilst writing this post, I just disabled MagicPrefs and my mouse seems more (maybe totally) responsive. So it looks like its some interaction with MagicPrefs and my logitech mouse that has suddenly started occurring. However, looking on MagicPrefs website, seems like no updates for quite a while. I took an OSX update yesterday, but it was an update for camera RAW file formats. I have also rebooted my MBP, no difference. Does anyone know what may be the issue and why it has started happening today? Im fairly fresh to modern Macs so don't have much historical experience to draw upon. In the mean time, I will run with MagicPrefs off, but the curious side of me would like to know the reason behind this.

Im not defending VW, but I don't think that rotate plan is meant to be a permanent rotation - permanent rotations should be done via the rotation set in the viewport OIP. I only use plan rotation on a temporary basis when I need to place/align certain objects not aligned with the horizontal/vertical axis. I had major issues with plan rotation glitches with one version of VW (probably 2008 but may have been 2009) that changed on an SP by SP basis and have never trusted it since.

Sounds like you want to upgrade to Renderworks rather than Architect. 3D is built into all versions of Vectorworks but photo realistic results are handled by Renderworks. The 'design series' of Vectorworks has more capabilities, but at the end of the day, they all ultimately use the core 3D modelling capabilities available in Fundamentals.

I don't use rotated plan other than for temporary rotations say when drawing some objects. For permanent rotations I use viewports and rotate the viewport. That way the call outs will always be drawn on a non rotated plan ie correctly be it on an annotation in a sheet layer viewport or a standard layer with a design layer viewport which is probably what you are after.

I've just done a test with callouts on a fresh document. All callouts were instant in my 2010 install on Lion. You show 2GB RAM and a couple of Macs. If you have 2GB with Lion and VW2010 it may be a bit tight - I don't know, it may be a red herring - although doesn't seem that way if its on every edit - you might expect things to be a bit sluggish when using a tool or something the first time when low on RAM, but consecutively repeating the same thing, on same layer you would expect the tool and layer to be in RAM so up to speed.

I have been on at NNA for ages about this. It is one of two major issues why I wrote my own plant toolkit, the other issue being labelling. It was a limitation of placing plants as symbols. The side effect of converting to group is probably worse, so I guess we were stuck with the limitations of symbols. However, since VW2011, symbols can be scaled so hopefully this issue can be resolved at some point.

That will be another shock to the system!

Your going to find a big change with this one... Try design layer viewports. They are great.

I understand your argument and am not disputing your point of view, but just want to know how you know that you have not got a virus? What antivirus software are you running? I just bought a Mac and don't run any AV on it which I don't feel comfortable about. But people told me, Macs don't get Virus' so you don't need AV which I don't buy as I could write a 'virus' for a mac so I am sure determined criminals could too. But it is nice not to have the overhead of AV software if it truly is not needed.

The last I heard VWs had 400000 users I hadn't appreciated that it was so many. I did my approximation based on the number of users registered on this forum and came to approx 100000. That is quite a large user base, a nice size, not as non main stream as I thought. As for being multi core aware, having spent a few minutes digging around at what VW is up to, it certainly is multi core aware. On my machine, VW typically runs with between 16 and 23 threads. Each thread is theoretically capable of concurrently running on a different core/processor. Add this to cine render which is also running, VW is theoretically capable of running across a large number of cores. However, just because VW creates a thread, doesn't mean that the OS will pick the thread to run. So VW can run across multiple cores and the OS knows that it can, but something is blocking the threads from running concurrently. Which goes back to my comment about code being thread safe. What is likely happening is that the threads spend a lot of time waiting for permission to proceed. This is typically waiting for events such as mouse/key presses, window events (possibly one thread per window), some form of IO operation to complete, but is also due to being blocked by another thread that needs exclusive access of a data area or some other resource, or by a library that is not thread safe and thus prevents multiple instances of itself running concurrently. My guess is that it is a combination of non thread safe libraries and some critical data structure(s) in VW that cannot be made thread safe and thus are being purposely blocked from concurrent access. If this is the case, in its present form, VW may never be able to be changed to take advantage of long periods of concurrent processing although even now, VW does run across multiple cores for small amounts of time indicated by VW CPU usage briefly exceeding 100%. The biggest advantage of multiple cores in this scenario is the ability for other processes to concurrently run without affecting the speed of VW. For instance, Outlook is currently using about 65% CPU. Had I had a single core system, VW and Outlook would have been limited to 100% CPU when the reality is that they can both have their full 65% and 100% that they require.

Yes. I have After Effects. Its a pixel based which is easy to distribute to multiple threads as you can just split the screen up into different tiles and have a thread work on each. Many years back (late 80's) when I did computer graphics at the BBC, we used what was known as bit slice processors which was the heart of the ubiquitous Quantel Paintbox. Basically it was a one bit processor and as such ran, for its time, extremely fast. The Quantel unit would perform real time screen manipulation simply because it was massively parallel and the application allowed the unit to split the screen up into tiles that could each be worked on in parallel. We later went on to use the Meiko computing surface, which was based on the Inmos Transputer. It was extremely good at the one job that it was purchased for, Peter Snows election graphics battleground if you know it, but incredibly poor at general purpose computing simply because the applications that we were writing could not make use of the parallel capabilities of the device even though our department specialised in computer graphics. As a result, the unit was rolled out every 4 or 5 years at election time. With a 3D model, traditionally you have a number of things that need to be performed on the 3D data before it becomes 2D. As I said in my previous post, much of this transform traditionally involved sorting objects within the whole model in the Z plane to calculate which objects are visible and which are not. This process I suspect will not scale well at all in a MP environment. However once the object visibilities are known, the image is effectively 2D which can then be easily split across threads for concurrent processing. However, by the time you get to this point, you effectively have all the information needed for a hidden line representation. Now, I am not saying that newer algorithms have not been devised to take advantage of multiple threads, but that in some circumstances, the effort to rewrite algorithms and data structures to allow this is simply a massive exercise, much like converting applications to take advantage of 64 bit data. As I said before, I don't know what algorithms VW use and how they have split up their application, but I suspect that as hidden line is part of the basic (non Renderworks) VW packages, there is one and only one implementation of hidden line rendering and that is handled directly by core VW. To convert core RW, its algorithms, data structures and third party libraries to make them thread safe would be a huge effort if it was possible at all - it may for instance rely on some third party libraries that are no longer supported and so will never become thread safe. The route that VW took, with a separate renderworks based on Cinema 4D engine is technically a very elegant solution which was possible with relatively little effort to produce a large amount of gain. Something that I don't think would have been the case had hidden line render had been rewritten to allow a small percentage gain when run on multiple cores. I appreciate that the cost to purchase and upgrade VW is relatively high, but I suspect that it has quite a small user base and thus its development budget is actually quite modest and needs to be carefully prioritised.

If I need character figures, I use the VW character figure, put it in roughly the position and style that I need then decompose it into a 3D shape which I can then modify using the standard 3D tools. I would have thought that modelling a telescope was fairly simple. Attached is an example of a couple of stone statues that I made with this technique.

Certainly I cannot recommend the Apple Magic Mouse for CAD. Its fine for many things but when I get tired my finger sometimes inadvertently touches the surface and key 'presses' and gestures then get confused with two fingered gestures and my model ended up zooming or shooting off the screen, even with the MagicPrefs app loaded. In the end I went back to a Logitech m500 corded mouse which I find is more accurate and responsive than my similar Logitech m705 cordless mouse that I use mostly on my PC. The cord is not an issue as it plugs into my Apple corded keyboard when on my desk. I had been looking for a V470 bluetooth mouse but could not find one in a shop that I could try so didn't buy one untested. But I notice they are now heavily discounted here in the UK so maybe a new version is due out. Shame it was not available in white otherwise if it is as good as Logitech's other rodents, they would have a killer device on their hands for Mac users. I can also recommend Logitech customer support. After 4 years my old logitech PC mouse started to double press when I hit a key. Logitech replaced the mouse and associated keyboard for brand new equivalent units for no charge.

I wish people would not trivialise this my calling it multi core aware. The problem is making algorithms and code thread safe which is non trivial and in some circumstances impossible or actually have a performance impact. Just because you have multiple processors or cores doesnt mean that best performance is achieved simply by writing algorithms and applications to use all of them. I don't claim to know what algorithms VW or Renderworks use, but I suspect they do alot of sorting, a process which does not scale very well when performed in parallel, ie on multiple cores. Just guessing, but I suspect that this may be a reason why Renderworks does not max out the cores during the early parts of its processing or when VW performs hidden line, a process that traditionally requires much ordering of objects in the Z plane.

Can I politely suggest getting a friend or colleague (or a PC repair shop) who knows what they are doing to try and sort the problem. It sounds like by "jsut sort of opened the computer up and hoovered out all the dust" you probably caused all sorts of problems, especially with the CPU heatsink/fan when you "lifted it up to suck out all the dust". That would be the critical CPU cooling fan and by dislodging it and revealing "some weird grey stuff which looks like a thin layer of plastic is melted" you have damaged the cooling of the CPU. NB the "weird grey stuff" is a thermal compound which helps create a good thermal bond between the processor and the heatsink/fan. It needs to be applied carefully and thinly otherwise the thermal characteristics of the CPU/heatsink will be affected which I suspect is what you have done. The cooling of many PC's are designed to work efficiently when the case is closed. Running with the case open will affect the flow of air through the unit which may reduce air movement over critical parts which will then overheat. As for why rendering is causing the problem and things like "photoshop, call of duty, autocad etc" do not is that rendering is highly CPU dependant and will continuously stress the CPU and memory for extended periods of time.

Sounds like your computer has a hardware problem that rears its ugly head when the computer is stressed. Likely to be memory or CPU rather than something like graphics card, or maybe some form of thermal malfunction. Suggesting running a diagnostics program that will stress the hardware. Also, did you ever see it shutdown and if so was it the bsod? You can also look in the event log files to see if anything odd is in there.

Why are you running 2010 in Parallels? Is it just to run on 10.6 and avoid 10.7? I run 2010 equally as well as 2011 on Lion. If you are getting crashes as you say then something is wrong with the install not the version - ie equally as likely to happen with 2011. However I dont push 2010 as hard as I push 2011 but I think the few issues are well documented and most issues will also affect 2011. Surely the cost of an additional copy of 2011 is going to be far higher than the cost of upgrading your copy of 2010 to 2012?

Your printing issues *may* be related to problems with some printers not handling transparency. See this thread... As you are a Windows user, you may have a work around.