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The ID on my Leica Total Station is alpha numeric. NNA have obviously thought of this with the stake object, by separating out the ID as alpha numeric 'ID Prefix' and numeric 'ID Number' but the Import Survey File cannot seem to handle this.

I am importing a survey file in ID, Eastings, Northings, Elevation, Description - its tab delimited in meters. All the data comes in fine and populates the stake object, except the ID. When importing, it would appear that this ID can only be numerical, otherwise the ID becomes 0. Is this correct? I would expect the ID to be alpha numeric, and the field to be separated into ID prefix and ID number in the stake object. So for example, a test data file containing: 1 0 0 0 Datum 2 1 1 0 1mE, 1mN, 0h STN1 2 2 0 STN1 at 2,2,0 1P1 3 3 3 1P1 at 3, 3, 3 points 1 and 2 are being correctly imported, but points STN1 and 1P1 are being imported with ID of 0, where as I would expect the stake objects to be (ID Prefix=STN, ID Number=1) and (ID Prefix=1P, ID Number=1) respectively. Not having used a Total Station before, I'm not sure of this is a bug or just how the functionality works - if the latter, it seems to me to be missing a trick. Looks like I'm going to have to modify my TS export format to also include the point ID as part of the description, then write an unnecessary script to copy the id from description into the ID prefix and number fields of the stake object.

Thankyou for your help. I will pursue this route and pass anything I find on to you. I wish you well in your fight against this horrible disease.

I have just invested in a Leica TCR705-XR TotalStation. My aim is to use it for surveying. Being a mere garden designer, I am just use to tapes and lasers, not real boys toys So apologies if I am missing something fundamental. I was wondering if there were any hints in using a TotalStation with Vectorworks? If I output DXF format, its pretty much useless. If I export as eastings, northings, height etc and import as survey data, its much more usable format but I'm wondering what techniques people use to 'join the dots'. I'm thinking about writing some scripts to assist me in doing this, probably by highlighting adjacent by ID stake objects and joining with a 3D poly and using some of the codeblock data to auto class/layer. But before I do this, I was wondering if there was any value for money applications that would be compatible with this unit and allow me more easily to associate data points something that Leica Geo Office, the data collector, does not permit me to do. Thanks

If they disappeared because you turned off visibility of the none class, I would turn it back on. Its difficult to justify why, but to be honest, the none class should always be visible. Its a default class, for things that don't fit logically within another class - ie all viewports that you may create should be in the none class. http://techboard.nemetschek.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=116562 If you do want to change the class for the plant components, you need to edit the underlying plant symbol, but this won't change the plants already placed, unless you edit each one separately. My advice is not to fight certain in grained ways of doing things in Vectorworks, such as always keeping the none class visible. Odd things can happen if you go against the grain.

Look under the plants/components class. All the sub classes should be visible - unless of course you want to turn off a particular component.

Plant symbols are made up from components from many different classes. You need to ensure that all classes relating to a plant are visible, not just those listed in the object info palette.

Presumably you are talking about 2009? And is it the Xfrog libraries you are after? And on a PC? If so, they are under program folders/Vectorworks 2009/libraries/Objects-Landscape & Site/Xfrom plant images/... Or in similar location under your user folders Or possibly in user folder/libraries/favourites you will find a shortcut to the actual file if you marked them as a favourite, which you probably have not since you are looking for them.

That has brightened up my day. Often its the most obvious of things. I spent yesterday afternoon worrying that the house was on fire - I heard a smoke detector briefly go off, but when I checked them, could find no evidence of smoke or anything else what may have triggered them and the batteries were quite fresh and the tongue test proved they were not flat . Thought I was going mad. It then happened again in the evening and my wife heard it too. Getting worried again, we investigated further - again, nothing to set them off and the sound was kind of distant so we were not sure which one had gone off anyhow. Then suddenly, there was another one and all eyes shot to the computer. Turns out that it was a desktop app that I had recently installed that sounded an alarm whenever an RNLI lifeboat was launched. If had not been in the same room when it had gone off, we would have been worrying about that one for ages. Unlike the guy who climbed into the sea from Eastbourne Pier, out night was thankfully without further worry.

Have you seen a package called Piranesi? This allows you to take a very basic 3D model then hand render it. By exporting a model in Piranesi format (or DXF), it uses clues from various attributes of the model, such as depth, materials and lighting/shadows to create a painting environment that is 3D, material and lighting aware. You can thus paint textures on to surfaces, place symbols/cutouts (people, plants etc) within the environment which generate 3D shadows and paint lighting effects. Once the scene is complete, you can then either render the scene using a built in style, or, combine it with further hand rendering. Piranesi also comes complete with a decent selection of plant cutouts which, as you hand 'paint' the final output, can be used as the base of many more plants. The amount of time needed to generate and texture a very accurate 3D model is greatly decreased by using Piranesi. Many examples in the Piranesi gallery are generated from very basic models in Sketchup or from early drafts in Vectorworks. So it is possible to produce visualisation quite quickly from fairly early sages within a project. I also have four basic examples of Piranesi sketches in my gallery. The Barnes garden took about 4 hours as I was learning on the job, the two Hampton Court gardens were low resolution and took about 1 1/2 between them and the school nursery took about 30 minutes, all once the underlying 3D model was in place. There is also Photoshop etc that can also be used to 'distress' an image. There is a free trial available from the Piranesi website and I am also a UK reseller of the product.

If you have not already done so, I would suggest updating to the most recent service packs. I have had this issue and reported it as a bug - not sure if it has been fixed though as I worked around the problem when I encountered it and can't find the description that I sent to NNA for them to reproduce.

I briefly mentioned it in this post and followed up with links to further information and instructions two posts further on. I have never tried it and it should be used with caution as there are apparently some applications that break when Windows is booted in 3GB mode although the sites that mentioned this were quite dated. In addition, I can see potential issues with giving an application access to too much application address space and starving the OS of kernel address space which may well make the system unstable. According to Dave Donley's post, NNA will hopefully be doing their own 'how to' instructions sometime soon.

4GB is only a recommended amount. Under 32bit windows, the maximum any application can handle is 2GB, unless you are running windows in a >2GB mode which by default is not enabled and most people (or applications for that matter) are not aware of. Vectorworks and many other applications can require more application memory than Windows can provide them with. This is not a fault of the application, but simply a factor of the complexity of things that you can do with Vectorworks and other applications - Rendering for example can consume enormous amounts of RAM because it is such a complex thing to do. Vectorworks 2009 is no more memory hungry than 2008, although 2009 can use more memory than 2008 by virtue that it is now aware of >2GB application memory if you run your PC in that mode. By recommending 4GB, NNA are basically saying that Vectorworks can utilise as much application memory as you can feed it, up to the 2GB (or 3GB) limit. The extra on top is not for consumption by Vectorworks but by Windows and the many other applications and programs that are concurrently running. However the reality is that 4GB of RAM is far more than Windows can make use of and share out to the applications, and generally between 0.5 and 1GB of the addressable memory in a PC is likely to be exclusively 'shared' by in built PC hardware, such as video card. So even with 4GB fitted, you are probably only able to make use of 3 - 3.5GB of it. For some projects, Vectorworks 2009 will, like 2008, run quite happily with 1 or 2GB. The performance tab of the Windows task manager is a simple place to see whether you are in need of more RAM. Unfortunately graphics card performance is a little trickier to judge and its all down to what functions the user makes use of.

Sounds like its a graphics card issue that is the problem rather than RAM. 2009 does have extra requirements for graphics card. Possibly a graphics driver update or one of the 2009 suggestions mentioned in the following posts may help matters: http://techboard.nemetschek.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=115455&an=7#Post115444 http://techboard.nemetschek.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=115485#Post115485 both of which discuss solutions to non specific problems even if the title is quite specific.

Renderworks rendering uses the CPU rather than graphics card to do its computations. So a nice new graphics card will have little or no difference in renderworks rendering times. I suspect that the standard render modes (hidden line etc), except OpenGL will also fall in to the little/no improvement. OpenGL and standard GUI (including drafting) operations do make use of the graphics card capabilities, more so with 2009. So a new card may well give improved performance with these operations. However, if your previous graphics card is under specced, then you are likely to find an improvement with a newer graphics card, but going high end is unlikely to give a value for money improvement compared to a well chosen 'gaming' card.

I believe that 2nd seats and add-ons like renderworks are still technically available as these simply use the existing media and just rely on a new 2008 license being generated. However, there may well be the odd 2008 1st license box still available - a couple of weeks back there were some still here in the UK so may well be available from other distributors. In fact, in the UK, due to recent price increases, the cheapest way to 2009 was to buy 2008 then the 2009 upgrade - and this also got you the 2008 manuals.

Apologies, poor posting etiquette replying to last post in topic rather than relevant post. Comment above referred to image in original post.

Nice

Jeffrey Could you possibly post a link (on the SP2 announcement that I can't reply to) a link to the installation notes (rather than release notes). I skipped past a comment/warning about installing Nvidia driver more recent than June 2008 before my brain had time to realise that it referenced a potentially important link. And I am no longer able to find the reference.

I frequent another forum powered by ubb. Apparently, by design, it will not search for words of 3 letters or less. Which is a pain as the things that people search most for are products with 3 letters/numbers. Its all to do with efficiency : unfortunately efficiency before productivity. The work around on the other bb was to add a site specific google search.

I would imagine that you will have more chance of sorting out your 2009 display issues than getting 11.5 to run on Leopard. http://kbase.nemetschek.net/index.php?ToDo=view&questId=154&catId=23

My Mac experience is years out of date so, other than suggesting making sure that your graphics card drivers are up to date, I do not know the answer to your problem. However, as far as VW goes on a Windows environment, Vectorworks installs as a separate application for each version, especially since the file extension has changed between 11/12 (.mcd) and 2008 and beyond (.vwx). So it is likely that you can safely install the 2009 evaluation concurrently with 11.5 and not suffer any cross version side effects, including when you need to uninstall.

That is exactly my situation and belief. I limit myself specifically to UK garden designers, unless someone is just starting out and wants VW configuration and the basics covered. The key features of each sector is so different and I am confident that the areas that I teach are highly relevant to garden designers. When I was a student, my CAD and design work was continuously critically assessed by a member of the adjudication team of the Society of Garden Designers here in the UK of being of the highest standard. Add that to nearly 30 years doing computer graphics, including over 5 years working for the BBC TV's Computer Graphics Workshop in late 80's/early 90's, 4 years solid Vectorworks (yes I still find new ways of doing things but I bet this is true of anyone), author/co-author of 2 books on programming and a fully qualified sailing instructor, I have no qualms about advertising myself as a trainer, tutor, mentor. I am never likely to want to get certified as for me, I do it because I enjoy it rather than need to make much money out of it. Because of this, I believe that I offer exceptional value for money which at the end of the day, benefits the end user.

I was at a 'mass demonstration' of a number of packages and asked the guy doing the sketchup demo if it could handle multiple simultaneous sun positions (which it can't) - I nearly got laughed out of the room. I find them very useful, especially when working out average light conditions in planting plans - so much that I started to write a PIO that would allow me to create one sun object, linked to the north point, that would simultaneously create others at alternative times of the day as for me, juggling 3 sun positions a day and associated classes for a number of dates through the seasons is asking for an error to occur.

Personally I do not import a dwg into an existing drawing for this and other reasons. I create a new drawing solely for the dwg and then reference it in. It works very well, especially to reduce unnecessary clutter such as umpteen classes. You can then bring the bits that you want in via a design layer viewport. It also works very well if you need to update the dwg. NNA now have a tutorial explaining the virtues of this method. I've just done a search and cannot find it but I came across it from a link in these forums about 3 or 4 months back. It was nice to see something to backup something that I already did.