IanH

I think the problem is with your old v12 Vectorworks. Snapable PDF came later than that (2009?) so I suspect that v12 just discards the vector data. Any chance of getting a 2012 eval copy then you can import in that and export an older file. Not sure if 2012 exports as old as v12 so that may not work anyway. If your life depends on it and you cant work with the bitmaps, upgrading may be best option although you would still need to check if your pdf's contain vector information in the first place.

So after you imported the PDF and ungrouped the OIP said that only 2 objects were selected? One of these was the bitmap and the other was a white filled rectangle? Nothing else? If so, that Is not my experience. What settings did you use when you exported the PDF AC this controls what is in the PDF. I can't think of anything that would cause only a raster bitmap to be generated. Are you sure you definitely used the Vectorworks export function and not another method such as printing to PDF? Another thing worth doing is checking whether the imported PDF is snapable. It would be worth listing your OS version and Vectorworks version. Edit: I see you have done that. Older versions of VW don't have some of the PDF capabilities. Maybe that is the problem Maybe send me a small (im on 3G at moment) PDF and I will see what it contains.

Im actually involved in garden design so i'm not a lighting person. As I have VW Designer I have the Spotlight features, but don't know what I need. The effect that I would like to achieve is that of dappled shade coming through some trees. For now I just set the sun and put a couple of 3D trees in front which then create the dappled shade. but its all very time consuming plus I have some unwanted trees that I have to deal with. I was wondering if there was something in spotlight that could achieve similar. I understand the basics of GOBO type lighting and wonder if there is some technique based on this that I could use. It would be brilliant if I could draw a mask that represented the density of the planting that I wanted to create the shade from. Im a workspace based on the designer workspace so will also need assistance locating the spotlight tools. Thanks in advance

PDF's can contain bitmap or vector information or both. If you export as pdf in Vectorworks it creates both bitmap and vector images. Other programs may not. If you import a PDF, you can ungroup it. This will create a number of objects, dependant on how the pdf was created. Assuming that the pdf was created in Vectorworks... One will be a bitmap, another will be a filled white rectangle which occludes the vector representations then there will be the vector data, which may be grouped per viewport, layer or class depending on the options used to export. What you need to do is delete the bitmap and solid rectangle (possibly a few others) and you should find your vector information. HTH

No really, but I guess, a bit like. The cloned object is part of the drawing, not a resource. Taking a recent issue, you could have a piece of text. The original would be black with no fill. The cloned/lined object would take the text from the original, but you could have no pen, solid fill, 50 percent opacity, or a gradient. You change the text, both objects change accordingly. Or you could have a solid. One object could be 2D with one fill, invisible in 3D, the clone/link could have a different fill, be invisible in 2D but visible in planer 3D. So the object would effectively have a different view for 2D and 3D.

I would find it useful to be able to assign different pen attributes to different vertices in a polyline. To achieve this at present, I often end up creating duplicate polylines, each with the different pen attributes that I need when hiding the vertices that do not apply to the vertex.

I, like many others, often find that two objects need to be created just the achieve the desired result. How about an object that automatically cloned/linked another, such that the shape or path came from the original object, but other attributes, including layer, class, plane, pen, fill etc etc which were specific to the new cloned object but the shape being common to both? Maybe it could also have an offset attached to allow the cloned object to be a slightly different size to the original. I can think of so many instances in the past where this would be useful and looking on the forum, its often the answer to so many work arounds where you create a duplicate object with slightly different attributes. The trouble with all these work arounds is that you end up managing twice the number of shapes that you need to. With the cloned object, reshaping (either) would affect all linked/cloned objects automatically.

No Don't waste your money if you don't need to upgrade, which by looking at the specs you probably dont need to as that not a bad spec machine. Just enable the 3GB option and that would most likely cure your problem - for free and is as time consuming as a couple of reboots.

If you run Windows 32 bit, then any application is limited to 2GB of virtual memory - whether your machine has less or more than this amount of RAM is irrelevant other than for performance implications. Your out of memory error is not caused by any hardware deficiency, just by the default configuration of Windows. Windows 32 bit has a maximum addressable memory of 4GB, but this, by default, is shared equally between an application (the limit is per application rather than shared across all applications) and Windows itself (which may include shared resources such as video RAM). In other words, 2GB per application and 2GB for Windows. What Vectorworks/Renderworks is saying is that it had breached this 2GB limit. You can add as much memory to your machine as you like, but it will still break this 2GB limit and will fail in exactly the same way. What you can do is adjust this default split and allocate more memory to the application and less to Windows. Then any application that is built in such a way that it can make use of more than 2GB can utilise the extra virtual memory. Vectorworks and Renderworks from VW2009 (IIRC) are built this way so they can can advantage of any extra virtual memory allocated above the default 2GB. How you adjust the split is OS version specific and whilst it should not cause any problems to do so, needs some caution. I suggest doing a google search for "3GB switch" - its called that as setting application memory to 3GB is the typical option (any more would have a stronger chance of breaking Windows and on some PC's, even 3GB is too much). Read up on the caveats and go for the 3GB option. Best of all its free! Only then, if you have performance issues, consider upgrading to 3GB RAM. PS. Don't be surprised if on first book Windows causes a BSOD - its just finding a mismatch between the previous boot and new boot and throwing a bit of a wobbly. A subsequent reboot should sort this.

It would be nice to be apply the opacity just to the fill and not the pen. For instance, being able to have text with a semi transparent background but solid text. A simple toggle specifying whether fill is applied to fill or fill and pen would suffice.

It can get quite congested with so many snap points in a small area made worse by many snap points being associated with 'secondary' objects that I have no interest in. I will use the stake object as an example, but there are many other objects that contain 'secondary' objects that I would not normally be interested in when trying to snap. When I insert a stake object, I get an insertion point and a symbol, such as 'x'. When I want to snap to the stake object, I am primarily only interested in the insertion point - the 'primary' snap. I am not interested in the lines making up the 'x', nor any of their mid points etc - 'secondary' snap points. It would be really useful if objects, particularly those in symbols etc, could have a primary/secondary attribute associated to them, or more simply a 'snapable' flag. Then a keyboard toggle that when snapping, could be used to control whether just 'primary'/'snapable' or both 'primary+secondary'/'snapable+non snapable' objects are snapped to. I don't think the snap options go far enough to alleviating the clutter as these filter the type of snaps rather than the objects themselves.

No way of resetting defaults without reinstalling?

No its even new files created on Mac. I did migrate my templates and symbol libraries though but none of them *should* contain anything created by the sun tool nor should have any preferences although thinking about it, there is a small chance that I may have UK 'localised' default for lat/long although I don't think I ever did this in 2011. Of course, it all works fine on PC.

Having recently moved from PC to Mac, I've got an issue with the set sun position dialog box in VW2011. When I try and set a sun position, the dialogue box opens with a corrupted latitude : 6669022220605899817211373175606? to be precise! See first attachment. No matter what I try and do to the dialog box, ie entering in valid values for all fields, I get an error stating: "The minute value is bad or out of range (0..59)", which it is not. See second attachment. I don't know if the issue was cause by my migration from VW2011 PC to 2011 Mac/OSX Lion or an issue with Lion or something else. It happens all the time, no matter what the file. Would appreciate some guidance on if/how it is possible to clear any preference that may determine the starting value for this dialog box. Thanks

I always use reference viewports and have never seen this issue. I quite often change the underlying source file, including manipulating classes. I have however just tried as you said and witnessed this anomaly, however the class is recoverable and I personally don't think its a critical issue in normal use. What I witnessed was with my standard creating of two files: survey and design. design contains a design layer viewport which references survey. I then added a new class to survey but did not assign anything to the class, saved the file, updated the out of date reference in design and looked at the class list of the viewport. As you say, no sign of the new class. I then went back into survey, assigned an object the newly created class, saved the file, updated out of date reference in design. This time, the new class was in the viewport dropdown but, as I would have expected, it was hidden. Changing visibility of the new class to visible, the viewport contents reappeared. So from what I can see, a new class that is not assigned to any objects does not show in the viewport. But a class that is assigned to an object, which is what I do much of the time, will appear in the viewport list, but will be invisible. Tested on VW2011 but I do this sort of thing all the time so probably similar back to 2008. Somewhere deep in my grey matter I have a vague memory of new empty classes not appearing in viewport. But if I create a class, I normally assign it to an object, so its never an issue as the class always appears when it is assigned to any object.

Thanks Pat for suggesting ungrouping the PDF. I had not realised that you could do that. On doing so I got the bitmap of the PDF, the page border and most importantly I got the group containing the vector data. However, on ungrouping, the vector data was positioned off to the right (see attached image) of the bitmap but fortunately, once I have realigned the vector data back to the bitmap, it will allow me to snap to the objects as I hoped. This got me investigating further. When I had previously created a viewport that encapsulated the PDF I found that the extent of the viewport was much wider than what I expected. So I decided to see if I could snap to anything to the right of the original PDF and blow me down, there were snap points available to an invisible part of the PDF. I suspect that the PDF is the more likely cause of this unless anyone knows different although there is nothing untoward showing when viewing the content in OS X preview of Acrobat Reader. Checking it out the file info of the supplied PDF, the Content creator is "PDFCreator Version 0.9.7" and encoding software is "GPL Ghostscript 8.63".

I don't know if this was ever resolved but I have just imported a (99.9% sure) vector based PDF and am unable to snap to any of the points contained within. VW2011 on Mac OS X Lion. I may see if it behaves the same on my Vista PC. I think its the first time that I have done this on my Mac.

Mine is a new Mac with Lion preinstalled. 2010 seems to be working fine but there are a number of glitches that I have encountered but I do not know if these are Lion related or 2010 related - I jumped straight from 2009 PC to 2011 PC/Mac so my experience of 2010 is only on Lion. I also have some issues with 2011 on Lion that are not documented. Again, I don't know if this is me as a new OS X owner or something more fundamental. Issues that I have found are: When 2011 starts, I get asked if I want to allow connections through firewall - VW is already allowed in OS X firewall but this seems to make no difference. When 2010 starts, I get asked if I want to personalise my copy of VW. Filling in box makes no difference so I now just ignore the dialogue and hit OK. I think it was in 2010 (but may have been in 2011 as I am working in both at present), but I had garbage in the Latitude when setting sun position and was not able to clear it. I just tested this again with 2010 and a new file and no problem, but did this in 2011 with blank file and had problem, so its a 2011 issue. When starting up 2010, I get occasional message to say that file is unrecognised or corrupt (can't remember exact wording). My 2010 is a fresh install with no customisation. My 2011 is a fresh install, but settings and some default documents/templates imported from 2011 PC environment.

Bring back Piranesi/ePix export lost in 2011 when moving to Cinema 4D. Workarounds are simply not satisfactory.

The following may assist. Taken from kbase So it would seem from this that 2011, 2010 and 2009 have the same issues, but these will only be fixed in 2011. 2012 will be Lion compatible out of the box.

People using it for real world projects and it providing working functionality as they expect. 2010 is not my main version (I only need it for ePix export), so as long as the 20% that I use works, I don't care about the other 80%. But from other peoples experience, it certainly looks more functional than broken. But would I put it in a production environment? No.

My software never gets two versions behind. As Christiaan says, you can pay for one years upgrade and get two years worth of software. Upgrading every other year works for me although maybe this pricing loophole has been stopped with the introduction of VSS, but I don't need to make any decision for another year.

Christiaan. Out of curiosity. When justifying an additional cost - is this your own money or someone else's? It's easy to justify spending someone else's money, less so when its your own and many more factors affect the justification. "someone else" = your boss and all other VW users that won't benefit from your justification.

In the UK, the most significant cost fluctuations are governed by the FX rates. So we get largely shielded from the true cost of VW. For people working for companies, the cost of VW doesn't really affect them too much - they may not get to upgrade as often as they may like and may have to work around issues, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really affect their income. But for the many people that pay for VW out of their own pocket, cost is a vital consideration in choosing what software they use. In the industry that I do a large part of my work for, even at current levels, for most the cost of VW is significant and any rise will result in lost sales. I now upgrade every other year, rather than yearly. I have heard of many people that have not upgraded in years or, heavens forbid, use educational copies. Its a tricky one for NNA (or whoever they are now), but being a lower end product makes VW accessible to a larger user base. Some users may want NNA to go up market and make it more specialised to their own industry. Great if it is your industry and you are not putting your own hand in your pocket to pay. I think the subscription model is a smart move for VW. It doesn't suit me but for VW and many users, it probably makes cash-flow more regular. I would not be surprised if VW moves away from the yearly release cycle. As far as income is concerned, with the subscription model, there is no longer any benefit in getting a new release out to generate income from the upgrade. And having less releases less results in more stable software.

I decided not to install 2009 to get ePix export (lost in 2011) and went for 2010 due to known Lion compatibility. I have not had a chance to test much but every time that I start 2010, I get asked to personalise my copy of 2010. But that is my only nagging issue that I have encountered so far whilst undertaking basic tests including loading up a few 2009 3D files and exporting to ePix. Its a fresh install of 2010 and my MBP came with Lion out of the box. I have installed 2010 SP4. Prior to loading SP4, it did complain about a corrupted file at startup.