Tamsin Slatter

You can also use View > Show > Show or Hide Site Modifiers.

No problem at all. Have you played with Renderworks Textures with the Reflectivity Shader set to Glow? You can get some good lighting effects with this too, as long as you use Indirect Lighting as part of your render settings.

Hi Phil Select the Line Light and on the Object Info palette, uncheck Render Geometry.

Sorry - I missed the bit that said they are existing roads. If the terrain already represents the surface with existing roads, then you would not need to use site modifiers. But you would need to use the Rise value to get from the starting elevation to the ending elevation. Hope that helps.

Hi Rob You need to change the Rise value to get the road to rise as you want. The send to surface will place the roadway at the elevation of the start of the roadway on the terrain model. But then use the Rise. Site Modifiers will then change the site to fit under the surface of the roadway. Hope that helps

The Plant symbols automatically place the tag (label) for the plant in the Plant-Components-Tags class. This is actually a really good, desirable thing. It means that you can choose to display the tags or not, when you come to create viewports of your plans for printing/exporting. Classes give you great flexibility. So, my advice is, don't delete the class - it will mess up all your plants. Instead, live with the class and make use of it! All the best

The Foliage plugin is great... But you could also look at my blog post here: http://www.vectorworks-training.co.uk/blog/3d-plants-with-vectorworks-landmark/ It gives some links to places where you can find lovely images for hedging textures and plant images to create image props. Hope that helps.

Have you tried File > Document Settings > Document Preferences and then turn Mesh Smoothing on?

Hi Two things to check: 1) Are both your layers at the same scale? If not, things will seem to disappear when you change layers (and have Unified View turned on) 2) Try changing your View > Layer Options to Show/Snap Others instead of Gray/Snap Others. That should solve it!

The white pixels must be pure white RGB 255, 255, 255 to become transparent.

Hi Helen For 2D Plan symbols, you need to have a pure white background on the image. Then, when you import the image into Vectorworks, you need to change the attributes of the plant image to have a Fill Style of None. Then, select the image and choose Landmark > Create New Plant. Hope that helps

Educational licenses behave differently in different geographies.

My guess is that the hardscape is being created in a class that is currently invisible.

They are architects, working on a purely 2D workflow, with little in the way of colour on the plans. Small files (one drawing per file) but they find zooming, panning, scrolling to be painfully slow. No referencing, no modelling, just 2D lines mainly. When in the office, they are using larger Apple displays. Then, the machine REALLY struggles, because it simply cannot cope with VW on the larger number of pixels.

Seriously, check out the graphic card capabilities. Even in 2D, Vectorworks makes extensive use of the graphics card and dedicated graphics memory. On the MacBook Air, there just isn't enough. I am speaking from experience... Here's the Nemetschek Knowledgebase article that describes the importance of the graphics card and it's spec. http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/714/Video+Card+%7B47%7D+Graphics+Card+Guidelines+for+Vectorworks+-+9-17-2012

I would not recommend the Macbook Air for VW. No dedicated graphics card or graphics memory. It struggles. I have clients using them, and they really find it slow and sluggish. Particularly bad when they plug it into a large screen.

You could do what you propose with the plants - but I do urge you make use of the classes built into the plant symbols, as these will make your planting plans very flexible. Layering your large trees and shrubs like this will have the benefit of being sure that all the tree canopies display above the shrubs in a plan view without having to keep sending plants to the front or back. Yes, I've written a book, which I hope you will find useful, but the Getting Started Guide is also me so I am glad you are finding it useful.

Hi Mark Definitely classes for "what" and layers for "where" or, also, for stages in the design process. Classes can store graphic attributes such as fills and line weights, so are a great way to set up your own graphic style and apply it with ease to any project. Classes will also export to dwg as layers - so if you are sharing your work with users who have only layers, they will be able to interpret your intention by looking at your class (layer!) structure. Classes are also great for showing and hiding different elements. For example, the plant symbols that come with Landmark are all classed, so you can turn them all on for your client to see a lovely colored plan, and turn them off for contractors who need to see a less detailed plan. So, for Landscape design, you might have a layer for hardscape, a layer for buildings, a layer for general planting and another layer for trees. Layers can be re-ordered so that they "stack" and display objects as you would see them in a plan view. So, the tree layer would be at the top of the stack, followed by buildings etc. Design layers also have a Z value (position in 3D space), so they can be used to separate areas on distinct levels. If you are designing a space where there are two levels, you can use layers to create those levels and then when you draw objects on them, they will be in the correct 3D space. Did you take a look at the Landmark Getting Started Guide? It will talk you through these concepts. http://www.vectorworks.net/training/getting-started-guides/landmark/index.html# Hope that helps

Set the Site Model to look the way you want in a specific Viewport and then click Create a Snapshot on the Object Info palette. This will create a version of the site model (that will continue to update if it's proposed). Place this in it's own class or on a specific design layer, then you can control the visibility of this version of the model in different viewports. You can continue to create Snapshots as you need to show the site with different display settings. Remember though - a snapshot is a snapshot of the settings not a snapshot in time! Hope that helps

Do you have Vectorworks 2013? If so, you can select the 3D geometry and run Create Auto Hybrid. This will create a plan view and you can determine the desired cut plane for the view too. (Only if you have something other than Vectorworks Fundamentals though. If you don't have a design series product, you could use the Extract tool and set its preferences to extract a planar object. That will duplicate a 2D version of your geometry.

You're welcome. Glad I could help...

Are you checking the Navigate back to Viewport checkbox when double-clicking the viewport to edit the design layer?

Clive - I haven't watched the video that's been posted, but, you must assign a class for the glazing. By default, Windows use the classing Glazing-Clear, which has the Glass Clear texture assigned on the Other tab of the class definition. Is this a file that you have migrated from an earlier version of VW? Pre 2011? If so, you may need to reimport the glass texture from the default libraries. I can see that you've tried this already... but I do hope that helps you.

Hi Jonathan For objects to render, they all need to have a Solid fill on the Attributes palette... Select the objects and add a solid fill if they have a fill of None. All the best

Glad to hear it...