Richie Hatch

Hi We have a few files in our office that are between 1.5 and 3 mb in size and are having difficulties when trying to print them to various different postscript printers. What happens is when you go to page setup or print, the hole machine freezes....? Very simple. Whats weird is that this dosent happen on all machines. I have checked memory allocations to both VW (9.5.2) and to each of the postscript printers, on all machines in the office and they are all the same. The versions of all the software on all machines are also the same. We are running MacOS 9.2, Vectorworks 9.5.2 and the latest Adobe postscript driver (8.8.0 i think). Any ideas would be greatly appreciated Thanks Richie

I mainly use C4D for rendering as i found that doing the modeling in it was a bit of a waste of time when you can do it very quickly and accurately in VW. I do the bare bones modellling in VW, import it as a dxf (having drawn with classes in VW sorts objects with similar materials into groups) then apply materials, lighting etc..... in C4D. I have done a bit of modelling in C4D and dont get me wrong it is very powerful, but for architectural modeling VW is perfect.

I have been using C4D V7 with VW 9.5 for the last year or so and i have to say that it is the best 3D package i have ever used. Easy to use and clever interface. Brilliant lighting (especially radiosity). Materials are also very easy to work with. I am not that interested in the animation part of it either but there is enough in the rest of the package to make any 3D stills producer more than happy. The one thing i would say tough is to buy an aftermarket manual as the ones that come with it are just average. I have asked Maxon if the plugin is available for Version 7 of the package and they say no but i deffinately read on their site that it is.......! I have worked relatively happily with imported dxf's from VW but the fact that it is know available with the direct import option is an added bonus. Thumbs up from me....!

Hi Katie When you say its a problem between the 2 dongles what do you mean. there is only one dongle on each machine. All off these dongles are the USB type and for information they have Hasp4-M1 wrote on them. I cant seem to see a pattern to this but it is happening randomly on all the machines. Richie

When I say other packages I mean every other package that i work with. That includes Microstation, Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, Word, Excel - need i go on. I also am fairly sure that it is available in AutoCad.

I am having this problem in my office where randomly colleagues will start Vectorworks and get that "you are now running in demo mode....." even tough their dongles are plugged in. How do I stop this from happening and as a matter of interest why this switch to dongles anyway, the other system worked perfectly......?

I know that text tracking (intercharacter spacing) is not available in Vectorworks (as it is in every other package) but has anybody found a way of increasing the spacing between individual text characters without having to press the space bar.....?

Cheers Matthew, That worked. Richie

Yeah i do exactly the same as above: 1 Draw in VW 9.52 Assign Colours to items that will have the same materials/textures3 Export to Cinema 4D 74 Lights,Camera and Materials in C4D5 Export to image to Photoshop It is mildly relieving to know that people are doing the smae thing as I am. I know personally that not having to learn the drafting side of Cinema was a relief. I know a bit about it but am able to concentrate on the material, lighting and video aspect of Cinema. Thanks for replying

Remember that problem with the handles disappearing on 8.5 with certain ATi Video cards. I had that problem until I installed a new ATi driver taht came with the Macworld March 2002 issue UK. Now I can finally work in millions of colours in Vectworks. Unfortunately my Quake 3 game dose not work anymore giving me an open gl problem.!

I'm trying to use the digital terrain modeling tool. i have drawn the contours as 2D polygons and used the 2D contours to 3D poly tool. When I then go to New DTM tool and click along, i get an error code 4,5 message? what does this mean? richie

It says in the user manual that you can download information on digital terrain modeling at the old deihlsoft site. Where can I get information on how to properly use the modeling tool? Richie

Hi I have recently received files form colleagues using AutoCad 2000 but am unable to import iinto VW 8.5.2. They are all dwgs. Should I tell them to save as V14 versions or is there a way to import V2000 dwgs?

The most up to date drivers that I can find are the ones that get installed with OS 9.0.4 but with these on the problem still occurs. I tried turning them off altogether but that obviously slowed everything down (yet it did clear the problem). I will try changing the amount of colours to 256 for the time being but as we work with a lot of graphic apps as well this may be a problem. I work on a blue G3 with the same extensions on, and have no problems, but presumably that is because I have a better spec grahics card installed..? I may also have a go at downloading OS 9.1 to see if they have been updated further. Thanks for your help Richie

Ther are no video cards in any of these machines just on board video ram so I doon think that this is the problem. Any other thoughts....?

We have 3 beige G3's in our office running Vectorworks 8.5.2. While scrolling through a drawing on any of these machiines a graphical (carpeting effect) glitch occours. The machines all have 128 mb's of ram with various allocations of ram assigned to each. I have been told that I may need to get video cards for each one. Has anyone noticed this before and can I sort it out without going to the expense of buying 3 video cards for machines that we will stop using next year....?