Thom

Johnathan's stuff is the best. They should hire him to put together training videos.

Anyone has a beta copy of Windows 7 running VW. I am constantly getting an "out of memory" error when running dtm's with less than 700 3D loci. I am getting disparate to get some cut and fill calcs out. Tech is not having much better luck. I have access to a beta copy and with its ability to read up to 8 gig of ram, I wonder if this might solve my issues.

I am with Bruce in the need for basic civil tools. While I aware of Charles's road tools and plan on buying in the near future, what tools do Robert Mullin & Manuel Garcia de Paredes have available. I am a landscape architect with a large base of site planning clients. There is hardly a day that goes by that I do not wish for more tools and flexibility.

My average residence is about 50 mb. Commercial projects will easily go to 80mb.

I would like to be able to pick a point, either send to existing surface, or assign an elevation, then assign a grade and pick a second point and have the elevation automatically calculated.

Miguel Good stuff - want to sell the plug-ins?

I too would like to see this. I have discussed this with tech support, but they say there are too many variables. I cannot help to thing that there must be a workflow that the program prefers.

Jonathan has the best stuff going. Jonathan Pickup VectorWorks training manuals join the on-line user group

Lock in place

It would be nice not to need to assign the elevation. The 3D poly tool automatically registers the contour being connected to - more of a contour line tool than a pad creation tool.

Since open pads are critical in getting the dtm to generate proper contours,I would like to see a 3D poly tool that acts as a site modifier. The present 3D poly tool will produce a 3D poly but will not act as a site modifier. When creating several 3D pads, drawing the poly line, creating a site modifier, setting it to pad, assigning an elevation is painful.

I would like to see the ability to lock the site model in position. I find myself mistakenly moving it when moving objects around.

Only would work if all the beds had the same orientation.

I would like to be able to dictate how plants align when using the place plants by rectangle/triangulate array tool. Most of the time the plants do not align properly such as against a curb making the tool worthless.

Heck, I would just like the program to multi-thread to make use of multiple cores.

Eric One thing to keep in mind is the wide range of opportunities that the Landscape Architecture profession includes. Many of parts of our profession are commonly associated with other professions, and therefore are hard for us to include in our scopes of work. This is especially true with the interaction with civil engineers. Giving us superior tools to theirs will only give creditability to our profession. Our profession is too often thought of as "gardeners". I have spent 30 yrs. battling this stigma.

Want to share or sell you symbol package. I have been developing my own, but am just getting started as I do not spend too much time doing planting plans. Do you see any advantage to using layer vs. classes to control what is on or off? I usually use layers for my primary control - landscape vs. irrigation vs. hard surfacing vs. models and use classes to turn plants on/off. That way it leaves more control for the AC user I end exporting to.

Ian Do you separate using layers or classes and why thks

Ozzie - Good idea, did not think of making each bed a different layer. IanH - I have modified the classes of the symbols provided by VWL to be able to switch on and off complete graphics to the simplest graphic form. Even in the simplest form my machine is bogging down. I have all my background bases setup through viewports, so the only thing that actually resides in the dwg are plant symbols.

Tech,Darick,Andrew,Robert,Eric Anyone have any comments about how to deal with large planting plans?

Ian It seems like you often have projects with many thousand plant symbols. Once I get over a couple thousand, my machine drags. How do you deal with this. I am starting to break large planting plans into several mini projects just to be able to work.

Is there a third party software that will configure a quad-core processor to function as one large processor or to spread out processing out over more than one core when the one core is running at 100%. I find that I am running one core at 100% much of the time without the files being too large. A couple of thousand plants will cause my machine to creep along and be very unworkable.

Need Spotlight module. This is an area VW could use to promote VWL but has not gone there yet.

There is a spreadsheet for irrigation equip. I have not had good luck with its accuracy.

The present irrigation package is just symbols, no automation etc. It needs to be a complete package. Rumor mill says it is being considered / worked on. I was hoping to see it in 09. Until VWL has one, many LA's will not consider the package.