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Landmark whishes: i.e. non planar site modifiers / flip triangles


MarcU

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Hello Vectorworks

I couldn't find any satisfying posts about these topics - please tell and sorry in case I missed something in the forum.

What I am missing in Vectorworks are non planar site modifiers. I am thinking of triangulated meshes or even nurbs surfaces since this would in my eyes match reality much more than the planar pad concept of Vectorworks, especially when thinking of stormwater / drainage and other civil engineering tasks on hard surfaces. Hard surfaces - at least here in hilly Switzerland - mostly are sloped in more than one direction, so are not planar and mostly triangulated.

My whish-object would have an edge represented by a 3D-polygon or even polyline and an (unlimited) number of inner loci and 3D-polygons forming a sort of separate little triangulated sub-site model. So actually this would be a secondary site model modifying the primary site model. The grading towards the primary site model would be applied to the (poly-) edge of the secondary model which of course is a more complex job than from the edge of a planar surface.

Separatly, some kind of better road tool would be helpful. The existing nurbs roadway tool goes in a good direction in terms of nurbs surfaces but it cannot represent i.e. a side slope (in road cross section for taking the water off to one side of the road - flat roads ar not reality) or a cambered road cross section. So for me this tool by now is just a sketch like thing which is actually useless because it is much too rough to represent reality or to create detailed drawings/cross sections with precise elevations. I cannot figure out who really uses it and what for.

Since VW 2016 will be launched only end of this week here in Switzerland I couldnt try out the pad improvements yet. But what I see in the online help of VW 2016 this will not really fulfill my whishes. Still now I would have to make individual triangular pads instead of one connected triangulated site modifier surface. But how manage to really fit them together and manipulate them? The new features (A and B slope markers and bottom height) help of course but do not solve everything. And how do the grading? I would like grading from a whole triangulated area to the primary site model.

Same problem for the 3D-Part of the hardscape tool. As said, often you have to get the water off hardscapes in more than one direction - so you triangulate. Of course this makes everything much more complex.

Also the retaining wall tools are much too far away from reality - they are useless for me except for calculating some simple cut/fill tasks. Further, retaining walls often are sloped (hardly stepped!) in the long direction. It would be great to have a retaining wall along a poly path with a custom cross section (or even wall-like properties like architectural walls) and a site modifier sticking to the wall surface.

I do not expect VW (Landmark) to become as sophisticated as AutoCad Civil3D, but still I am convinced that improvements in this area would be a great advantage on the market since landscape architects (at least in europe) often have civil engineering tasks like urban traffic scapes, city squares, etc. The VW Architecture tools seem much more developped and detailed to me than the landmark tools. It would be great to reach the same standard for landscaping / civil engineering in VW Landmark.

Another whish is the individual flipping of triangles in the site model like i.e. in Sketchup. Especially in small site models with only little base data this would be very helpful to shape terrains easyly. I know I can work around this by placing 3D-polys in the site model base data, but this doesn't really seem handy to me.

Have there been any thoughts or attempts in these fields? What do others think? Are there any documented workarounds / workflows? Are my whishes much too demanding?

Thank you for any reaction / tip / additional suggestions.

Regards, Markus

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+1

A few improvements on some areas would get us a long way into making Vectorworks more useful for fairly straightforward Civil Engineering projects. (i.e. not extremely complex projects).

Some tools need to be improved, incl. the road tool, but there is also need for some increased GIS and AutoCAD compatibility in some areas as well for exchanging/roundtripping drawings to make VW Landmark a really viable option for Civil Engineering projects, at least over here. Currently the toolset is just a bit too little and a bit too limited.

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