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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
Oh sorry, I thought this thread was about VW development.

No need to be snide. Rather than the years of closed development where nothing was announced until the day of release, we have started showing what we are working on over half a year in advance and eventually I suspect it will be even more than that.

We are moving in the correct direction and while I know you personally would like to see all development wide open, in major software development it just isn't entirely acceptable yet.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Oh I can feel your pain there, I have had to institute a no-question-answering rule in the morning before I've had my coffee. Half the time I just come off sounding like a random word generator before im halfway done my first cup.

Also: I will be adding everything I can to this thread. From what I understand there may be more coming quite soon from other presentations that were given by engineers at the Summit, but they're still currently sleeping off 4 straight days of working around 14 hours straight. I'll give them... a BIT of respite.

Edited by JimW
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So what else is there (other than the new Resource Manager) that will improve productivity for everyday tasks in an architectural workflow?

I hope there will leak more soon.

And I don't see the Resource Manager as a new feature, I see it as a fix. The existing resource browser is woeful.

Exactly.

And that is why RM is so important.

How many time I wasted with scrolling and going back to top folder to scroll again ...

And the absence of new features beside VR and Irrigation toolset let me hope

that there will be some more "minor" productivity improvements on existing tools.

Throwing out other shiny new features like Accoustic Calculations or integrated

Zoo Planning with more than 5200 of North American + East Asien Animal

Symbols won't help.

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Sometimes I draw from scratch something that I know is probably already drawn as a symbol, somewhere in the resource browser, just because going into the resource browser gives me a headache. That's how much I hate the resource browser.

So I think it's great that it's been recognised as an unglamorous but very necessary fix and we should encourage more of the same. It's these things that make the biggest difference.

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Structural Member Object:

-Three modes: Columns, Linear (beams) and a poly mode for freeform framing members.

-Concrete, Steel, Timber, with multiple preconfigured settings and configurations.

-Attributes allow you to set the appearance of the member at, above, or below the cut plane.

- These objects are associative, to altering beams will update to keep connected beams attached, similar to how wall networks operate.

Will this be for VW Architect only or for all modules? I can see this functionality being useful for Landmark and Spotlight as well.

Currently I see it listed as included in Architect and Designer, I will inquire and see what they think about making it available for all design series modules.

Thanks for checking out. This feature is something that can be used for things other than architectural structures as well, even though it is quite similar.

For those using Landmark for Civil Engineering it would be useful to have it as I run into structures quite often (e.g. racks, equipment platforms etc.) and having this functionality would make it easier to change those items if all structural members would update automatically and I can imagine those using Spotlight will run into some structural steel setups as well for attaching their lighting elements or setting up locations from time to time.

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Hi Jim,

Thanks for all the info for the upcoming release.

Seeing the resource manager is getting a face lift, will we be able to now create material folders and sub-folders? Also, I'm not a fan of "finder" on Mac and I see the new look is based on the finder. Will the PC users get a "Windows Explorer" look?

With regard to project sharing, seeing you say individual objects can be checked out, can multiple people now work on a level at the same time. How exactly does this work? Is it going to be like Revit where if a user touches an object, Revit tells everyone that object is borrowed by a user? Is the process automatic like Revit or does a user have to manually check out an object (in a dialogue box) each time they realize they need to use it?

Most importantly for me, has there been any attention paid to the Cinema 4D connection. I know there has been 1 bug in particular that did not exist in 2015 but appeared in 2016-sp1. I sent a file over showing the big and it still hasn't been fixed in sp3. Will there be any improvements/fixes to the Cinema 4D connection in vw2017?

Thanks,

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Most importantly for me, has there been any attention paid to the Cinema 4D connection. I know there has been 1 bug in particular that did not exist in 2015 but appeared in 2016-sp1. I sent a file over showing the big and it still hasn't been fixed in sp3. Will there be any improvements/fixes to the Cinema 4D connection in vw2017?

I strongly hope so.

Otherwise I really had to ask for a serial number blocking RW completly.

And rewrite my own Renderer+C4D exchange in Marionette ;)

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I'm actually very interested in the possibility of acoustic analysis (even more than the zoo animals, shhh)

I should brush up on my old vibrations textbooks and get more learning into my head to make this a reality!

I tried to find the most unrealistic examples to make my point.

Obviously I was not so successful.

I am ok with your ambitions as long as you promise to not hold any other

engineer from fixing MY feature requests :)

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Seeing the resource manager is getting a face lift, will we be able to now create material folders and sub-folders? Also, I'm not a fan of "finder" on Mac and I see the new look is based on the finder. Will the PC users get a "Windows Explorer" look?

All resources can now be placed into folders and subfolders. I'll check on the Windows version, so far I have only played with the Mac version personally.

Most importantly for me, has there been any attention paid to the Cinema 4D connection.

Yes. But I can not go into further detail at this time.

With regard to project sharing, seeing you say individual objects can be checked out, can multiple people now work on a level at the same time. How exactly does this work? Is it going to be like Revit where if a user touches an object, Revit tells everyone that object is borrowed by a user? Is the process automatic like Revit or does a user have to manually check out an object (in a dialogue box) each time they realize they need to use it?

From what I understand, you will open the project file and be permitted to freely check out objects, but yes you must perform a checking-out action at least as far as the last demo I saw went. Other users will be informed that it is currently checked out and who has it checked out if they try to modify it, but I do know that the UI for it is not yet finalized.

Jim,

Can you tell us if there are any unannounced updates to be excited about? Last year all the biggies were revealed at the Summit. Did you guys hold anything back this year?

There are MANY. Resource Manager is a pretty big deal but there are features not revealed yet that many would easily consider more important than anything we've shared already. A lot of those are industry specific but they have things cooking for nearly every user base. Some are flashy but many of them are just solid upgrades or reengineerings of existing features to dramatically increase usability.

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With regard to project sharing, seeing you say individual objects can be checked out, can multiple people now work on a level at the same time. How exactly does this work? Is it going to be like Revit where if a user touches an object, Revit tells everyone that object is borrowed by a user? Is the process automatic like Revit or does a user have to manually check out an object (in a dialogue box) each time they realize they need to use it?

From what I understand, you will open the project file and be permitted to freely check out objects, but yes you must perform a checking-out action at least as far as the last demo I saw went. Other users will be informed that it is currently checked out and who has it checked out if they try to modify it, but I do know that the UI for it is not yet finalized.

The manual check out process now is slightly more annoying than I would like. This might be an issue if you are confronted with a dialog every time you touch an object. Hopefully - this process can be streamlined.

I am so curious on how this is going to work with Google Drive. If it works well, it is going to eliminate the need for an in-house server.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

The main point is to eliminate the need for an in-house server! The only requirement will be that the machine also be running the Dropbox or Google Drive (Most likely we will support more than just those two, but they're the confirmed ones for now) sync application is running and actively connected to the internet. If it is offline, it will prompt you to work in an offiline mode similar to how it works when you use other applications that support cloud storage.

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The main point is to eliminate the need for an in-house server!

And this is such an advantage over the other known solutions, even if there

are some little restrictions or missing features.

Even me, myself and I don't have much use for project sharing, I often hear

the pain from people having to use these sharing server solutions.

Most importantly for me, has there been any attention paid to the Cinema 4D connection.

Yes. But I can not go into further detail at this time.

It's such a relieve to read this.

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A man walks into a shop and hands over some money and is told that he will get his new product in 6-months and at that point he will be told what he has bought. The man is not happy but accepts this proposal and sits and waits........

I am so pleased that things are more open. I accept that along with this brave new world it also gives people the chance to complain a bit more, but I for one am very very pleased. I can actually plan for the first time (ever) and that helps us out enormously with the new semester in Sept/Oct.

Thanks for doing the right thing :)

And a second thanks for fighting the students corner not least because it makes business sense.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

You are quite welcome, I intend to keep pushing this trend.

And a second thanks for fighting the students corner not least because it makes business sense.

When the RIGHT thing to do and the SMART thing to do are both the same thing, my life gets easier.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I mentioned this in another thread but it probably bears mentioning here as well:

The VGM and Multithreading tasks are directly tied to the long term requests of being able to cancel geometry calculations both when performing actions and rendering, as well as to the system that will eventually allow multiple views of the same model all displayed onscreen at once. They are one of the last major gates that we have to pass through before things like that become standard across the entire application.

Its incredibly important that they be stable though, since they tie into nearly all aspects of Vectorworks, so the testing needed is extensive and adds time to development (and multi-view will not be ready by 2017) but trust me when I say that it is going to be awesome.

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