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Materials


PVA - Admin

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

So... Materials, or Building Materials.

This is a big one, and a concept/feature we are actively looking into developing. For me personally this is a more difficult feature to properly frame out, as I feel I may lack sufficient industry knowledge to detail what such a feature would include. To that end, I am requesting your comments, concerns and any other input regarding the scope of your needs and how we can best meet them.

Now, this is not to say that as of this post we BEGIN developing Materials, talk about this internally has been going on for a long time and many of our distributors (some of them accomplished architects and designers in their own right) have been providing us with wishes and other suggestions, but this thread will concentrate on specific user needs that I will curate and add to internal planning pages for use by engineering since I am sure there will be a great deal.

I won't merge the other existing threads since many of them have tangents to things I feel are a bit outside the scope of this feature, so this will be the new home for this discussion.

I have pulled input from many existing threads, (Special thanks to @digitalmechanics, @zoomer, @Chris D, @Dieter @ DWorks, @Christiaan and many others whose threads and posts I stole from) as well as from competitors feature lists. Feel free to link in any I may have missed that have missing key points to advance this initial list:

1) Materials must be assignable to any object, 2D or 3D, with the 3D aspects of the Material simply left out of 2D scenarios.

2) Users must be able to not only rely on an extensive default catalog of Materials, but be able to add new Materials themselves from scratch.

3) Materials must be a resource type available in the resource manager with all the current share-ability of current resources via workgroup folders.

4) Users must be able to update a source Material resource and have that push the update to all instances where a Material is used.

5) Materials must include Line Styles for both the 2D and 3D edges of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

6) Materials must include Hatch settings for both the 2D and 3D faces of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

7) Materials must include Tile settings for both the 2D and 3D faces of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

8) Materials must include Textures.

9) It must be possible to generate reports on the volume, weight, density, cost, surface area, exposed surface area, and thermal properties.

10) The same Material needs to be applicable to wall, slab, roof components as well as solids. Duplicates should not need to be created for each type of object to inherit the Material's settings.

11) Materials need to (optionally) have the ability to determine the joins for wall, slab and roof components contextually. Each of these types of joins needs to be user definable.

12) What aspects a Material inherits from the resource should be controllable similarly to Door and Window Types, where users are able to select certain fields that use the Material resource and then allow for overrides for that particular object's particular field value.

If I have completely or partially missed the mark with this list, feel free to correct me.

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On 9/20/2016 at 7:52 AM, PVA - Jim said:

5) Materials must include Line Styles for both the 2D and 3D edges of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

6) Materials must include Hatch settings for both the 2D and 3D faces of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

7) Materials must include Tile settings for both the 2D and 3D faces of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

I take it from the videos these goals didn't make it to production?

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Almost everything on Jim's summary wishlist for Materials was implemented in VW2021. I can only count three of twelve as not done, and more accurately say that every single one of them was addressed but those three are more that the responsibility has stayed put and materials didn't need to do anything extra special, yet.

 

   5) Materials must include Line Styles for both the 2D and 3D edges of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

Pens seemed most naturally to stay where they were, controlled by walls/components/LOD settings, and only give the appearance settings for surface/section fills and texture to the material.

 

   9) It must be possible to generate reports on the volume, weight, density, cost, surface area, exposed surface area, and thermal properties.

Components have surface area calculations, but if you consider the full suite of interesting ones (full WxH face, that minus window cutouts, that plus wrapping the edges of the cutouts, etc), components are not calculating all possible ones.  Materials have what components do but more would be nice. (Also, more and better linear measures.) We still have those as wishes on our plate.  And easier reporting too.

 

   11) Materials need to (optionally) have the ability to determine the joins for wall, slab and roof components contextually. Each of these types of joins needs to be user definable.

For now this is still components, and little to do with materials. We do have component wrapping and joining in our sights, and at that time we'll reevaluate if materials need a special role or not.

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On 10/7/2020 at 9:44 AM, Rick Berge said:

Almost everything on Jim's summary wishlist for Materials was implemented in VW2021. I can only count three of twelve as not done, and more accurately say that every single one of them was addressed but those three are more that the responsibility has stayed put and materials didn't need to do anything extra special, yet.

 

   5) Materials must include Line Styles for both the 2D and 3D edges of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

Pens seemed most naturally to stay where they were, controlled by walls/components/LOD settings, and only give the appearance settings for surface/section fills and texture to the material.

 

   9) It must be possible to generate reports on the volume, weight, density, cost, surface area, exposed surface area, and thermal properties.

Components have surface area calculations, but if you consider the full suite of interesting ones (full WxH face, that minus window cutouts, that plus wrapping the edges of the cutouts, etc), components are not calculating all possible ones.  Materials have what components do but more would be nice. (Also, more and better linear measures.) We still have those as wishes on our plate.  And easier reporting too.

 

   11) Materials need to (optionally) have the ability to determine the joins for wall, slab and roof components contextually. Each of these types of joins needs to be user definable.

For now this is still components, and little to do with materials. We do have component wrapping and joining in our sights, and at that time we'll reevaluate if materials need a special role or not.

Are materials and on-going project?

They don't seem to make the road-map. Seem like are we going to be left with a promising but undelivered feature that isn't worth changing the way we work because we still need to keep doing it for some items not others.

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