2021 Public Roadmap

[JuanP]

New Roadmap site live site HERE 

 

Development Strategies

 

For Everyone

 

We believe your focus should be on your designs, not your design software.

 

Our long-term commitment is to enhance and simplify the user interface and experience in Vectorworks products. The main areas of development in our core Vectorworks technologies and interfaces are in the themes of Quality and Performance, UI/UX, and Graphics Modernization. These areas will continue to drive us towards making your experiences in Vectorworks products faster and more intuitive, while also providing the stability and accuracy you require.

 

For Collaborators

 

One of the great strengths about Vectorworks is the variety of supported file formats. We take pride in being a design hub, and we have no plans on stopping our investments in this area. Our goal is to continue to invest in optimizing the most used file formats, supporting value-added partner products, and ensuring that project teams and BIM collaboration remains unrivaled.

 

For Architects and Interiors

 

We made several great advancements in recent releases, and we have a clear focus on continued support for a growing demand on 3D and BIM workflows. We are also undertaking the re-engineering and modernization of core architectural objects to support the creation of accurate BIM models and the documentation of modern construction methods and materials.

 

For Landscape Architects, Designers, and Planners

 

With purpose-built tools for landscape design, Vectorworks Landmark is providing ways to simplify the complex learning curve of adopting BIM in the landscape industry, and is quickly becoming the BIM platform of choice for landscape architecture. As we move forward, we are investing in developments that focus on making it simpler to produce landscape BIM models, support the demand to create sustainable sites, and creating tight integrations between landscape BIM and GIS workflows.

 

For Entertainment Design and Production Professionals

 

Our commitment to users in the entertainment industry is to invest first and foremost in re-engineering for better file performance. We will make tools more responsive. We will consolidate features where multiple options cause confusion. We will create consistency in behaviors between the various tools and commands in our entertainment products, and we will add functionality that simplifies your workflows. You will see evidence of this investment in the many great performance enhancements and bug fixes in version 2021. And you will continue to see this in releases moving forward.

 

We hope this has given you some insight into what lies ahead for Vectorworks development. This is of course a snapshot at this moment in time and not an exhaustive list of all features in development or research. As with any roadmap, things can and do change as time passes. We look forward to continuing to share our plans with you, and to hearing your feedback with regularity. 

Vectorworks design software wouldn’t be what it is today without valuable feedback from our users. 

[line-weight]

In the PDF, what does "scheduled" mean - scheduled for inclusion in VW2021?

[Matt Overton]

This doesn't seem to include many of the points from the Design Keynotes.

How do the 2 fit together?

[Peter Neufeld]

Hello,

This really makes the term "user-friendly" not just a description of the program -  but of the company itself!

Ever since I started with MiniCAD 6 the company has always listened to its users. Thanks for the candour and inclusion.

 

Cheers,

Peter

[Diamond]

@JuanP Thank you for the insight into Vectorworks Inc.’ internal thinking and development plans.

A question — could any of these arrive in 2021 service packs, or are they all set for future releases?

Cheers

[Tobias Kern]

Hi  Vectorworks-Team,

 

i personally appreciate your openness.

 

Software is a product for the users, so it it important

to listen to them and tell them the way the development goes.

 

… so this first step goes in the right direction. Thumb up!

 

Look at the public Twinmotion roadmap:

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/3-twinmotion-public-roadmap/tabs/4-under-consideration

 

I think it is always good to share some information.

A weekly, monthly, or whatever timeline you prefer, would be good.

 

What i would like to see is an option to choose a little bit (for us user), the way the roadmap goes.

Maybe a public poll, or whatever.

You propose some ideas from the pipeline and we can decide (a little bit)

which are the most important for us and maybe this can have an impact for a future roadmap.

 

Also a development/status quo/info-blog, would be nice, like:

https://blog.sketchup.com/

 

Sketchup (Trimble) does it like this.

 

They often introduce people behind the Sketchup-Team.

For me also important, because you at Vectorworks are human being

as we, with ideas, dreams, feelings.

 

Why not give Vectorworks a more personal touch.

Software is more than just the code and openness ist always welcome!

 

Greetings

Tobi from Germany.

[JuanP]

17 hours ago, line-weight said:

In the PDF, what does "scheduled" mean

@line-weight Scheduled means that these items are not just in development but officially on a planned schedule for release whether it be an upcoming service pack, or a future major release. As with many things software related, we’ve refrained from sharing exact scheduled dates, as some items can become delayed due to issues that may arise from external dependencies or in quality testing.

[JuanP]

7 hours ago, Diamond said:

A question — could any of these arrive in 2021 service packs, or are they all set for future releases?

 

@Diamond Historically, we have been releasing some features in SP3. I don't think this cycle would be different. 🤞

[Mark Aceto]

@JuanP and the VW team that brought this to life (and will continue maintaining and developing it) thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!

 

For a round one first pass at this, it absolutely exceeds expectations (especially during these unprecedented times).

 

The recent improvements to VW Cloud Services are blowing me away (I'm finally using it), and with the the M chips from Apple, I'm beyond excited for Redshift on a Universal VW in the future. Not to mention Metal, Unreal, TM, and all manner of other real-time developments... 

 

[E|FA]

@JuanP  Continued development of Materials - such as being able to apply them to all objects - is not mentioned anywhere in the roadmap.  Am I missing something or should we assume that development of the Materials feature is complete for the foreseeable future?

 

BTW, I appreciate the release of the roadmap, understand that nothing is promised, and hope that it will be updated regularly.  Thanks.

Edited December 1, 2020 by E|FA

[line-weight]

4 hours ago, JuanP said:

@line-weight Scheduled means that these items are not just in development but officially on a planned schedule for release whether it be an upcoming service pack, or a future major release.

 

At risk of being overly pedantic, "future" doesn't define any timescale other than that it hasn't happened yet.

 

I appreciate that there will be some things that get delayed, and you don't want to commit to anything definite, but could we assume something like: the target is that majority of the "scheduled" items will appear by the next major release?

[JuanP]

46 minutes ago, line-weight said:

could we assume something like: the target is that majority of the "scheduled" items will appear by the next major release?

@line-weight I think that is a fair assumption.  I wish we could be more specific on the timetable; however, we will be looking at some other ways to keep evolving and improving how we share the roadmap information.

[Mark Aceto]

I just realized Roadmap has its own subsection in the Feedback section of the forum 😎

[_c_]

Hello Juan,

 

On 12/1/2020 at 12:02 AM, JuanP said:

These areas will continue to drive us towards making your experiences in Vectorworks products faster and more intuitive

 

VW is getting more than ever unintuitive and cumbersome to work with. How does this fit your declared target?

 

On 12/1/2020 at 12:02 AM, JuanP said:

For Architects and Interiors

...a growing demand on 3D and BIM workflows. We are also undertaking the re-engineering and modernization of core architectural objects to support the creation of accurate BIM models and the documentation of modern construction methods and materials.

 

And that's what worries me. Are you sure that you are doing what we want?

We have again and again the situation where you implement things that we never cared for and blatantly skip those we all wanted differently.

And you didn't know. And you are surprised and sorry.

 

You are clearly going the path of fully generated plans (horizontal sections). As it is now, what your development does to us is just making most works involving anything that is not lines and polys extremely time consuming, insanely complex and there are bucketloads of mistakes at the end too. This comes with a stubborn disregard of our needs, our drawing standards. So I ask, why should we bear with you on this?

 

We want our SI units, our standards to be realisable out of the box.

We don't want to cut a section to see if a plan is right.

We don't want to add things into annotations if we can do it otherwise.

We can't have everything in one file.

We create in 1 hour but edit 1 year, always bear that in mind.

And we definitely don't want to derive everything from 3D, if we can avoid it.

Even the most complex BIM project is very sparing on the 3D modelling. Specially, the large ones.

 

You are leaving us alone fencing with the infinite frustration of VW's 3D edits. Year after year.

Slab modifiers, 3D Wall holes, 3D in Autohybrid, 3D in symbols, Extrude along paths. Etc. There is no snap, there is constant view turns and twists.

Are you fixing this kind of edit first?

 

Are you making VW more direct? Less dialogs? Less interface scattering?

We are left alone with daily work with often cryptical tools that never, ever work as we need them to.

Please do finish what you begin, and really do

 

Focus on us.

[Christiaan]

This is really great. This is great news: Stair Tool: Interactive editing & improved geometry.

 

What's not great is the confirmation that window/door tools are simply not considered important. It continues to boggle my mind that the window/door tools can be so neglected for so long.

[Alexander Thiel]

Hey,

 

in the roadmap there is "Lasers".

But it is for Vision, so it's for entertainment, not for Landscape, isn't it?

 

Best
Alex

[line-weight]

1 hour ago, Christiaan said:

This is really great. This is great news: Stair Tool: Interactive editing & improved geometry.

 

What's not great is the confirmation that window/door tools are simply not considered important. It continues to boggle my mind that the window/door tools can be so neglected for so long.

 

I was hoping that

 

Updates to Door & Window to integrate with wall component wrapping.

 

in "scheduled" means a general update that includes integration with wall component wrapping, rather than an update that is only about wall component wrapping.

 

If it's only about component wrapping, then it's very worrying that Doors and Windows are not mentioned at all in the "in development" or "active research" sections.

[Tom W.]

That being said any improvement to wall component wrapping would be a VERY positive step

[_c_]

23 hours ago, Tom W. said:

That being said any improvement to wall component wrapping would be a VERY positive step

That's my only joy in that list

[Tom W.]

Ha ha!

 

Although be keen to learn more about these:

 

Not sure what this means:

?

[_c_]

What is truly saddening me -as most old users- is that old problems are never resolved. New features, new features, new features is all there is.

 

And new features always come out with some devastating flaws.

There are exceptions, I'd like to mention them for motivating those who put so much work and energy into VW.

If I look at the development of complex features who took their time and released slowly: Subdivision, Data Tags, DTM come to my mind.

 

Title Block had a devastating start, but the responsible engineer stood patiently -bravely, really- his ground and fixed ALL of the issues giving the tool unprecedented power too. This tool is now at a very high professional level and I use it every day without problems.

(And that engineer is daily around helping people resolving all quirks they might encounter, I love that.)

[line-weight]

1 hour ago, _c_ said:

(And that engineer is daily around helping people resolving all quirks they might encounter, I love that.)

Yes.

[Helm]

Actually I don't see much there that I care about.  I suggest you go out of the office and talk to some architects to understand how they are really using VW or other CAD drafting and design tools.  And most important how they are interacting with their consultants.  For example most or really all of our consultants just want a dwg set of our plans they don't care about models or IFC.  Some are into Revit, I don't see mention of it.  The current Revit export produces an embarrassing result with walls missing and not much of a relation to all the work we have done on the model.  And it takes forever to produce.  I have grown fond of Enscape, and I don't see mention of it.  We are not doing movie quality rendering so why Epic, or Redshift.  How about suspending work on any new features and spend the next six months or year just fixing the ones you already have.  Architects work in the real world, 3D modeling tools (not BIM) are fun but that is about it.  Right now we can't even make a clean hidden line view from our building model of an elevation without a bunch of extra lines we have to cover up.  

 

You want to have some fun, design a multi story apartment building with apartment units that repeat in various configurations on each floor.  Then tell me an easy way to do it.  There are ways but none are perfect or simple.   We use referenced viewports, but I can't turn on the interior walls and make a section or elevation viewport because VW gets hung.   Charts and worksheets are often best made with Excel the new import feature is great but it is not interactive and the imported worksheet is does not support all of the Excel features.  

Edited December 3, 2020 by Helm
added some text

[neal-2002]

concur with the speed of some issues that never seem to get resolved...
 

im a self employed architect and use renderworks often but recently been using twinmotion to render projects as renderworks is nowadays just too slow - so im looking forward to the epic/twinmotion/ redshift changes to speed up my workflow...

Edited December 3, 2020 by neal-2002

[Matt Panzer]

5 hours ago, Helm said:

Actually I don't see much there that I care about.  I suggest you go out of the office and talk to some architects to understand how they are really using VW or other CAD drafting and design tools.  And most important how they are interacting with their consultants.  For example most or really all of our consultants just want a dwg set of our plans they don't care about models or IFC.  Some are into Revit, I don't see mention of it.  The current Revit export produces an embarrassing result with walls missing and not much of a relation to all the work we have done on the model.  And it takes forever to produce.  I have grown fond of Enscape, and I don't see mention of it.  We are not doing movie quality rendering so why Epic, or Redshift.  How about suspending work on any new features and spend the next six months or year just fixing the ones you already have.  Architects work in the real world, 3D modeling tools (not BIM) are fun but that is about it.  Right now we can't even make a clean hidden line view from our building model of an elevation without a bunch of extra lines we have to cover up.  

 

You want to have some fun, design a multi story apartment building with apartment units that repeat in various configurations on each floor.  Then tell me an easy way to do it.  There are ways but none are perfect or simple.   We use referenced viewports, but I can't turn on the interior walls and make a section or elevation viewport because VW gets hung.   Charts and worksheets are often best made with Excel the new import feature is great but it is not interactive and the imported worksheet is does not support all of the Excel features.  

 

Unit Plan is looking to solve the very problem you describe.

And Viewport Styles (just below it) would be another one, I think, most users will care about.