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What features do we desire for Landmark in the future


Viper x

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We have an opportunity to put our thoughts forward regarding our wish list for the ongoing development of Landmark.

(Some ideas may have been partially addresses in vw12 but post all thoughts please)

For landmark as a landscape design tool in general and for individual components of the software.

For me being a soft landscape specialist it is the place plant tool and the PRD that is most important.

1. Make both stable, reliable and much faster than they presently are.

2. Many more options for fill and colour, especially plant symbol texture, ie softer more natural looking effects and hard surface texture like standard functions like asphalt, concrete, paving, mulched ground, etc,

These need to be easily picked up from a pallette not have to be built by the user, all these surfaces are standard treatments and as such need to be on hand.

3. PRD needs to be faster and easier to modify.

4. Not specifically landmark but ease in pasting word text into vw where it holds its formatting.

These are just a few thoughts.

But this is your chance to have some input into where landmark is going, so please post all your ideas.

Viper x [smile]

[ 11-04-2005, 10:52 PM: Message edited by: Viper x ]

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I also am waiting for version 12 to arrive before I make any comments other than I want an valid irrigation design module, before I am forced to spend $3000.00 on a stand-alone program.

While Viper x's focus is on planting plans, I am more of a planning landscape architect, working on urban designs, complete project management, and consultant management, where the ability to quickly produce site plans and building concepts in 3D is important to translate ideas to clients, architects, and engineers.

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Let me add - I would like to see Landscape Architecture training (Landmark) with emphasis on site planning, dtm's, rendering (presentation)& planting in a central location i.e. Salt Lake (during the winter-so the major expense can have some ski value. Give a discount to those of us who bring our own laptops.

Want to convert other landscape professionals - train those of us who believe. Makes believers out of the rest.

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A few things I can think of right away:

- Speed using the plant list is very slow once you have all your plants done and you need to recalculate or change a value somewhere.

- Customizing the plant list so that we have the plants separated into categories: trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals. I have done this myself, but found that with more than three categories, it doesn't seem to work.

- Speed when you want to adjust the plant bed shape, etc. is very slow - it is usually faster to start a new plant bed than to adjust the existing. Sometimes I want to round the numbers off in a plant bed (put in 100 instead of 98 or 101). If there is a way to type in the number of plants you want and spacing and have the program place that number in a given area.

- An easy way to flip back and forth between a coloured rendered version and a black & white version (with no fill in the plants). I use to do this using classes, with one class for black and white, and another for coloured with separate symbols for each class. Then when you switch between the classes, you would automatically get either a black & white or coloured version of your drawing. Maybe we can pick a colour plant symbol and a black & white plant symbol when creating the plant reference data.

- I have never done much with the DTM's. The few times I tried I didn't get much luck, but would like to be more knowledgeable in this area.

I am also waiting for version 12, and will comment more when I receive it.

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Thanks Tvetter and Marietta.

I think landmark has a great future but it needs to get its core functions operating fast and reliable as priority one.

The vw12 landmark demo looks to have taken some important steps with the place plant tool, I just hope reliability and speed is also there as well.

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I have just gotten my VWL 12 upgrade and it was supposed to support georeferenced curved earth 3D coordinate system (GPS WGS-84/UTM grid) which is the keystone of all modern surveying! I have not found it yet.. THIS IS A MUST HAVE!

The DTM needs contour intervals labels spacing and visibility defined by user

Better breaklines for DTM/contour editing

Lots of COGO tools

Support for data collectors direct download an upload

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I have been working with VW 12 for about a week now and really like what I am seeing and finding...

I too agree with tvetter about a Landmark training session. I have struggled to get landmark to give me the accuracy and control in developing and manipulating surfaces that I had in ACAD and Land Desktop. I am not sure if it is my lack of knowledge of the program or if I am asking it to do things it can't do. Althought Salt Lake is nice, may I recommend something in the Midwest...Discounts are always good too.

Keep up the good work... you almost have a new convert of a diehard ACAD user. [Cool]

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Pamela dont worry about it you are not at fault it is plain simple that VWL does not have Autocad 3D Civil/LAND DESKTOP control or accuracy or COGO tools features in developing and manipulating DTM surfaces or point coordinates editing

I was really hoping that version 12 would finally support WGS-84 GPS coordinate system to gain "real world" geopositioning for all purposed

Maybe version 13? tomorrow wont be soon enough!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Pamela, I'll provide a summary of some COGO operations and explain how to do them in VectorWorks. I'd appreciate any input you might have on other COGO functionality you might want. Since you're a new user, I'd also recommend you review the documentation sections on the Data Display Bar.

quote:

Insert point by coordinates

Double-click on the 2D Locus or 3D Locus tool to do this.

quote:

Insert point by clicking

2D or 3D locus tool and cursor click

quote:

insert line with bearing or azimuth

Double-click on the Line tool, you will see a dialog. Highlight the little "polar" button to get polar style L/A coordinates

quote:

insert multiple points along a line or curve, etc.


Arc into Segments... and Line into Segments... commands do this.

connect 2 points with line,

?? I must be missing something here -- how is this different from the line tool (2D) or 3D Polygon tool (3D)?

quote:

intersect line-point, line-line, line-curve, curve-curve, etc.

These are different construction methods using the Smart Cursor.

quote:

Curves: create curve through 2 & 3 points, between 2 intersecting lines, by parameters (radius, entry bearing, tangent, external, arch lenght, etc)

The Arc tool does all of these, some just using the modes on the mode bar. If you want coordinate entry, you can double-click the Arc tool.

quote:

Boundary: select any points/lines in order and define a boundary

The Property Line object will do this (by points), as will its accompanying tool (by clicking a starting point and entering data).

quote:

Points Coordinates transformation: rotate around a point, translate, increase elevation by, etc


Enter your points entered as 3D loci. You can group them and then rotate, move, or elevate them together. Then ungroup if you want.

Hope this helps, Robert

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  • 1 month later...

An apply button on pop-up windows.

It would save several steps when testing choices.

Now we need to select okay, see the change, not like the change, open the pop-up window, make another change, select okay...etc.

Choosing an apply button, would make the change instantly visible and leave the pop-up window open for additional changes.

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On a landscape basis, I;d like to see a simple way of creating hedges in 3d. This often applies in visualisation. Another useful tool would be railings.

There are lots of tools of this type in architect - handrails, furniture etc - but there is an absence of 3d tools of this type in landmark.

The emphasis in Landmark seems to be on 2d whereas I beliec that 3d should be a big advantage of the program.

How about UK based training - nice as it would be to travel to the US cost would be prohibitive!

More 3d tree / plant symbols would also be helpful. (Ihaven't seen 12 so don't know if they have improved there?).

Thanks to everyone who has helped me meantime!

Lynda

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I would like to propose that VW begins a Landmark specific mailing list where we could share tips, help each other and maybe have a better voice as to the needs of Landmark users. Sometimes I feel the the software designers do not have a good feel for how diverse of field we work in and what is important to us.

However, this is the best program and the most receptive group of people I have ever worked with.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I second that notion.

Also a more active input in the landmark forum would be appreciated, it is easy to feel landmark has been cut adrift from "VW central"

Posts go unanswered and to me there is very little connection between us the landmark users and VW proper.

As tvetter rightly said I too feel there is little understanding of the specific needs of us landmark users, in both the pure technical challengers of the software but more importantly an appreciation of "landscape design" as opposed to electronic drafting, one is very different from the other.

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Would like the ability to export VectorWorks stake data (point number, northing, easting, elevation & point description) in a text format so that it can imported into other programs. LANDesign is a surveying software program has this ability, the program is old 1994, but still runs flawlessly under Classic.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I would like to see more interactive training issued with the product as trawling through ever changing reported issues while interesting can be time consuming.

Most of the operations once located I find simple and of great benifit but the curve of learning is very steep and if you are looking for conversions then this must be addressed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here are a few things I'd like to see:

*The ability to control sketch-rendering by layer in viewports. Sketch is such a neat feature of VW; I like the look of some layers sketched (like plant material, hatches) and some un-sketched (like the house, property, etc). I know this controllable by layer on the design layers, but in a viewport its not - at least that I've found.

*As I've said before in a post, I wish there was a way to deal with raster images differently. It is just so slow to draw/trace on-top of a raster image. Granted, my drawings get to be cumbersome due to my tendency to try to make them look hand drawn with lots of hatch/stipple - but even without that it is a slow process. I don't know much about the implementation of QuickTime to bring in images - but is there another way? I hate to compare since I do love VW, but in whatever way AutoCAD has created the implementation, it is much faster at rendering/dealing with images in the drawing space. I'm no software engineer, so I don't know if VW is just not compatible with another image rendering solution, or if it is just too cost prohibitive.

*Speed ? Speed ? Speed while dealing with complex drawings. Could VW team up with a graphics card manufacturer and tune some drivers to make VW more optimized at re-draws, refreshes, panning, zooming, etc? I would pay several hundred at least because I would like to not only see it a little faster, but 500% faster. I know I?m dreaming, but from my experience working with VW on a couple different machines I don?t see VW perform markedly faster (as one could expect) on a computer that is say, two or three times faster than another (in terms of memory, CPU speed/cores, graphics card, etc). So, is the software the bottleneck?

*Greater variety of tiles, hatches, stipples, and plant symbols specifically for Landscape Architects. VW has come a long way in this regard with the last couple of releases, but I still feel we all have to do so much customization and creation of our own. Though VW is great at allowing us to each be creative, it would be nice to have more to pick from a landscape point of view. Could NNA create a forum where we could exchange with each other and even see the work as a community meshed into the sample folders at install? Just a thought.

*That NNA will continue to grow and prosper. I?m surprised at all the exposure VW has gotten over the last several years. When I started using 9.5 essentially nobody I spoke with had even heard of VW. Now, almost all the landscape architects I speak with have heard of and/or seen samples of VW landscape drawings. There is much respect and interest for the product out there. I don?t know how it is translating into sales, but if VW can continuously improve and be more robust, fast, and full-featured, its take of the AutoCAD market will continue.

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My Landmark Wish for today is...

Dealing with the hydraulics and precipitation issues necessary in developing a good irrigation design is one of the hardest areas of landscape design. In VW-12, the ability of the software to create a good planting layout is the best it has been, but it doesn?t offer much support for irrigation design. If also doesn?t help much with understand how the Sun?s shadow lines from local plantings and obstructions can affect soil moisture content, but that will be a different Wish List item.

For this Wish, I would like to be able to identify the source water pipe/Water-meter diameter and location, static pressure and feed line details and then see a table update that displays the capacity available at each head in a section as they are added to a sections manifold. Doing this calculation by hand takes a lot of time and many repeated calculations unless the design constraints are very simple.

With VW having all the information it needs to understand what is happening, it would seem this would be a natural extension of the Landmark module so that heads that aren't getting enough pressure, or pipes that are restricting flow, and even pipes that are oversized can be flagged and modified to be more in tune with an optimized design.

Being able to easily identify, heads with inadequate pressure and legs with inadequate flow or with extra capacity would be displayed in a dynamic table with colored values based upon a user-selected criteria. Ideally the colored fills of each object, head, pipe, etc, would change based upon how the layout met the criteria so that their design compliance can be evaluated easily.

A really good tool would also generate a colored irrigation pattern showing the amount of water/precipitation being laid down in the site design and which section of the irrigation plan was contributing to each area of the watering pattern. It would also have the ability to interface to industry standard databases to that current products would be simple to access and implement in the design.

If all of this weren?t feasible in a short period, then providing a mechanism where dedicated Irrigation Design software could be used for the design work and VW would be used for the design import so that the documentation and integration into a total landscape design would be VW based.

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Wooh........ you take your irrigation design to a new dimension. [Eek!]

Me, I put a bucket under the tap, measure the flow rate and divide by nozzles..... nexxxxt .... [big Grin]

Actually scary thing is I can not recall ever ending up with a system that did not work.

My tip is always specify the biggest main line possible.

Crude I know. [big Grin]

[ 02-22-2006, 06:32 AM: Message edited by: Viper x ]

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Hello Viper x,

Ah, the old water bucket trick. I sure like that approach for getting cooled off, but when water is scarce, the weather is hot, pressure is weak, supply is low, and expense is restrained, getting close doesn't always work for us.

Irrigation Design Tutorials is a series of pages by a well respected Irrigation Architect that covers a lot of the aspects of what is critical when designing irrigation in this western climate. I read through these pages some time last year and found they were really very good and reminded me of some things I hadn't used in a while.

In hot western areas water cost are rising and supply is becoming a growing concern. As this water condition concern grows I suspect before long that cities and towns will begin asking for design consumption estimates as a way of keeping water rationing to a minimum before they'll allow any new or expanded irrigation work .

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