I feel your pain - my "new" office still uses MicroStation... It's like being right handed, but forced to draw with my left.

Sucks balls...

Apu - welcome to the dark side. come on in...the water's fine.

i'm a daily VW user...let me know if you got specific issues, maybe i can help...



(btw - dealing with new software would explain your anti-per rage of late...;-)

misery loves company. It was compounded by the fact that on my first day, I had to use an ancient ball mouse, even cleaned it was like operating with boxing gloves on.

Now I bring my own mouse into the office.

LOL mighty, it may actually have put me in a bad mood, i've been rather short lately.

seriously - VW isn't all bad. i like it actually, it's a hell of a lot better than ACAD...IMHO.

learning a new platform is like a new language, mind-expanding and frustrating but worth it.

it's jut a box with a bunch of microchips in it.

yeah, everyone in the office swears by this program. It is prettier than ACAD.

Apu I went through it about a year ago when I switched to an all mac firm, the first few months were infuriating. I copied every drawing I worked on first because within the first 5 minutes I would typically destroy them after trying to use cad shortcuts. I wonder if my boss questioned hiring me when I had to ask him how to draw a polyline.

Now that I'm used to it, created my own shortcuts, and with 12.5's interface and navigational improvements, I'll agree with mighty that I like it much better then CAD. something about the white background and colorful tool bar also feels less primitive.

Get ready for fun when you have to start converting sets to send to structural and MEP guys, that's always a blast.

One thing i do like is its easy to change line weights and fill. I bet it cuts down on layers too.

VW doesn't have to be a white bkgnd...go to VW preferences, choose display, and click Black Background...and there you go.

i work in black whenever i'm importing CAD files becasue i can't see autocad standard cyan, yellow and magenta against a white back.

writing new scripts (sometimes) can also be great in VW...i've got tons of simple ones

apu, you on vw 12.5? we're about to make the switch to vw2008. probably this week or next.

Vectorworks pioneered the object info palate and is very user friendly. There's a philosophy to using it.

It was originally a lot like Illustrator. So you see the line weights in their actual thickness rather than in colors if you want.

Getting structural coordination is not that big a deal. If they're using your drawings as backgrounds, it's quite easy.

maybe the conversion is something I just haven't mastered yet, especially when I start getting symbols inside of symbols inside of groups, converted drawings will have their texts reversed or layers wrong, a lot of times I'll have to explode my entire drawing so they can read it properly.

I had to check the date on the original post.

Who still uses Vectorworks???

lots of people do garpike...and the numbers are growing. it's a great piece of software, especially for smaller firms.

FWIW - VW's parent company just bought ArchiCAD too...so expect further development on the BIM, modeling and rendering fronts from Nemetschek.

also, FYI to all people who think VW is only for macs...nope! it's dual platform. you need separate licenses for different machines, but it does work on both MAC and windows based machines.

I'm an Auto-bollucks user and I love VectorWorks. Granted one of my first exposure was to MiniCAD way back when and where the philosophy began - aka great design software doesn't have to be crazily expensive or dumbed down. Its hands down one of the better software out there particularly when it comes to manufacturer integration. And it is the most intuitive of the cad/bim software - wins my vote

I'll take VectorWorks over AutoCAD any day. It all feels much more natural to me, even though I learned AutoCAD first.

until grad school I was a VW monkey. since graduating I've been stuck in cad hell - I miss drawing in scale with real lineweights...

in germany, we did all our competitions directly in vectorworks w/ little to no photoshop work.

the way the office was set up, i was able to walk in and start producing, even though my german was a little limited.(whoops :))

VW is by far the best CAD program (maybe archicad comes close), but AutoCad is nothing compare to VW. And guess what I am using for work.... AutoCad because it is some sort of standard in the business.

AutoCad is +/- 15 years old and you still draw with lines (ok nowadays with polylines or rectangles). VW is much more graphical, as mention before: lineweight, textures anything goes in VW.

I really do think it has promise, but when it takes you an hour to make a drawing you could have made in 5min its a humbling experience.

holz. ditto - VW is great because you can get great looking competition panels straight out of it.

not surprisingly though - nearly all germany competition panels have the same graphic style.

i enjoyed using VW, and it was a major bummer when i had to go back to autoCAD. (what a stupid name - like the drawings do themselves!)

lol.

i love (and currently use) autocad. i only LIKE VW, though i have no problem with either.

when i first moved to japan i had to learn a japanese bit of goodness called JW-Cad (this was my introduction ot reading japanese, btw; def not recommended), which is sorta like nothing else out there. i used it for years and like it still too...mostly cuz almost ALL of the shortcuts are in the mouse. it is so nice when you can just click and drag your mouse in a swooping motion to erase lines, join them, extend them, etc etc... incredibly fast and versatile. and freeware, too. if it wasn't only japanese i could almost recommend it.

i'll vote for vectorworks too even though it's been awhile since i've used it...i'm still on version 10

oh man i miss vectorworks so very badly. it's so much crisper and cleaner and tighter than autocad--autocad takes three steps and three layers and three random bits of gobbledygook to do every thing that vectorworks does in one step. and everything's so neat on the screen!

Also, AutoCAD is making my eyes go bad in just 9 months already. My optometrist friend explained to me that the black background is actually one of the worst things for your eyes, which explains my increasingly frequent (and painful) headaches.

You'll get the hang of it, Apurimac, and I promise you won't look back!

thanks myrian, it does get easier with each passing day. I was in CAD cons. drawings class this eve though and I was kicking ass at it. VW does make more sense than CAD though. I mean why the hell wouldn't you draw in paper space and why shouldn't i be able to pick a lineweight instead of a color.

By the way myriam you can change to color of the background to white. Its in the options menu under color options i do believe.

Yeah, I would do that, except that then I can't see the office layer colors that we have to draw in. Because it was all originally set up for colors on a black background, way back when... and autocad does nothing if not rope you into getting stuck doing the same conservative action for years! you know how it goes. i tried the white background for about 2 seconds until i lost all the yellow and white lines. then i gave up and went back to black. it drives me nuts though.

yes the whole paperspace / xref bullshit drives me nuts. Once you've done it a simpler, easier way it is way hard to go back to autocad. For example I spent a good chunk of today just messing around trying to get my xref'ed linetypes to read correctly on my scaled paperspace sheets--I had to run testplots and everything. in VW, everything is scaled automatically to whatever scale you set it to, voila! (And why shouldn't it be?! IT'S A COMPUTER, it's MADE to do conversion fractions automatically!!!)

Two quick things VW has over autocad, that we haven't mentioned yet :

GROUPS (HOORAY!!!! God i miss these, they make drawings SO MUCH EASIER)
and
The ability to turn your background drawing into gray if you want (VERY handy for Furniture Plans, RCPs, etc. and you don't have to muck around changing colors or setting up layer managers or whatever -- you just turn it to gray and you're done!)

Actually VW is in many ways like Sketchup (or, vice versa, I should say). They are both intuitive in the same way, and share many of the same task structures. It is annoying at first to be so mouse-dependent, but you get past that pretty quickly.

Ouch mate, well with each passing day it gets better.

Although my office still does CDs on ACAD tho. Everything else is VW.

you almost convince me to go back, myriam.

i love paper space and model space. i love drawing at 1:1 and really do hate having to be careful about what scale i am drawing in from the beginning. not a big deal, but something about that is annoying...there are other things too..but vw def has some nice features.

think ac is ever gonna catch up?

I remember briefly using MiniCad (which later became VectorWorks) back in the late 90's and being very frustrated by the fact that I couldn't draw 1:1 and that everything was in "paperspace". To me it seemed more like a very basic drafting/illustration program than a design tool. Maybe it's changed since then, but I'll admit to having a negative first impression.

Lately I've been toying around with my 30-day trial version of ArchiCAD 11, and it seems like a pretty powerful yet intuitive program. I still have much to learn, though. I'm hoping I can learn it well enough that I won't even need to install AutoCAD (and hence, Windoze) on my new Mac.

I picked up VW 12.5 a few months ago. It seems extremely powerful for such a low cost software. Been doing the VW 12.5 step by step tutorial. Wish there was some better text to learn with. The text that were supplied with the software are pretty lame

Oh man, where do I begin?

I am using VW 11 - just 11, no architect, no add-ons, no nothing. Architect might help, but the well is posioned at this point and when we switch, there will be no tears shed. Oh, we have v12.5 (also not architect) but nobody uses it because whenever you try to pull an old file into 12 from 11, the program screws everything up. We still have people with 10 on our machines because theres a similar problem of upgrading files from 10 to 11. I'm sure when 2008 comes out, you won't be able to upgrade your files either.

Bright Shining Example A: What frikin' program does not have a stretch command?

No, really. Why is there no stretch command? We got vectorbits (which is actually BETTER than most other strech commands - but its not standard. Some other fed-up VW user invented the thing)

VW Hatches suck
VW not calling a layer a layer sucks - I get it, you aren't ACAD, you don't have to be contrairian for me to notice.
VW 3D abilities suck. They take too long and do too little.
VW Groups suck. And why does the group have a layer separate from the object within the group? You've just double the chances for things dropping off of prints.
VW Pull down menus and general organization is atrocious. Nothing is intuitive.

Now, I used and loved ArchiCAD. I've used and respected, if not loved ACAD. Our office may be going to Revit, and I will love that too - at least relative to VW Hell we are in now. We have layer bloat, file bloat and memory bloat. We have problems with office standards, but VW and its bizzare organizational (to use the loosest definition of the word organize) system only compound the problem.

ArchiCAD is twice the price but 10x the program. ACAD may be the standard, but its the standard for a reason - its not an obstinate program. To me, ACAD is like the qwerty keyboard - its not the most efficient, but pretty much everyone is used to it. To continue the analogy VW seems like a keyboard where they put half the keys on the underside of the keyboard and are touting that it takes up less space and is more efficient, but really its just a pain in the ass.

There IS a stretch command--it's a thing you type in--I can't remember what you type in offhand--command - minus sign? or something? Can't remember, but it was fantastic.

But I remember being REAL frustrated until someone showed up and taught us all that one. It was like being taught how to make a fire or something.

Myriam,

Especially frustrating when in every other program it is blatantly easy to learn how to make fire.

BTW - I still haven't found VW's native stretch command.

Vectorbits is a godsend. It makes VW almost usable. Almost.

I'm trying to use the VW 12.5 modeling and BIM tools on projects. But I've had a hellish time getting the workflow to work.

Specifically, I'm trying to keep a model (architecture) in one file and all the sheets (annotations, etc.) in a separate file—sort of like Microstation. But where, then, do I put things that are both notes and objects, like light fixtures or door callouts? Also, where do I draw sections? In the model or the sheets (knowing that the "section viewport" tool works like crap.)

Does anyone have a great workflow with Vectorworks? Or an online resource they can recommend for setting up medium-sized projects in VW?

Thanks!

All i know is everyone in my office swears by it, and everyday i pray someone will hack the office macs and change all the software to ArchiCAD.

Kinda like a spouse swears that if only she cooked a better meatloaf, she wouldn't "run into the door" so much.

Good luck with your hacking skill apurimac

or that Intellicad will make a Mac version or that Rhinoceros OSX is in release version

anyone still using the black ACAD background or worse VW/MC backgrounds really have no idea what they are doing. You can change the background to be your boss' wife if you chose

I think my boss's head could explode if exposed to the awesomeness that is teh RHINO. Which is exactly why i'm gonna demo it during a presentation I have to give during my tenure there.

awesome

i'm fond lately of HIPPO.

HIPPO, sounds pretty sweet mighty. Does it have NURBS?

yeah, NURBS and shizz all up in the hizz.

comes with a rendering engine called UNICORN.

oh, and it exports directly to 3dh.

DUDE! 3DH export! Where the fuck do i torrent it!?

hahaha

DO you really need nurbs to model a strip mall or a colonial style house?......

Oohhh, yeah, I remember, everyone here is doing blobs and working for a starchitect.

Apuri
Hold on until you get used to VW. In my experience, VW cannot be aproached like Acad or Microstation in order to use it efficiently. I started to use VW 1 year ago and now (finally) I am convinced that is a very good tool for small and medium practices. It really covers many production phases that in other programs would require the use of external applications. Also the price is quite reasonable if compared to a full blown MS Triforma or Archicad.

Of course I miss the shortcuts of Acad and its simplicity, however I would not imagine to give up the automatic sections, facades, worksheets and other plugins that VW has. The 3D while not being a Skechtup or a 3Dmax, is good enough considering that you do not need to change interface and software.

If you need good training manuals, look for the Archoncad material by Johnatan Pickup. His manuals are better than the VW ones in order to put you to work. The original manuals are good for detailed information mostly.

Finally, VW2008 looks really good, mostly on the 3d side and the integration between drawings and worksheets.

Regards!

thanks for the help mini

i sincerely feel the 3d in sketchup and 3dsmax is lacking
have never tried VW but want to

and that NURBs allows far more control over surface edits especially and even ones no 'blob'