Landscape Special Interest Group January (am) 2017

This session looked at the problem of creating several curving driveways and paths. The texture should follow the curve and the path. We focused on using the Hardscape tool. This gives us the shape that we needed and there is also the ability to have the hatching follow the shape of the curve. We also looked at ways to create the paving pattern where the hardscape tool would not give us the shape we needed.

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Landmark_SIG_079 Special Interest Group September(pm) 2015

The main part of this session was around image props. The attendees want to look at the height of the image props, how they were created, and how they can incorporate these into plants. After that they want to look at some 3-D modelling.

There is an Australian website (OzBreed) that has several Australian plants created as image props, formatted for Vectorworks, the can be downloaded from the website. To start with we had a look at the OzBreed website, found out where to download these image props and then downloaded several.

We looked at the location of the image props in 3-D, and why they are where they are. We also looked at how to change them if you're not happy with their elevation. An important part of using his image props is to locate them on your computer in a place that Vectorworks is able to access them. We went through the exact location that you need to use in order to make them easy to find.

We took these image props and we incorporate them into plants so that we could make the plants the way we wanted. We also looked at using these image props as part of a plant a symbol and whether you can incorporate the entire planter as a plant object.

Next we looked at some 3-D modelling. Ideally we need to create a pergola. In order to do this we used the architectural object "column" but most of the work we did with simple extrusions. By creating one rafter, it could then be duplicated by creating one beam, it can be duplicated. In order to duplicate columns and beams we used the move by points tool. The user also wanted to create a curving bracket, which is straightforward if you draw it in screen plane, then extrude it. Once extruded, it can be copied using the mirror tool or the move by points tool. Finally, we put in a sun so that we could see our completed pergola.

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Landmark_SIG_078 Special Interest Group September(am) 2015

This session was the day that Vectorworks 2016 was announced, so some of the attendees wanted to know what was new. We started by looking at what is change with site modifiers.

The first thing you’ll notice with 2016 is that the toolbar for site modifiers has been changed so that you can now choose the type of site modify you want to create directly from the toolbar. There is also the option to snap to a contour which means that as soon as you snap to a contour it sets the elevation of your site modify to that contour.

We had a play with a couple of the site modifiers then the users wanted to look at some urban design 3-D modelling. In some places there is a trend is to have rough sawn timber on the outside of buildings creating vertical sunscreens. These are easy to create if you use the new subdivision modelling capabilities in Vectorworks 2016. If you then you subtract solids you can cut out the parts you don’t want leaving a series of horizontal or vertical rough sawn timber pieces.

After we had fun with the 3-D modelling, one of the users wanted to know how to use these pieces of timber with a solar animation to get the ideal rotated angle. Ideally they wanted to have the timber allow the winter sun, but keep out the summer sun. We discover that that’s reasonably difficult and that the timber has to almost horizontal in order to do that job.

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Landmark_SIG_059 Special Interest Group October (pm) 2014

In this session we looked at Keeping accurate time for a job whilst working in Vectorworks, the new site modeling features in version 2015, creating the banks of a pond that have a constant slope, and how to create underwater steps for the pond.

Landmark_SIG_058 Special Interest Group October (am) 2014

In the session we focused on site modifies and site modeling in Vectorworks 2015. There have been some important changes in Vectorworks 2015. One of the most important is the ability to see errors in your site model visually. This may not sound like much in improvement, but everybody who sees it comments on how important this change is. We also looked at two of the new road objects, one of which we used to build a car park.

Landmark_SIG_056 Special Interest Group September (am) 2014

In this session we looked at some of the new techniques in Vectorworks 2015, the changes to site modeling, changes to the existing tree tool, but we started out by looking at an important concept in Vectorworks, The concept of classes inside container objects. This is really important, because if you don't understand how the class hierarchy works inside container objects you can easily turn off your objects without realizing it.

Landmark_SIG_019 Special Interest Group January 2013

Like the other session this month, this session focused on creating and storing plants. this session also had time to look at storing plants in the default content and in the Resource Browser.

Landmark_SIG_018 Special Interest Group January 2013

The main topic for this session was how to create a plant from scratch, rather than duplicating an existing plant.