Highlights from Vectorworks Design Day

Vectorworks Design Day was held this week, outlining the new Vectorworks 2021 release and the theme of “simplicity to design the complex” that characterizes that release.

Vectorworks Graphic Module Cache

Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CEO of Vectorworks, spoke about the meaning of “simplicity to design the complex.” What does that mean?

The short answer he says, is that the ideas will be quick to flow.

The mission and strategy is to be inspired by design, to lessen inherent complexities of building designs and simplify and build “creative solutions that exceed client demand and expectations,” said Sarkar. “Centered on design phases, we invest in building best-in-class technologies. We do this to create software that is simple to learn and use. It allows creative freedom. How will we deliver on this promise? Start with quality and performance. Your feedback, pain points, your wishes, every year between 60-70% of the Vectorworks projects started with you.

Smart Markers

We’ve increased our analytics investment to the meet the demand of over 1 million transactions every day.  Next we modernize invested and reengineered our technology to keep nimble, cutting edge.”

Graphics performance and visualization are upgraded as several years ago, Vectorworks predicted the way the technology was headed and fully supports multi-threading and fast performance. “We believe our focus should be on designs not design software, enhanced user experience, not just making things look prettier, reducing mouse clicks, on-scheme widgets,” said Sarkar. “Complexity surrounding BIM is real. Our focus is on making BIM easier to use and  incorporating information and geometrics from any source, making it easier for the project team, consultants, to spend more time on design and less time managing the project.”

Open workflows is another area that Vectorworks leads in, as they now can handle larger models, IFC exchanges, with cloud based project management. These areas make it simpler to tackle complexity. The design process has become more complex, with purpose built tools for landscape design. Landmark is quickly becoming the BIM for landscape platform, with GIS from Esri, getting to be BIM for GIS. Landscape BIM models allow users to make informed decisions based on them.

Interior space is a balance of art and science, and is very fluid as no two projects are exactly the same.

Using specific tools makes you more efficient, eliminating cost of re-entering data lost, transfers between platforms, and saves time and money, by simplifying your workflow.

Smart Options Display

“We see the need to simplify even further,” said Sarkar, “this means changes to rendering features, capture the visual drama of interior space, lighting schemes, integration with more real time, simplifying documentation, improved presentation capabilities, supporting cutting edge cloud computing to help sell your designs. When you can do all these things you can create the balance of art and science.

For years we have provided industry leading tools for production workflows. Consistency and performance are our primary goals.”

Vectorworks’ partner network allows you to find quality partner add ons, filled with partnerships to offer real benefits, and in Q1 2021, there will be tighter integration with Maxon Solibri and Bluebeam.

Rubina Siddiqui, Product Marketing director, spoke on “Product Line Updates,” with a focus on new features and capabilities that were introduced in Architect and Landmark, Spotlight, ConnectCAD and Vision.

For Architect and Landmark. section markers, interior elevation markers, detail callouts, reference markers and drawing label tools have been redesigned. With fully customizable graphics, you’ll have full control over your graphic output, so whether you’re using the create viewports command or markers, results with be the same.

“These new functions provide consistency and great usability boost to your workflow,” said Siddiqui. “All these drawing coordination tools are now symbol based and object styles. With object styles you can easily share the resource with coworkers through your resource manager and manage your office standards. You can better customize and control your markers to ensure consistency throughout all your projects.

Materials Resource Cubes

“Now you can edit or replace marker style from the object information palette like any style in Vectorworks. They have been updated with a consistent interface to make the process of links to viewports and navigating to viewports easier. Smart Markers make drawing coordination easier as well.  A change in one location and your markers will be updated throughout the drawing set. Drawing labels will be customized to have a backreference that creates a way to easily navigate between your details. When publishing a drawing set, smart markers will automatically export as hyperlinks so in a pdf viewer you can navigate to different details by clicking on hyperlinks on the markers. With materials you can define a new resource – materials – and manage 2D and 3D attributes with all relevant data in all one location.”

The materials resource cubes display the ways the different materials are represented in the different drawing views. This includes 3D view, plan view and section views.

You can also define construction properties, product data, and coworkers through the resource manager can manage your office standards. This means you can better customize and control the quality of your drawing markers for consistency through your drawing projects.

Now you can edit or replace a marker style from the object information palette. Like all marker tools, they have been updated with a consistent interface.

Grade objects have been useful for site designers who rely on slope oriented  or point-to-point grading. In Landmark 2021 you can create a network of Grade objects, making changes to those networks more simple. Once a network is established, you can grab the grade network and move it. The site model is quickly updated and new slopes identified on the slope.

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, engineers, Vectorworks, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D PDF, AECCafe, architecture, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, file sharing, GIS, IFC, infrastructure, project management, Vectorworks

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