Vectorworks Macbook Air

[Beltran Mathews]

Mycollegae and I are working on the same projects, I do my drawings in AutoCAD 2015 for Mac, and he works in vectorworks. If he imports my dwg in Vectorworks, he's missing certain snappoints. And when he updates a drawing and saves it as a dwg again, I'm missing essential snappoints as well, even the ones I had before. Does anyone have experience with sharing files between vectorworks and autoCAD, and maybe a working solution for us? There are more little issues, but the lack of snap points is really annoying.

Thanks for replying, unfortunately I've read that post and found it a different problem than ours. There is no real issue with making a mess of the layout, but an annoying problem of snap points that can't be found (for instance, I can't find the center of the main tubes, see attachment)

Maybe I just do not understand you, but our issue is that when I open the symbol in AutoCAD I can find that center snap point. But when my collegue worked with it in Vectorworks and then sends it back as a dwg, I don't have those snap points anymore. He also can't find those snap points when he imports my original dwg in Vectorworks.

Attached here are two files of the same drawing. One from autoCAD, en one after it's been imported and exported with Vectorworks. When I open the one from vectorworks again in AutoCAD, I can't find any center of circle snap point.

Besides the fact that unfortunately your "solution" appears not to work here, you can imagine that we want to move and rearrange the blocks, and that first exploding them all creates a whole new challenge which I think is quite unworkable. I exploded the post vectorworks block and still was unable to snap to the center of the tube (tried a couple of explodes to see if that would change it). I'm by no means an autoCAD specialist, so it could very well be that I'm doing something wrong to not be able to reproduce your results. But wouldn't you agree that your solution makes working with big numbers of blocks very time consuming?

That works for me, to put the 3d snap on in drafting settings! But isn't it strange that I don't need to switch that on for the 3d snapping in my initial autoCAD drawing? Anyway, thanks a million, this helps me out a lot. Now to work on the Vectorworks side of problems, but maybe it's a similar thing.

I need to upgrade my workstation and looking at a macbook pro with external monitor. Anyone out there have an opinion whether it's worth it to go for the top model with the M3 Max chip or is the M3 Pro enough for Vectorworks rendering, etc.?

I have the Mac Pro Laptop (new) M3 Chip, with external monitor. I really like it. I only have the 18 GB version and it seems to render fine. If you are doing very heavy computational work, RAM is still a key player. Th more the better.

Not exactly apples to apples (pun intended), but I'm seeing RAM issues with a 24MB M2 15" MacBook Air. However, in addition to VW, I'm using Luna Display to drive a 27" iMac 5K display and often have too many tabs open in Safari, both of which are known to affect memory use. If I could do it again, I would have bought a 36GB (min) MacBook Pro.

I'm really curious to see the M1 Pro working, but sadly the reviewers they will try and get the max units of each chip but then they don't do CAD software testing. Hopefully we will have some people in here that will purchase at least the M1 Pro with 16gb and 32gb of unified memory and let us know ?? pretty please?? ?

PS. i'm looking into get one of this macbook pros M1 Pro 16gb or 32gb (now that is the difficult choice due to high price)

I'm also considering an upgrade but looking at the current CPU usage makes me really hesitant if I'll actually see a big jump in performance. Below is a screenshot showing rather typical CPU usage when running VW. I've never seen all the processors peak, it seems rather like only 2 of the performance cores are normally being utilised, and not to an equal amount, with an additional core getting some rare use. I'm currently on a MacBook Air 16 GB RAM. I absolutely love the small form factor and performance of the machine but it seems VW isn't really making use of all the power.

And how it behaves with TwinMotion?? Have you tried using the Twinmotion, because that is a quick killer with the ram, that was my initial doubts, because i'm looking into the M1 Pro 32gb at least which should be more than enough for the VW with some RW, but essentially i want to be using both at the "same time"... Any tests on this ?

I'm really hoping to see the workflow and how it handles heavy scenes, Jonathan Reeves has a video working with the M1 and it was working okish, so now with the huge boost it is this upgrade i'm quite hyped to see ?

Hi @zoomer , I am really intrigued by this comment, will vwx be utilising more gpu cores in the future? I am trying to understand if having a 32 gpu core is worth the investment for the coming years of vwx versions.

I can confirm that the data for now has defined a 50% faster CPU rendering time and 70% faster GPU rendering than a 13 'MBP with M1.

The tests concerned for now only viewports at 300 dpi rendered with custom renderworks on one side and redshift on the other, repeating the same operations with both machines.

There have been some problems with unified memory though. I wanted to do an important stress test. I opened a file I worked with two years ago on a 27 'Intel iMac quad core (2017) with 64GB of RAM at 2400. It is a file with 6 referenced files. In each of these files there is a 100 million point poincloud. So the final file features a 600 million point cloud.

Well, the iMac as long as it had 40 GB of RAM in doing this process ran out of virtual memory and crashed. The entire operating system was crashing, not just the software. By reaching 64GB of RAM, I was able to finish the job by the time. With difficulty, but I did it.

With the MBP 13' and M1 there was no way to overcome 3 pointclouds.

Something important must therefore be changed about virtual memory, and this could be a problem in these cases, because VW with very large files consumes a lot of virtual memory and does not get it free until the software is turned off.

Actually not I'm focused on big files. I'm worked with this machine remotely, it's not mine. Mine is the same and arrived at end November. Maybe I will test big section viewport later. If you have something send me on PM

Point cloud imports in Vectorworks have a hard limit of 100 million points for a reason, higher values can run into usability and slow performance issues. Stacking multiple ones is indeed a stress test for how to get Vectorworks to run out of memory. IMO this test is not using a typical model.

I updated my OS to Sonoma 14.4.1 last night and today Vectorworks 2024 is completely unusable. The program will open and it will open files/ create new ones, but the second I touch a key or use the mouse the bottom portion of the vw window flashes (almost like when a logic board fails) and then the entire computer crashes. No other programs exhibit this behavior.

The Page Setup command in Vectorworks isn't ours, we just call the command from the OS. It's no surprise Vectorworks and TextEdit have the same issue. I've seen the same in Adobe Acrobat, if you choose, "Page Setup" from within the Print dialog.

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