Product Overview

	Vectorworks Integration - Renderworks offers you a seamless method to add high-definition rendering that works right from within the familiar Vectorworks interface. Having the Renderworks module means that all rendering happens in an easy-to-set-up file that saves time because there is no repetitive transfer between your CAD and rendering applications. Since Renderworks works from inside Vectorworks, the initial learning curve is reduced, and you'll be more efficient as you modify the model and render without interruption.
	CINEMA 4D Render Engine - For added power, Vectorworks software exports directly into the standalone version of the CINEMA 4D application through a simple “Send to Cinema4D” command. The Vectorworks file is imported into CINEMA 4D with the high-level organization of your project’s structure that works with all the additional features of CINEMA 4D. When you add the CINEMA 4D application, you'll experience the incomparable world of broadcast quality animation, as well as the available Sketch & Toon module.
	Breathtaking Realism - Renderworks comes with hundreds of material textures, entourage images, image backgrounds, and HDRI scenes. This makes it easy to sweeten renderings with easy-to-use, realistic materials that give clients remarkable images to inform their understanding of your design intent. Plus, these styles are infinitely customizable, so you can make and repeat your special effects and environments — from image to image and from project to project — and aim for the ultimate in photorealism using predefined styles.
	Better Communication - Convey your ideas through enticing renderings that help clients buy into your ideas for a project. Whether your personal style is photorealistic and stylized or non-photorealistic, sketchy, and artistic, Renderworks helps to provide a clear, non-technical image of your design concept. Make compelling collateral for the marketing and sales teams much earlier in the process, and use Renderworks to sell to stakeholders better.
	Dimensional Design - Vectorworks software's stock OpenGL rendering options offer highly optimized, full-color, shaded images and animations in plan, 3D isometric, and full perspective. Now, add the delineation of materials to your presentation and show your customers their project in its surrounding environment, with expressive skies and unlimited lighting. You can also add shadows, 3D hatching, and atmospheric haze for dramatic effects.
	Advanced Effects - Use the power of Renderworks to adjust a model with realistic materials made with images of the actual project surfaces. In Renderworks, materials are enhanced with accurate reflectivity, transparency, and bumps, using advanced displacement mapping that even calculates the shadows of the surface roughness, which aren't in the model. Plus, dial-up a texture with powerful procedural shaders that don't need any external resources. Caustic capabilities refract light through translucent surfaces like crystal and water while a grass shader makes it simple to render realist scenes with grass, carpeting, or hair.

New in 2016

	MARIONETTE - The first and only cross-platform, Python®-based graphical scripting tool in the AEC, landscape and entertainment industries. Designers can create visual scripts that take advantage of Vectorworks software's 2D and 3D modeling capabilities, integrating seamlessly with BIM environments.
	POINT CLOUD - Allows designers using their preferred 3D scanning device to capture a physical location and import a 3D point cloud object into Vectorworks software to manipulate and measure.’
	ENERGOS - offers a dynamic, intelligent gauge of a building’s energy performance during the design process and is based on the Passivhaus calculation method.
	PROJECT SHARING - It is an intuitive means for teams to communicate and collaborate while working concurrently on the same Vectorworks design file.
	SUBDIVISION MODELING - allows designers to transform primitive shapes like spheres and cubes into any form imaginable.

System Recommendations

The following are real-world system recommendations for running Vectorworks 2016. In some demanding cases, we would suggest a more capable machine than is described by these recommendations. Likewise, there are some less demanding situations where Vectorworks will perform well on older hardware.

General Recommendations:

Additional Details

Graphics Cards

IMPORTANT – Like past releases, Vectorworks 2016 added improvements which placed still higher demands on graphic hardware. The performance and quality of the graphics provided by the new Vectorworks Graphics Modul e depend directly on the speed, memory, and supported extensions of the graphics card. These new features have the potential to provide a very fast and fluid experience if used on capable hardware, or a noticeably slower experience if used on older or incompatible hardware. Graphic cards should support at a minimum OpenGL version 2.1; cards not meeting this recommendation will have limited functionality and poor performance, particularly when rendering in OpenGL mode. In general, the more powerful your graphics card is, the better your Vectorworks experience will be.

The amount of Video RAM (VRAM) required to drive Vectorworks adequately depends largely on the size of the display being used and the complexity of the Vectorworks document. Medium-sized displays with a native resolution of 1920x1080 or less should be driven by a graphics card with at least 1GB of VRAM. Larger displays should use a modern graphics card with at least 2GB of VRAM, with 4GB or more recommended.

OpenGL rendering of shadows and edges are VRAM-intensive and require at least 1GB, with 2GB of VRAM or more being preferable. If you want to take full advantage of OpenGL shadows and edges, especially in situations where you have any combination of the following:
- many lights
- point lights
- image textures
- anti-aliasing
- high shadow quality 
- excessive geometry

and if you have a graphics card with less than 1GB of VRAM, you should consider upgrading your graphics card.

We strongly recommend that all users check that their video drivers are current. The majority of display problems reported to our Technical Support department have been traced to older video drivers.

For the latest information on our graphics card recommendations for Vectorworks 2016, go to the Vectorworks Knowledgebase and search for "OpenGL".

We do not consider remote login environments such as Remote Desktop, Terminal Services and VNC or virtual machine environments such as Parallels and VMware to be appropriate for regular work, so Vectorworks performance in these situations is not of primary concern to us. They may be appropriate for administrative testing or utility purposes, and Vectorworks is fully functional in these environments. You should not expect high performance in these environments, however, especially with interactive screen feedback.

We do support Vectorworks running under Boot Camp on Mac machines. As long as you have appropriate and current drivers for the hardware on your machine, you can expect fast and reliable Vectorworks behavior.

Unless there is a known problem with a maintenance release of the operating system, we recommend the latest maintenance release at the time we ship a new release of Vectorworks as a minimum because that is what we test with. If you have problems with an earlier maintenance release, we will often ask you to update as an initial troubleshooting step.

For users who work with large files and complex renderings, we recommend running with at least 8GB of RAM. When RAM runs out, Vectorworks usually continues to function, but is slowed significantly by the need to access the hard drive to provide virtual memory. Extreme lack of RAM may cause operations to generate errors in cases where given sufficient RAM they would otherwise succeed. Faster hard drives can have a large impact on system performance especially when virtual memory is actively being used.

Faster or slower processor clock speeds have a predictable impact on Vectorworks performance. Hard drive size requirements are driven by the total size of Designer with Renderworks including all content files. You can reduce this size by opting to not install some of the larger Vectorworks content files.

Project Sharing and Network Bandwidth

The performance of Vectorworks when working on a shared project over the network will depend on the available network bandwidth. If the network bandwidth is insufficient, operations that transfer large amount of data over the network will be slow.

We recommend at minimum a Fast Ethernet (100Mbit/s) network connection. For large projects, Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbit/s) networks are highly recommended for a fast and fluid experience. Slower networks can still provide a satisfactory user experience if operations that transfer large amount of data over the network, such as committing changes to the project file or refreshing a local working file, are kept to a minimum.

For the latest support information on Vectorworks 2016, go to the Vectorworks Knowledgebase and search for "2016".

Resources

Download a trial of Vectorworks: http://www.vectorworks.net/trial/
Buy now: http://www.mmhk.com/contact
Success Stories: http://www.vectorworks.net/success-stories
Gallery: http://www.vectorworks.net/gallery/