Product Overview

	The Best in BIM - With the unsurpassed Parasolid modeling kernel from Siemens PLM Software, Vectorworks Architect has mastered BIM with design and presentation capabilities and, arguably, the best 3D modeling core in the business. Whether you’re looking to streamline costs, analyze materials, increase your energy efficiency, or just create world-class designs, you can create building information models without changing your preferred design process.
	Creative Modeling Solutions - Usher in a new world of discovery that enhances your workflows and integrates seamlessly into your workflow. From graphical scripting tools and subdivivision surface modeling to point cloud support, you can create any shape and easily explore geometry. With our intuitive interface, you can design from any 3D view using modes in modeling tools that automatically infer working planes as you move your cursor, and enjoy the superior quality that allows you to manipulate your model with ease. Anything you can imagine is possible to express in Vectorworks Architect.
	Flexible Workflows & Project Sharing - Design smarter than ever with seamless project sharing capabilities, access to reliable cloud- based storage solutions, improved communication and visualization tools, and the industry-leading development team that is always working to make your design software experience better — all in  one application. Whether you’re a sole practitioner collaborating with other professionals or a large firm dividing work among different members of the team, Vectorworks provides a flexible way to manage productive BIM workflows for even the most complicated project.
	Seamless Interoperability - Realizing a design often requires multiple sources of inspiration and refinement, as well as iteration, communication, and collaboration. Make your work even more compelling and easier to communicate with digital imagery. Import or export a wide array of image files. Publish your designs for inclusion in your firm’s marketing materials or website. Get on the cutting edge of collaborative digital practices, exchanging 2D drawings, 3D models, Building and Site Information Modeling (BIM/SIM) data for numerous multidisciplinary, multi-platform design workflows, as well as sending models to CAD/CAM machines, CNC routers, and other 3D printers.
	Superior 2D Documentation - Vectorworks software's extensive suite of drawing and editing tools help you to produce beautiful drawings and high-quality, professional documentation with ease, as well as make quick work of any type of project. Define your signature look and meet industry standards with Vectorworks Architect's precision drafting tools, intelligent objects for building, detailing, MEP, furniture, millwork, machine parts, and annotations, plus thousands of free symbols from leading building product companies. Batch print drawing sets or export them as multipage PDFs at full or reduced size.
	Inspirational Rendering - Define and communicate your signature look through our partnership with the award-winning CINEMA 4D render engine, which provides rendering capabilities that are faster and easier than standalone rendering applications. When added to Vectorworks Architect software, Renderworks integrates fully into the software interface, so it lets you seamlessly visualize your work throughout the design process while producing clear and accurate renderings. With the click of a button, rendered viewports in your documentation will update as your design evolves.
	Sustainable Design - Our Energos feature empowers you to make sustainability a priority throughout the design process. Based on the Passivhaus calculation method, the Energos module gives you — and your clients — a dynamic, intelligent gauge of a building’s energy performance. Using convenient, color-coded graphics, you can measure a project’s energy efficiency, giving you the ability to make critical decisions about sustainability as your design evolves — all from within your Vectorworks Architect file.

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/