Website: http://www.vectorworks.net/2017/
Manufacturer: Vectorworks, inc.
Product: Vectorworks Designer 2017
Language: English
Platform: Mac/Win
Price: Please contact us for pricing
Trial Version: http://www.vectorworks.net/trial/
Local Instructor-led Training: Please click here for further details
Vectorworks Designer Software
Whether your specialty is architecture, landscape, or entertainment design, Vectorworks Designer software enables you to draft, model, and present in a single, intuitive interface. Enhance your workflow and enable great design to materialize from inspiration, exploration, and discovery with Vectorworks Designer – the ultimate solution for the design professional who needs it all.
Product Overview
 | The Best in BIM Vectworks Architect is the industry's only modeling, drafting, and documentation software built with BIM at the heart of the design process. With Vectorworks Architect, your firm will benefit from best-in-industry building information modeling tools. With the software's design-oriented BIM capabilities, you will streamline costs, refine construction details, and increase your energy efficiency - all without altering your preferred process. Flexible parametric objects help you create a virtual prototype of your designs, with as much or little detail as needed. Edit and analyze your model while simultaneously generating interactive schedules. |
 | Industry Leading 3D See your captured visions come to life in 3D. An advanced suite of Parasolid-based solids and NURBS surface tools lets you create any shape and easily explore geometry. Plus, with graphical scripting tools, subdivivision surface modeling, point cloud support, you can create any shape and easily explore geometry. Our intuitive interface lets you 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. More accurate object information and better snapping make drawing in 3D easy. Anything you can imagine is possible to express in Vectorworks Designer. |
 | Seamless Interoperability Exchange NURBS models with Rhino or concept models from Sketchup®. Support of both import and export of OBJ, STL, 3DS, and SKP file formats lets you explore the full range of design options by incorporating information from multiple sources, making sweeping changes quickly and easily. Using IFC, an industry-standard file format, communicate effectively with your consultants and collaborators who may be using Revit® or other BIM software—or use your model for clash detection and model checking. Vectorworks Designer supports IFC, gbXML, DWG/DXF, Revit, PDF, and more for document and model exchange. |
 | Flexible Workflows & Project Sharing Enable multiple designers to work concurrently on the same Vectorworks Designer file with our Project Sharing feature. Whether you’re a sole practitioner collaborating with other professionals or a large firm dividing work among different members of the team, Project Sharing provides a flexible way to manage productive workflows for even the most complicated project. Plus, the software lets you create, model, present, and develop your designs easily and precisely with just one application. With Vectorworks Designer, you can move easily from design concept to technical documentation. |
 | Superior 2D Documentation Produce high-quality documentation with ease. Vectorworks Designer offers 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 sized. Plus, use our exclusive sketch rendering technology to change hard-lined drawings into soft, hand-sketched illustrations, blurring the line between clear, accurate technical documentation and compelling presentations. |
 | Superior SIM Tools Vectorworks Designer provides an efficient way to introduce Site Information Modeling (SIM) capabilities into your workflow. The program’s tools will help you analyze your design for area, volume, slope, cut/fill, and other data such as water flow and sun/shade. Scan in planting plans and trace over them with ease. Or, simply enter your field measurements. Use the property line tool to define a site’s boundaries and setbacks. Plus, building tools and site objects easily document existing structures and site conditions. In addition, you can use the program’s drawing, modeling, and 2D and 3D graphics capabilities to create compelling presentations. |
 | Unmatched Experiences Vectorworks Designer software gives designers in the entertainment industry an edge to advance their ideas from concept through completion. Our users include entertainment design professionals, such as lighting and scenic designers, including theatre, film, television, exhibits and events, as well as students starting out in their careers in these disciplines. The extensive libraries of signature brand lighting are complemented by best-in-class documentation tools, so you can quickly create light plots, automate paperwork, and visualize your design in rendered 3D views. |
 | Inspirational Rendering All Vectorworks software packages include Renderworks, the best-in-industry rendering feature set built on the award-winning Cinema 4D render engine. Renderworks provides the tools necessary to visualize your work throughout the design process while producing clear and accurate illustrations with stunning quality. |
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New in 2017
 | Resource Manager Vectorworks software's Resource Manager puts the ability to create, edit, and apply desired resources to your designs at your fingertips. Easily find what you need with powerful search and filtering, attach keyword tags, and access your resources directly from Vectorworks software's parametric tools. |
 | Irrigation Tool Planning for a site’s irrigation involves considerations and calculations related to both its physical features and resource availability. Vectorworks software meets all of these needs with innovative irrigation design tools |
 | Integrated Rendering All Vectorworks software packages include Renderworks, the best-in-industry rendering feature set built on the award-winning Cinema 4D render engine. Renderworks provides the tools necessary to visualize your work throughout the design process while producing clear and accurate illustrations. |
 | The Architect's BIM Tool Vectorworks software provides a purpose-built suite of tools that equip you to create a building information model for documentation and collaboration without inhibiting your preferred design process. Our 2017 features support the future of BIM workflows with IFC4 compatibility, direct Revit import, and project sharing capabilities that allow you to work concurrently on a single file with your entire project team. |
 | Virutal Reality and Webview Easily share your designs with current clients and collaborators using Vectorworks software’s immersive webview and virtual reality features. Generate a link that allows anyone, anywhere, to view your model in 3D on any device. |
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System Recommendations
The following are real-world system requirements for running Vectorworks 2017. 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 Requirements | Macintosh | Windows |
Operating System | Mac OS X 10.10 | Windows 7 SP 1 (64-bit) Windows 8 (64-bit) Windows 8.1 (64-bit) Windows 10 (64-bit) |
Processor | 64-bit Intel Core i5 (or AMD equivalent) or better | |
RAM* | 4GB minimum | |
Graphics Card** | Vectorworks: | |
Screen Resolution | 1440 x 900 minimum 1920 x 1080 or higher recommended | |
* See the discussion in the Optimizing Performance section below.
** See the discussion in the Graphics Card section below.
Additional Details
Graphics Cards
IMPORTANT – Several Vectorworks features have placed higher demands on graphic hardware. Additionally, the performance and quality of the graphics provided by the Vectorworks Graphics Module 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. Graphics 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 2017, go to the Vectorworks Knowledgebase and search for "OpenGL".
Remote and Virtual Machines
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 but you should not expect good 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.
Maintenance Releases
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.
Optimizing Performance
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.
More Information
For the latest support information on Vectorworks 2017, go to the Vectorworks Knowledgebase and search for "2017".
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/
