Vectorworks Tips 451 – Workflows 1

Your workflow is the way that you work, the way that you move from one tool or technique to the next. Your way of working is probably a series of workflows.
Take editing a viewport as an example. When you want to edit a viewport, you can right-click on it and choose Design Layer.

This takes you to the design layer where you can edit the design. When you are finished, you can click on the Return to Viewport to go back to the viewport.

This is a common way of working, but what if there was a new way of working—a new workflow? Vectorworks 2018 is able to open multiple view panes. With multiple view panes, we can keep a view of the viewport in one pane and use another view pane to edit the design layer. This is a new way of working, a new workflow. I find this new workflow to be very efficient. It allows me to edit the design layer and instantly see the changes on the sheet layer.
I recently had a project where I was editing the floor framing. It was very useful to have the design layer open in one view and the two associated drawings open in other views. As I changed the design layer, I could see the information updating in the two separate drawings.

I was teaching a Landmark course recently where we looked at how to use this technique. We opened a main pane with the top/plan view, one secondary pane with a view of the sheet layer and another secondary pane with a rendered view of the area that we were working on. It was extremely efficient to see the rendered view update as we moved the planting, and we could see the resulting drawing update at the same time.
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Some users might not see the benefit of this new workflow because they haven’t tried it yet—try it, you might like it!