Landscape Special Interest Group October 2018

In this session, we looked at what is new with plants in Vectorworks 2019 and how to do a cut and fill calculation for just a portion of a site model.

Topics Covered:

• 00:12    We looked at what is new with plants in Vectorworks 2019. We began by putting some plants in the plant database. Opening up the Advanced Plant Preferences dialog box, we clicked on the Edit Plant Style button at the bottom, chose Schedule from the left window pane, and hit the Get Plant Data button—this process took us to the new dialog box. Vectorworks is gradually phasing out the Vectorworks Plant Database, which is a FileMaker file. In Vectorworks 2019, the plant list, or Plant Catalog, is reintroduced, but with the possibility of adding images. The Plant Catalog is supposed to be quicker and more reliable than the FileMaker database. It is now possible to use an Excel spreadsheet to add plants to Vectorworks. The spreadsheet has to use the Vectorworks column names (same names and same order) and must be saved as a text file in the Plant Database folder on your computer—otherwise, it won’t work. We demonstrated going through these steps by adding a cabbage tree to our Plant Catalog. You can still load images if they’re on your computer. The Plant Catalog is only the data for the plants. To make the plants, you still need to make the 2D and 3D images, input the settings, and create the spaces.
• 24:03    We marked our favorite plants in the Vectorworks Plant Database—by checking the “Mark as favorite item” option on each plant record—and tried exporting the records in the Tab-Separated Text Files (.tab) format with a text (.txt) filename. We had to match the order of the columns with the order required by the Vectorworks Plant Catalog. If you’ve been using a lot of plants from the Plant Database, this method should allow you to bring them into the new Plant Catalog. We also went over the Import Field Mapping command for bringing in records that you’ve added under previous versions of Vectorworks.
• 41:20    We finished the session by discussing how to obtain cut and fill data when you make changes to a site model. The challenge was obtaining fill data from only part of the model. We demonstrated creating a cut and fill record that we could attach to individual site modifiers. Then, we created a worksheet that could find those records and perform the cut and fill calculations for only the selected site modifiers. It’s crucial to carefully assign the Existing and Proposed parts of your site and to take care of any modifier conflicts—these items have a considerable effect on the cut and fill calculations. If you used a cut and fill worksheet, you can easily include soil expansion as part of the fill calculation!

Landscape October 2018 pm

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