Landmark_SIG_078 Special Interest Group September(am) 2015

This session was the day that Vectorworks 2016 was announced, so some of the attendees wanted to know what was new. We started by looking at what is change with site modifiers.

The first thing you’ll notice with 2016 is that the toolbar for site modifiers has been changed so that you can now choose the type of site modify you want to create directly from the toolbar. There is also the option to snap to a contour which means that as soon as you snap to a contour it sets the elevation of your site modify to that contour.
We had a play with a couple of the site modifiers then the users wanted to look at some urban design 3-D modelling. In some places there is a trend is to have rough sawn timber on the outside of buildings creating vertical sunscreens. These are easy to create if you use the new subdivision modelling capabilities in Vectorworks 2016. If you then you subtract solids you can cut out the parts you don’t want leaving a series of horizontal or vertical rough sawn timber pieces.
After we had fun with the 3-D modelling, one of the users wanted to know how to use these pieces of timber with a solar animation to get the ideal rotated angle. Ideally they wanted to have the timber allow the winter sun, but keep out the summer sun. We discover that that’s reasonably difficult and that the timber has to almost horizontal in order to do that job.
Landscape 078 September 2015 am (m4v file)
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Landscape 078 September 2015 am (mov file)

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