Landscape Special Interest Group May 2017 am

In this session, we looked at creating a plant, connecting the plant to the plants database, creating a new plant in the database, creating a plant report, controlling how the plant report finds the plants, and controlling the slope of a hardscape object.

• 00:42    We started by creating a plant from a simple circle. There is more than one way to do this. One way is to right click on the object and to choose the Create Objects from Shapes… command. Another way is to use the Create New Plant… dialog box from the Landmark menu. All that is required to create a plant is a simple circle. When you create a new plant, you can enter the botanical name, the common name, and an ID to identify the plant. Instead of entering the information, you could use the Vectorworks plants database to obtain all the information you want. This will connect your plant to the database. Changes made to the database will then be copied through to your plant and vice versa.
• 17:25    After we created the plant, we looked at the plant graphics. One thing that seems difficult for people is mass planting. When you activate mass planting, you lose all the plant graphics except for the backmost object of your plant. When you are constructing your plant graphics, you must remember that the backmost object is the object that creates the outline for the shadow and for the mass planting. If you create the wrong object at the back, your mass planting and shadows will be wrong.
• 27:59    When you have a project with several plants, then you can count or schedule the planting. There are standard Plant schedules available from Vectorworks that you can edit to suit your style. Once you have edited one of these worksheets, it can be saved in your library and used on other projects by importing it through the Resource Manager. We looked at how to change the fonts, how to change the color, how to remove columns, etc.
• 34:34    The next thing that we looked at was how to get a worksheet onto a sheet layer. We looked at creating a design layer just to contain the worksheets, and we looked at scaling the worksheets to fit on a sheet layer, which does not require a viewport. Scaling the worksheets may work for some projects, whereas other projects may have too many plants; the answer is to create a design layer for the plants schedule, then create a viewport from that to the sheet layer. Creating a multi-column worksheet loses the heading; however, the solution for this is to create multiple viewports.
• 54:10    One of the attendees wanted to know how to determine the total number of plants on an entire project. When you turn on the database header in the worksheet, Vectorworks shows you the total number of plants. However, when you close the database header, you lose this number. It is easy enough to create an extra row and ask Vectorworks to provide this number as a total.
• 55:50    The attendees also wanted to look at controlling how the plant report finds plants so that they could look for only a particular type of plant. One way is to use plant data that fall under the Category option. By including the plant category (Tree, Shrub, Groundcover) in the information for your plants, you could then create a worksheet that would divide all of your plants into these categories. We looked at how this would work. When your schedule looks for plants, it uses what Vectorworks calls Criteria. For example, if you set the criteria to be the plant object plus the Tree category, then it would only find the trees in your project.
• 1:02:51    Finally, we looked at controlling the slope of a hardscape. This has been changed in recent versions of Vectorworks. Previously, you could only slope a hardscape in one direction, which made it easy to control the slope. Now, hardscapes have the ability to slope in two directions, which might make it difficult to understand how to control it. The rest of the session was devoted to understanding how the slopes (slope A and slope B) work, and how they work with the overall slope of the hardscape.

Landscape May 2017 pm
[ms-protect-content id=”34491,34492,34493, 34494, 34495, 34496, 344927″]

 
[/ms-protect-content]