Once you start using walls, windows and doors and slabs, you're kind of at present there for a 3d BIM model. So why not push that extra bit and start getting plans and elevations and sections from your model?
Hello, and welcome to the Business of Architecture. I'm your host Ryan Willard and today we had the fabulous pleasure of hosting yet another masterclass from Vectorworks. Maestro Jonathan Reeves. Jonathan himself is an award winning architect, author and educator. He's the owner and director of Jonathan Reeves architects, which have their offices in libre, let's share. And he also runs j are a Vectorworks, an authorized partner of Vectorworks and UK reseller Vectorworks software, and he is the author of revolutionize your rendering. Jonathan, is, in my opinion, the best Vectorworks trainer out there. His YouTube channel has over 16 and a half 1000 subscribers with a whopping 340 videos, all of which are dedicated to mastering Vectorworks, there really isn't anybody quite like Jonathan, to be able to get the most out of this incredibly powerful platform. So we invited Jonathan in to talk with some of our business architecture clients, many of whom are Vectorworks users. Many of you know a big fan of Vectorworks, I think it's one of the best bits of software out there for small businesses, very versatile, you can use it for literally everything from your actual 3d rendering to 2d CAD, draw up grafting, it's got BIM capabilities, you can put together presentations and documents inside of it. It's a very, very powerful piece of software. And I always think it's very important for architecture firms to really be investing in their knowledge and know how of their tools so that they can get the best usage out of them amazes me how many people use a program like Vectorworks, and they've perhaps been using it for the best part of 10 years, and they've never moved from 2d into 3d, they've never explored the BIM capabilities. I also think it's very interesting for practices who are looking to upgrade and move in to the world of BIM production, that Vectorworks should be one of their serious contenders for moving over to a new piece of software, there's all sorts of competition and challenges with other bits of software like Revit. And I think for, again, for small practices, certainly, if they're Mac based, that Vectorworks is the way forward. So this session, Jonathan gave us a demonstration of Vectorworks 2024. And all of its capabilities, we talked about its ability in rendering real time rendering when it can do in house in the software itself. And with other plugins, like an escape and twin motion, really enlightening, as always, highly recommend that if you've if you're running Vectorworks in your office, that you have some training sessions with Jonathan to make sure that you're getting the most out of it, because it'll make an enormous difference to the efficiency of your practice. So sit back, relax and enjoy Jonathan Reeves. This episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architectures flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment, and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this, please visit smart practice method.com. Or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how we might be able to help you please follow the link in the information. Jonathan today is going to give us a bit of an overview on the capabilities of Vectorworks and 2024. He's going to show us how it integrates with things like N scape and twin motion. And then we'll have you know, we'll be able to have a chance to kind of ask questions as we as we go along, relating to anything that you've you've seen. And I ties there we were talking earlier about, you know, what your guys are trying to do in terms of BIM capabilities, and do recommend it's well worth having a chat with Jonathan.
All the time for some questions. Absolutely. We'll be in well. Great. Thank you so much for the introduction. Shall I shall I fire away and share my screen and go for it? Well, jumping goes. So let me share my screen. I've got a little presentation I want to share with you. And when I look over there, it's just me chatting to the group there. Good. Everyone see my screen. Okay. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you, right, well, I'm gonna get fire away and I'll try and take a few little pauses for breath as we go through But of course, called my talk, unleashing your creativity and pairing up your productivity, exploring 3d workflows with Vectorworks 2024, twin motion and N scape. And obviously, within the time scale available, I would like to try and cover some of the 3d capabilities of Vectorworks. Obviously, not all of them just touch on a light touch on a few projects and things. I'd also like to talk a little bit about some of the exciting features of twin motion. And finally, unveil the power of n scape, which is now on the Mac for the first time, fairly recently. And it's been developing at a quite a good rate. So this means we've got some amazing sort of 3d modeling capabilities and good rendering in Vectorworks, then we've got amazing real time rendering with twin motion, and then n scape on top all on the Mac or Windows. So really, really great capabilities. And, you know, they introduce a lot of different options that you can do. And I quite like trying to throw myself into live demos, always a risky thing as we were talking about Ryan, but I'm gonna go for it and do some live demos for you. And some q&a as well. So just before we go,
is it worth mentioning as well that this whole presentation is being done? Non PowerPoint, not on keynote, but on Vectorworks? itself? I think that's
absolutely. So you know, rather than doing a keynote, which I love, keynotes, great, can do lots of flashy effects and things I thought, you know, as the bulk of my projects are in Vectorworks, you're gonna see how amazing Vectorworks is as a presentation tool. And I'm going to demonstrate it by showing you my presentation all in Vectorworks 100%. So all my slides, everything I've got in Vectorworks here. Okay, so a little bit of background about myself, and Ryan did a great introduction. So I don't need to say much more than that. Where am I based? Well, here's, here's the map of England or Britain, and back in the middle. So good location to get anywhere within two or three hours, which is quite nice. And pretty much up to Scotland or down to London. So I've been a practicing architect in the UK for over 20 years, let's call it that. And obviously, I've been using that too. It's my entire career, actually, since University back in the day, and I won't quite name the day. But you know, a while ago, I've also been a top reseller for that to work. So I've gained a lot of expertise and experience. And I've worked with some amazing clients all over the UK and Ireland. But recently, I've kind of started my YouTube channel a few years ago, and I've been putting in more effort into that recently, I love making the videos, and a great that some of you have seen loads already. something I'm really passionate about. And it's kind of taken me a bit more like Ryan has a bit more global, I would say, it's really nice. I've got lots of clients all over America, Canada, Australia, Germany, all over the world really these days. So good fun, definitely. So here we go, this is what I'm gonna really try and talk about, I thought I'd kind of put some sort of, you know, worthiness in here before I get going with the live demoing. So, you know, in my view, in the realm of architectural design, the integration of advanced 3d workflows is a transformative force in that it pushes your creativity, collaboration, and your visualization. So for me, those things are really important at the front end, as well as the sort of back end, this talk is probably going to focus a bit more on the front end and the creativity side, not the documentation, the hardcore stuff, I sent Orion. Perhaps I'll do one of those talks in the future. So we're going to explore how architects can harness the combined power of Vectorworks, twin motion and N scape to enhance your design process really, to bring your visions to life. So for me, Vectorworks has always served as the foundation of my architectural creativity is offered amazing 3d modeling capabilities, even right from the beginning, you know, right from back in that first time back in university, I was modeling up my thesis project in 3d. So I've always worked in 3d. You know, I rarely work in 2d these days at all I do. I find it a bit strange or most architects just drafting in 2d. And that's just the way I am these days without two works. So for me, you can basically design with a lot of precision and efficiency. And you can leverage things like Project sharing, or referencing to also share your information in real time with a wider team. Now, I'm not going to talk too much about these today. But that dudes has those capabilities. And they're basically really quite robust these days, the project sharing and the new Vectorworks is extremely robust. Now, I've always been into 3d and rendering and I remember back in the day, in fact, I could probably show you one of my renders that took 72 hours. I've got it in the background. Maybe I will just flick on to it briefly. See if I've got it here. Yeah, here we go. There we go. You know, 72 dpi, so 640 by 480 72 hours of rendering on a Mac, making fan noises while I was trying to sleep in my student bedroom, but I was over the moon with that image and I blew it up to a one. And it looked unbelievable on the wall, I thought at the time. But you know, that's how long things took back in the day. So we've moved a long way. And basically twin, that's
pretty, that's pretty extraordinary image. It was 95. Yeah,
where I started. And, you know, it sort of makes me realize how easy and lucky we are now with the technology, both the hardware, and a Mac with our M three, Max processes and all these amazing new kind of processes out there that we have. And I feel like it's just taken a massive leap forward in the last couple of years. So for me, I'm really passionate about real time rendering and visualization workflows. So you know, the icing on the cake is that real time and VR and all that kind of rendering stuff, that's the icing on the cake stuff. But it does mean that you've got to make a very good cake underneath it to get that 3d material. So you know, for me the idea of doing a set of drawings in one program, and then a 3d model in another program. And then rendering in another software doesn't really make a joined up sense at all. I'd rather model and do everything in one software. If I need that extra for the ray tracing, high quality materials and lighting, I can just plug in that works to twin motion in Inscape. So hopefully, that's what I'm gonna try and demo to you guys see what you think. Okay, so let's get started on the actual presentation. As I say, I am doing all of this, in fact works. So little slideshow effect for you. I'll tell you how I did that later if you're interested. So the first thing is, you'll notice that I've got my new interface here. So I thought I'd actually start off with just talking about Vectorworks 2024, because we've got this brand new interface that just came out. So the couple of things I just want to talk about there, briefly. So we've got this new homescreen that arrived last year. And now this year, we've got the new interface, just briefly talk about the homescreen. To access my homescreen, all I need to do is go up and click on this little home button up in the corner. And you'll see it'll kind of pop up with a brand new window, where it greets you with all of the files that you've been working on recently, which is really, really cool, actually. So you can see what I've been up to pretty much all day to day preparing to present to you guys. Because here are the projects I've got here. I really like the way you can view them in ListView. See the file size when you last worked on them. I mean, a killer feature here would be how long you'd worked on them, they should add that for sure. So you can do your fee quotes, that'd be really awesome. That's definitely on the wish list. You can also see that you've got a few kind of what's new and sort of sample files. So this is just Vectorworks being friendly and communicating to you, which is nice. Over here, we've got the learning tab, which has access to the university cloud services, which are really good. This is where you've got your iPad, an iPhone app Vectorworks Nomad, which many people don't use as much as they should or could. And this is a really good way to access your files on the move, and to show people different projects both in 2d and 3d. So maybe something you're not aware of that you could look explored it more couple of and things like the message center. And then of course, the customer portal and tech support. The good thing is guys, it's all in one place. previously to this, it was sort of darted here and there around to get help or libraries or whatever you need it. So I think it's a really nice improvement. Now, that was actually kind of last year's big improvement this year is big improvement is the new interface. So if you're not on 2024, you'll kind of notice that basically the icons look a bit different. And we've got this new view bar at the top here. Okay, so just a couple of tips on this, you want to go up to this little cog. And you'll notice there's three different modes. So you've got a like a regular mode, which is quite nice. On Windows, this works quite well particularly. And basically if you click on the button here for settings, you can introduce some additional options to your workspace. So I actually turn these off, because I don't really feel the need to have my text here because I've already got it up in the menu. So you know, that's fine, I can actually disable that one. You'll notice the snapping is also here as well. But if you turn the snapping off, it just reverts to where it was last year down at the bottom. So I'm pretty happy with that. So having done that I can now spread my workspace across by using a compact mode. You see it all kind of spreads out really nicely along the top here. Okay. One really cool thing though, is when you are presenting know this, you can go into auto hide mode So what that means is it automatically hides itself away for presentation. And it only pops up as and when I need it. So when I go up to the top it pops up. You'll also note that I've got my sidebars here. And if I want to, I can basically go up to my window, palettes, palette options. And there's a great little sheet keyboard shortcut here that I've programmed into my workspace, which basically hides my doctor palettes. So this guy's clears everything away. So when I'm presenting to my clients, which I do a lot via zoom, you know, rather than live meetings and lots of travel, especially in the pandemic, I can slide out my screens here, and basically only slides out the tools when I need them. To be honest, if you know enough keyboard shortcuts, which is something that I'm quite passionate about teaching, you can almost use Vectorworks, in this full screen mode. But for those of you who want to just present in this mode, I think you'll agree, it looks really, really nice. And you know, that means that now when I'm sort of moving around between different views, just got this sort of full screen capability. What do you think is cooler? I think that's nice, the new interface improvements are really, really nice. And I do beta test that works. I'm on the beta forums and the Beta less, and I see all the hardware that goes behind all of this. And I can tell you, it's pretty phenomenal. The amount of refinement and work that went into this. So with a keyboard shortcut, I can just do Command Zed On my workspace and bring those back at any time. Good. Okay, so that was those new features on the homescreen and the interface. But I think what that shows you is Vectorworks has this very people centered approach. As a business, they're very bit like Apple, I would say in my view, they want to make the customer experience as good as possible. And that's something that I've always enjoyed as a as a user and as sort of customer Vectorworks, I guess. Okay, so let's jump into something a bit more exciting. The next thing I want to talk about is the enhanced 3d modeling and rendering capabilities just in Vectorworks itself. Okay, before we talk about twin motion, and Inscape for later on. So what I'm going to do here, guys, is basically see this little bit of text here, this is called a hyperlink. And this is a very cool little gadget that you can find from your DIMMs and notes tools down here. Okay, this little hyperlink object here, what the hyperlink does is very sensible. It basically just does whatever I asked it to do, opens a web page opens a document gives me a QR code, which I can scan and link to something. In this case, all I've got to do is open a document. So when I hold the Command key down, and click that it's going to open my next file, which is a bit flash, but it's nice and convenient for me. So if you're not already using hyperlinks is something that I would definitely recommend embedding into your drawings. You can imagine lots of uses for this things like engineer specifications, or a website for, you know, a specification for the bathroom, that kind of thing. Anybody using those hyperlinks at all?
No. People pretty cool. Mahmoud Mahmoud would like you know, you ever know about the mermaid?
Oh, sorry, I'm in tears actually have a question. But can Should I wait till the end?
Let's let's get let me go a bit. Well, depends what the question is.
Regarding hyperlinks, is there a way to publish them and have them carried through in your PDFs? Yes,
they will publish as a PDF, but only if it's a web link. Obviously, it can't link to a file that it doesn't have. So web links are the one thing that do work on a PDF. They work pretty well. Okay. Great. Okay. So what I've got here is a very simple little demo project that I created, just as part of one of my YouTube tutorials really, just to explore something in Vectorworks. And I call it the Vectorworks cafe. So at the moment, you can see if I go inside the cafe, we're in White Card Mode. Okay. So the nice thing about this, let me just hide that interface there is I can basically visualize my sort of massing and the idea of the space without getting drawn into materiality, which I think is quite nice. Now, if you do want to replicate this, let me just go up here and put my v bar back on full mode compact mode, all I need to do is pop into shaded options, and you'll see that all I've done in here is basically turn everything off. So I've turned off the textures, the colors, shadows, pretty much everything and that's where you get this nice white card mode. The only thing that I've got going on in there is this ambient occlusion and you can see what a difference that makes in terms of bringing out the sort of soft shadows. So Ambient Occlusion and really great little tip, I love Ambient Occlusion, and you can play with the strength there. So you can kind of play around with the brightness as well. So that's my first little tip, you know, the white card mode in that too, it's very easy to achieve, actually. So secondly, I'm gonna go to something a bit more conceptual. I've called it cartoon mode. You know, it's very sketchy, it's very loose. You know, if I showed you this as a client, you wouldn't get too bogged down in. Oh, is that the finished thing? You know, it's kind of clearly supposed to be conceptual. So the way that I've achieved this, it's going to my shaded options, you can see I've now turned on textures and colors, a little bit of anti aliasing, but not shadows just yet. So it's flat. But I have turned on these edges. Okay, and that's where these edges come in. And I've made them pretty thick. Okay, now you can have them sort of normal level is one. And that's how it normally looks quite low. But if you make it a bit thicker definitely looks quite conceptual and cartoony. So it's a pretty cool little setting. If we go on to my next a few. This is basically shaded only nothing, you'll agree it's starting to look a bit more realistic, isn't it? We've turned off the edges. It looks a little bit more realistic, but the rendering isn't quite there yet. Okay. But shaded rendering is super nice. And the advantage with it is, you know, you can just kind of move around, navigate around in real time in your back to its window, full screen. Very good. Let's go down to the next option before. So here we go. We're stepping it up a bit. Now. We're introducing some lighting and some reflections into Vectorworks. So these are fairly recent developments in the shaded rendering the Vectorworks. Have, they weren't there a few years ago, so you didn't have these. So we're going to shade it options. And the big, big difference here is these three. Now these came in with backdoors 2023. So if you're not older version, you won't have these yet, but look at the difference. The biggest one is the object reflections. And the environmental reflections makes a massive difference. Actually, you can see that shine of the floor and the environmental lighting bouncing around. And then environmental lighting introduces a bit more depth, I would say into the image. What do you think, Oh, it is pretty cool for shaded rendering for a CAT software. Very nice. Yeah, it's good. And you can still navigate around in real time, it wouldn't necessarily work in this rendered mode. But if I want to give you as the clients a bit of an experience, you know, I think you'll agree, this will communicate and do the job without me having to go to twin motion or Inscape. Really, this is me just designing and giving you the best experience for cam. Okay, so my next view is shaded option with lighting. Okay, so the big difference here is I've actually turned on another layer. Okay, let's bring back my palettes a bit more permanently for a second. Okay, so if I go to late layers, you'll notice that I've just got a layer for lighting there. So without the lighting, it definitely looks a bit darker than the lighting on really boosts it up. Now, I'm not seeing the lights at the moment. But if I do want to see them, all I need to do is go to my view bar. And what's really nice about the view bar is I can click here. And if I forget what the icons do, I can actually kind of read in here and click and access the drop down from here now, which is really, really cool. So the reason the lighting isn't showing is because I'm in always in wireframe, only showing wireframe. So if I go to show in always, you'll see the lighting now. So quite a nice little tip that so in wireframe, you'll only see it in rendered mode. But as soon as I I'm just doing couple of keyboard shortcuts here, guys, I do a lot of those command shift G for rendering Command Shift W for wireframe, you know, these just basically instantly turn on your rendering on or off. So you can see the difference it makes just with that little bit of extra lighting added in. And I don't know whether you're aware of this, but in Vectorworks there was a limit on shadows. Okay, that was been removed last year. And there was a limit on lighting and that's been removed this year or the other way around. Okay, so there used to be eight shadows of eight lights, that was the maximum. So if you've ever looked at rendering in Vectorworks before and it didn't look as good as you wanted it to that could have been the reason but with no limit on shadows and lighting now, and things like these environmental reflections. I personally think the rendering for you know, actual CAD software is absolutely brilliant. People go on about SketchUp. But you can't do this in SketchUp, you can only do sketchy stuff in SketchUp. But I think I've proved that you can do that in Vectorworks, as well as the realistic stuff as well. So the final thing, then I just want to talk about is two extra settings or three extra settings. It's called Depth of Field. So with the depth of field turned on, you can see we've got this nice blurring out of the distance. And you'll find the depth of field settings in the shaded options. And what's really nice in the new interfaces all gathered together here now, so we can go to the camera settings, and I can just enable or disable my depth of field, what's really cool is I can click a focal point, you know, focus on that chair or table. And basically, it sets the focal distance so that everything else gets a little bit blurred out for me. So pretty cool setting to have. And if I increase it, let me increase a little bit more. Let's go to three, let's go to two, two meters two, or you can definitely see this in depth field there. But you know, it actually does work in real time and sort of, you know, a little bit blurry, and then it kind of clears AI as you get further forward. So that's a really nice new impact, the depth of field gives gives you this distance and depth range. Very, very cool feature. Finally, we've now got bloom. Okay, so Bloom is something that gives you a bit of a glowy effect, really, okay, you can see I can enable bloom. And basically, that means these, these lights sort of bright surfaces just sort of give off almost a bit of light. Now, I've over egged it to sort of clearly show you but if you go a bit more subtle, it does actually enhance quite nicely, the image just sort of lifts it in certain areas. So the Bloom is really, really cool. We've also got a couple of other settings if you're a photographer, and that works now called exposure settings. And this is basically where you can adjust the different exposure, film speeds as well. And even F stops as well. So if you're one of those sort of people who love photography, this is a really nice aspect to control the brightness and the sort of different characteristics of your image. So guys, what do you think about the new rendering and the latest Vectorworks? Are you sort of pleasantly surprised? Yeah,
it's very nice. It's very nice. So that you can actually start to control where the focal point is, and create that nice kind of blurred background that you get that concentrates on some of the foreground imagery like you'd get in natural photography.
Yeah, you can imagine an elevation with some trees behind the building, and you do a nice render, and you blur out the trees adequately. So you get that nice blurry sort of backdrop, you know, obviously, maybe not in a space like this working as well. But yeah, it's still very cool.
Do you find that people still need to use things like Photoshop on their images now,
I mean, like, Photoshop, I don't know, I hardly ever use it for anything to do with CAD now or InDesign, I do all my desktop publishing, in Vectorworks. And I do most of my image making in Vectorworks. Now, okay, the kind of thing that I would have done in Photoshop was add people, but I probably do most of that in Vectorworks, or twin motion. Now. I always find the more you do in Photoshop, the more redundant it is when you have to change the image and redo all the work again. So I'm totally minimize the Photoshop stuff until the final ticket at the end. And I use those Photoshop images. Back in Vectorworks. I literally import the PSD file. And you'll notice that you can import image files, including PSD, and you can reference them so that means if the actual changes, it just updates my Vectorworks drawing or sheet.
Very tasty. Okay, so basically, you can work off a whole load of reference files, essentially. So your, you know, everything just updates automatically from the CAD file. Yeah, exactly.
And it's really nice that you can update PDFs and images as well, that's a really cool feature. You just don't need InDesign or Photoshop hardly at all. So it's an expensive bit of software to maintain Photoshop, sorry, Adobe, but you know, right. The final thing is animation. You know, vector it's does have quite nice animation built in. So I've just activated a camera. And now I can click play. And basically, I can just pre record a little walk through animation. And this is something that you can just draw the path where you can set up a bunch of saved views. Again, it's not a twin motion, it's not an escape, but in terms of animated capability, it's nice to have definitely, and if you kind of render these, say 60 FPS, they can be pretty smooth actually. They look pretty amazing. So that's the animation camera there as well. Okay, guys, good, right, I'm gonna close that file down. And I'm going to jump back into my presentation, if I may, and carry on with my talk. So that was 3d rendering in Vectorworks. Now, I just wanted, if you're interested, I don't have to do this. But if you are interested, I can spend a few minutes showing you some of the actual 3d modeling and do a little live demo. Would anyone like to see that? Yeah. Thumbs up, and we've got some taller buildings. Here we go. So I'm going to hold down my command key and to up, let me just close this big file down later. For later, Command key click on this one. And let's launch this one. Here. We go. Right, cool. Okay, so I'm a bit of a fan of just playing with software, I love playing around with software in my free time making videos, that sort of thing. And I quite like, you know, having the idea of being a skyscraper architect, it's very unlikely that I'll ever get commissioned to do a skyscraper Ryan. But I like the idea of having a go and seeing what I can come up with conceptually. So these are just a few sort of weird and wonderful kind of concepts I've kind of had a little bit of a play with over my time, I can't quite remember how to model all of these to be honest, I'm just gonna go and jump in and model something, but show you a couple of the processes that I would use. So let's just swing round a couple of years. You know, these are very, very quick to model. As I'm going to demo. I've also got one here that I was just messing around with the other day. Okay. And this is really cool in that this is using something called an auto hybrid. Okay, so what this does, the auto hybrid means that I can represent the object at a height at any level. So you notice I'm cutting through at 200 meters. So that's right above, so I'm cutting through right above, if I cut through and say 30 meters, it will basically give me a different floor plan. So now, you know, now I'm cutting much more down at this sort of level. So the auto hybrid is really, really cool in that basically, let's do 100 meters, that's probably a bit too high to 250 meters, you can see it basically update its geometry, depending on the height, that you're actually telling it to slice through the auto hybrid, a really useful thing in BIM, because if there's something that you can't model with the BIM tools, you know, regular walls, windows and doors, you do this sort of freeform modeling type effect. And then you say, like, give me an auto hybrid of what this thing would look like, above or below at 30 meters. So it means that you can kind of represent things two dimensionally, from very complex objects. So really, really important sort of tool in the armory of BIM. It's coming to my life demo, and see how this works. So I'm going to turn my page boundary back on, and I'm going to kind of start off with the regular polygon tool, hiding under my polygon tool, I've rearranged my workspace a bit, you can see, I'm just gonna go through, I'm really not quite sure what I'm going to model let's do 20 meters. And let's change into 3d. And let's just push and pull 100 100 meters. Okay, so I've got a little tower building here. Now you notice that when I'm changing view, at the moment, Vectorworks is giving me perspective view, one quite nice new preference that you can change is that you can get it to remember the render mode. Okay, so what this means is I can help separate render modes for primary views. So if I put it into front view, I don't really want that in perspective. Okay, I'd rather have that in orthogonal. Okay, so that's straight on. So what that means is, now I've got plan, when I go to front view, or right view or back view, I'm straight on. But now in any of the other views. By the way, sorry, I'm just clicking my numerical keypad here to access all the 3d views on the keyboard. So very easy to revolve around. I really like that new feature of having primary views and secondary views in perspective. And I think that's cool. Okay, so here we go. So a couple of tools that I just wanted to show you, you may have missed these. So I'm going to drag out this 3d palette. Now this first tool is called the Offset Edge tool. And this couple of modes on this tool, it's really powerful, you can basically select an edge, move that edge and what it basically does, it splits the face so that you can now kind of split your face and just push and pull. Okay, so let's do that. Again. Just sort of push and pull, come in a bit there and just raise this bit here. So you can see I've kind of sculpted that little building a little bit more in that sense. The second mode of this tool is that it takes what they call an edge loop, so this time it offsets the entire edge. Let's do two meters and let us push that In getting minus two meters in, okay, so you've been, you can see that I'm able to kind of basically push the surfaces in or out, depending on what I'm looking to do. Basically, it takes the entire edge. To bring it down again, let's do two meters again, this time, I'll come out the other way, let's go two meters outwards. So you can see I can push in or pull out very easy, what I call solid modeling. That's pretty cool. So definitely crack on and have a go with this edge Offset Edge tool, I keep calling it edge offset, a great little tool. Okay, the next one, which you may not have tried is quite a fun one is let me just put it into isometric view for this one always looks weird after perspective, is the deform tool. And it's pretty powerful this tool. So this means that you can basically select an object, select a center point, and basically click and basically, you'll see that I can now twist my object as much as I want, let's just do a 90 degree twist. Just to create a bit of interest in this weird and wonderful tower building. I'm not sure I'm creating but it's fun to do. As well as that the deform tool has a very nice taper mode. Okay, so let me just do something with the push pull tool. Okay, so what I'm going to do is actually just push and pull another edge here, I'm just ungroup that one, so this one is separate. Okay, that means that I can use the default mode to basically see if I can kind of taper it in a little bit there, just on the top there, can you see, so very easy to taper. And then when I'm ready, if I want to, I can select both of those and just add them back as a solid again. So that's pretty cool. So that's the second tool that I would say is one of these unknown tools that you may not know about. Now, the third tool is basically a new feature called the 3d dragger. Just wanted to demonstrate this, where's a good spot to demonstrate this, so what I'm going to do is use the extracting tool, and I'm going to extract a surface. So this allows me to extract any surface from my model. Let's click on this one and just click extract. Now, if the object is flat, which this one is, it's a planar object, you can see so this is just a polygon. Okay, if I take something a bit more complicated, such as a surface here, this will be a NURBS surface. So when I click Extract on that one, you can see that I've actually give it a slightly different color, a NURBS surface here. And what you're seeing here is a phenomenon called Zed fighting, where the two surfaces inhabit the same thickness if you like, infinitely thin. So sometimes you need to do something called Shell egg. And the Shell tool is pretty amazing. It basically gives something a thickness, you can see I've shelled it by 150 mil thickness there. So basically, that's a separate object, like a piece of cladding now, okay. So really two modes there, the extracting tool really, really great for just extracting a surface Explorer, and then if you do, you want to give it a thickness, you click and then shell it as well. That means then it's a separate object that you could color up. Let's go to Benjamin Moore designer colors.
And let's go for a nice Spanish red just for the sake of what we're doing. Okay. Now, the final thing I want to show you is really quite powerful. So if I take this surface here, I can go to my 3d powerpack. And this is something that people don't know about much. And I can basically turn this 2d object into a surface with curves. So essentially, this is a NURBS surface. Now, this means that I can use something called the degree weighting to give it more vertices. And if I now click the Reshape tool, you can now see these vertices forming here. Now, what's really cool about these is I can now just push and pull these in any direction using this new thing called the 3d dragger. Okay, so this is absolutely fantastic for what I call organic sort of for modeling, you can basically select one or more vertex, and basically just start pulling the cage if you like, that basically controls those vertices. And this is something that you couldn't really do in Vectorworks before, you know, just dynamically model this sort of subdivision, the stuff. I think that's pretty cool, very easy to interact with by selecting and then you've got this nice, very clear 3d dragger, don't you think? You can also kind of rotate it to a different angle. So you know, definitely take a bit of skill to master but I think This means you can model some incredibly organic forms. And as I say, with things like the shelling command, you can just sort of immediately let's shell it to make a bit sick, let's make it 500 miles, so you can kind of see it, you know, you can kind of shell, that organic format there, whatever that might be. Pretty cool. Final thing I want to show you is the texture tool, which is a really nice new ish addition. And basically, this allows me to select various textures from my resource manager, which is a wonderful element of Vectorworks. And basically just apply them not to the whole object necessarily, let's do it to the whole object. Okay, but you'll see that I can actually apply them to different surfaces. So basically, I can just apply to individual surfaces. With this mode, let's go to another material here, on this material that can see, it's pretty easy for me to achieve something a bit clearer. Can you see how I can just sort of paint the surfaces we're using texturing. Very, very cool. So you know, this sort of thing was quite difficult before, you couldn't really kind of just do that if the object was one solid thing. But now you can apply what they call surface overrides to all of these textures, the surfaces. And this is a very neat feature that not all software has. And you can kind of scale all of that up and, you know, rotate it around as well. There we go, guys. So let me finish off, dare I do the auto hybrid? I think I'll leave that one. Because I've already sort of demoed that the basically with the auto hybrid, that would sometimes it doesn't like it, if it's too complicated, it might take a little while. So I'm a bit reluctant, the basically, that would allow me to cut through the building at certain heights. Of course, the other alternative is using the wonderful clip cube. And with the clip cube, I can also do the same thing in that I can kind of cut through at various heights, if I want to as well. Good. Any questions on that? Guys? What do you think about some of those weird and wonderful 3d modeling capabilities? They're quite fun. I mean, you know, I know I've just modeled something crazy weird. But you know, this is where your imagination takes you when you're trying to present. And I would recommend giving it a go because you can't actually come up with some of these amazing conceptual ideas that you see in DC and and all the magazines all the time. I'm always thinking, Oh, how can I model that in Vectorworks? You know, it's a good way to go. It's definitely fun. Okay, brilliant. So I'm gonna go back to my presentation. How are we doing, Ryan? Okay, so far?
Yeah, we're great. We're doing well. Good. And
I may have to skip out a couple of things. I'll ask you, if you want to have a look at warm closure styles, you may not want to let me show you very briefly what this one was about. It was something that Vectorworks introduced fairly recently, where you can have different closure on your walls. So you can have things like splayed reveals angled reveals, you can see here I've got some radius reveals as well. And what's nice about that is not only does it work really well in planned, you know and give you a nice level of detailing where I'm returning my plaster board and returning my external cladding. That wasn't easy to do before, but it is quite straightforward. Now, what's quite nice is as well, you can right click. And basically, if you just don't want the wall closure to apply, you can just turn it off. Okay, so that one just won't have the wall closure. So you've got wheel flexibility, it used to be all or nothing isn't. And now within a wall, when you do the wall closure, you actually have numerous styles, I've only got the one set up. What it means is you can have multiple styles set up per wall. So imagine one with displayed reveal one with a rounded corner and one with no, no kind of, you know, just a maybe a single sided splayed reveal. So you've got complete flexibility over your reveals and what you do both in plan and 3d. And what's nice is you'll notice that it actually kind of works nicely on the inside as well see how the plasterboard returns on the inside. So you don't get any of that sort of seeing the constructions.
And it's easy for you for you to just export these into other projects and just build up a kind of standardized CAD library. I know that that actually you have your own, you have a lot of kind of already standardized CAD libraries or they come with Vectorworks or they things that you need to purchase separately or Yeah,
so thank you, Ron. That's a very good leading question. I appreciate it. So if I pop up my wonderful resource manager, you'll notice I'm a big fan of favorites and I've developed lots of libraries. I think I've got about 50 Now, I think I sell at least 25 of these on the websites. so check him out. So I've got kind of libraries of things like details, construction details, but the main stuff is, is like people packs, vehicles, trees, you know, it's kind of everything. Any architect needs to do the job on a daily basis. You know, you always need hatches, construction hatches and walls. So if I go into walls, I can right click and open my file. And this for me is, you know, this is how I do my walls, I like to have visual libraries where I can go and select the wall type, copy them, and bring them into the file, what I encourage practices to do is set up that own wall types per project, and you can then reference those into multiple projects. So if the wall type changes, it can update potentially, you know, 10 different documents very easily by having a centralized project library. What's really cool about these walls is, you know, there's sort of the simple level of detail, the detail level of detail, you know, they come with a few materials, but all of this can be swapped out. And then at the end of the day, if you want to all of the styles can just be edited, quite flexibly just adding more components, and adjusting things like the thicknesses as well. You can actually build in more than that you can even build in things like materials, and things like you values and other quantities as well. And this is something that I train people how to do if required. But yeah, if you want to do the wall closure, you go to this little wall closure inserts here, can you see and this is how you can start to do things like displays. So you can basically just do, let's say 200 mil, you can see it starts to splay. This is just a preview, rather than a sort of accurate representation. And as I say, I can now create a new wall closure set if I want to. So this is very powerful. It means that you can be really flexible with the way that windows and doors sit in, in walls. And I've not seen other software do this as elegantly as that to its does. And I'm just amazed that not everybody knows, you know, we're uses this feature. So it's pretty cool.
And that's been something that's interested me before, when I've spoken to people who have been using Vectorworks for a long period of time they've been using it solely for two dimensional drawings. And then they're still drafting out details like this, rather than having them kind of automated inside of a workflow, CAD library. Yes, which is just massively inefficient. And the fact now that you can do it, and it's all 3d, as well, and that you can build these libraries out yourself. It's just enormous time saving.
Absolutely. Yeah, no, definitely. I'll just show you very briefly. I know we're short of time. But let me see if I've got it. I think I've got it on my, my spare layer. I think I had a little link to it here. Yeah, basically, now let me go. Let me go back. So I've got a really nice little file, I'll just open up briefly just to show you the flexibility of door circle my project files, here, we There we go. Yeah, so I kind of made libraries of lots of things, Ryan, I'm a big fan of this. And then I can just reuse them to learn this is so cool. And back to it's now in fact, she can basically just dynamically resize your openings in 3d, you know, or in front view, or whatever you want to do. Okay, so it's really easy to do, you can then go down to your objective info and say, like, I'll make that five panels or six panels or just adjust. So all of it, it's very interactive. And there's a lot more sort of what I called dynamic control than they used to be. So this makes life much easier for things like doors and windows, you know, I've got a window here that I can just dynamically squish it in. Previously, with Vectorworks, you used to have to go into dialogues and do a lot of numbers here and there and everywhere. But now, I think a lot of it is upfront, sort of more straightforward. My dialogues right over there. So you know, previously, I would have had to go in and sort of put the width in here four meters, and then it respond, now I can just drag it. And it resizes pretty cool Lagos you think? I think it's, it's you can't deny that it's user friendly. It just is. I mean, it's just as simple as it can be. So this is one thing that I do find with Vectorworks people coming from other software. I won't name names, but you know, the other two BIM software's we've talked about, often say that it's easier. And I mean, personally, I agree. Definitely for sure. Yeah, so very important to build up a good library of walls, windows and doors, all those basics, of course, people trees, cars and hatches, but all the BIM stuff that's really important and then you can basically just copy and paste it into your next design file on your way. So that's really cool. So a big fan of libraries. Good to shut that one down as well.
Okay, I guess, like I said, there's a wider conversation here in about how offices develop their own CAD libraries and, and standards and how they should kind of curate those.
Yes, indeed, I spend a lot of time when I'm teaching and training, I'm very generous with sharing my libraries. But the most important thing is I share them and explain to people how they then develop them and expand upon them and make them tailored towards you know, North America or Canada or Vancouver, obviously, English, all types will be different, but the concept and principles will be the same. So you just need to kind of build those up in a centralized library, you can then take them from the centralized library to a project specific library. And that means that you then have the benefit of referencing resources into multiple design files. So if the wall type changes, you change it in the master file, and then it'll change in 20 different files, as you open it without doing anything, you know, as opposed to going through 20 files and changing the wall type 20 times. So really important to be efficient. Good. Any questions like carry on? I kind of had
a question about referencing of the wall, like, do you actually do it? How do you reference a wall? So like, because we have kind of same thing going on, like creating a library, but I don't haven't heard about referencing a wall. Up.
Here, I'm in another project was going to show you basically all I do, I go into my libraries, I select my wall, I use my filter and go down to all stars. Select the wall I need. And rather than dragging and dropping, or right click and importing, I click reference. Okay. And then when I reference, it basically brings it in as a reference file, but only brings that resource in. Okay, so where are they in last? I won't reference that particular one. Let's see if I can choose something that isn't in there. Choose one that definitely isn't in there. Do you want to replace current format. I don't know whether already. But what happened is it will then appear in italics. So the only difference is you'd see the text in italics. And when you hover over it will say referenced resource. So then if the centralized wall type updates, it will update this file and any other files required. There. It's pretty cool. It's a good little workflow. Definitely. Thanks.
I wasn't aware of this one. Thanks. No worries.
Good. I just want to show you this little project briefly. It's another little project I'm quite pleased with this little project was a little house for an elderly client who wanted to sort of downsize and retire, essentially a bungalow single storey building in the UK, we call that. But I was quite pleased with, you know, contemporary design and sort of relatively interesting sort of use of materials. And using my saved views, you can see that it's quite easy for me to kind of navigate around and get lots of different views, including, you know, inside. And sort of, you know, I think this sort of gives the client quite nice experience and confidence when they're sort of, especially older clients who just didn't understand 2d drawings, I'm not being funny, but they just didn't get the drawings. Now they were in their 80s. So they were really impressed by having a walk around in 3d. So what I really wanted to show you was as well as that I've got all of my sheets in the one file. So Vectorworks is extremely efficient at this, all the traditional drawings, as well as, you know, some really nice rendered sight sections. First one thing I think is really important is that the words is brilliant, not just for the architecture, because there's Vectorworks landmark, you know, we have all the site capabilities for site modeling and really nice lamp landscape and planting. You know, personally, I use the Design Suite, which features architect landmark and spotlights as well. That's really cool. But yeah, even without landmark, you can do some really nice sort of contextual site stuff as well. Okay, the real reason I want to show this file though, is something a little bit more technical on the BIM side was something called Graphic legends. Now, I think this is a bit of a killer feature for 3d workflow if you're not convinced already by the flashy sort of graphics and the renderings. Let me show you this. Right. So here is a graphic legend at my window shedule. Let me just show you how I create that from scratch, so I'm going to delete it. So all I would do is go into my dimsum notes. Select the graphic legend to go to the top. Choose from a library of graphic legend that does give you but also I've tweaked and modified and, you know, made my own. I've got a library of these. So you can see some of the sort of standard ones here. I think it was, which one was it was that one. So I just double click to activate that one. And all I do is basically draw across my sheet. And you'll notice down here Vectorworks is doing some operations. And it's generating a graphic Legend of all the windows in this file. Now, how much time have you ever spent doing manual 2d drafting of doors and window schedules? You know, this is boring days of boring work, isn't it? And if something changes, you got to redo it, or, I mean, I personally hate the boring stuff in architecture, I think there's plenty of that. You know, I don't know who says I love it. But we all do it. I mean, we've all done it. But for me, this kind of killer feature of having a window shedule is particularly nice. And you'll notice that it's got all the dimensions. And after, if I update this on the drawing, these will just immediately update dynamically as well. And they're very, very cool features. So I would definitely encourage you, if you're not working in 3d to be working in 3d. Even if you don't like all the flashy twin motion and the rendering stuff, you probably want to do it just for the documentation, benefits of saving time, and being fully coordinated and not making errors. You know? So yeah, pretty cool. It's a pretty sophisticated tool, I'm not gonna really go into how it works. But basically, you can kind of, you know, set this up, really kind of define what it is you want to search in your document, you can pretty much shedule anything. So anything that you've used in Vectorworks, even things like furniture schedules, pretty cool. What do you think, guys, I think that's a really neat feature of why you should work in 3d alone. Even if you don't go for the other stuff.
That schedule is every single instance where you can read, you can redefine it so that types of windows are grouped. And yes,
you can do it by layer by class, you can do it by style. By type, there's so many different factors. So you can filter out exactly what you want by using multiple options. You can actually filter out by viewport, if you really want to create a viewport, turn on just certain things, and then filter by a pupil and then it will only shedule what's in that viewport visible. So lots of flexibility. I was very impressed. This is like the second iteration of these came in in 2023. They've been improved quite a bit in terms of user friendliness and 2024. And yeah, I found them to be a real benefit for sure. So if you're not using them, get them on the list of something to use. I would say
I've got a number of questions there from Rob, go for it.
All right. Question one, what's the learning curve? Like? Because this is like, super dense, it
reminds me of looking at Revit interface. It's like, ah, yeah, I think the learning curve for Vectorworks is good. Actually, I think that all 3d and BIM software is complex these days. There's no getting over that. But I think it's it's, and I know that a lot of clients have told me the same, it's the easiest to learn in terms of the approach of 2d to 3d, and then BIM. Personally, I agree with that, you know, other people might disagree, but I've heard of people going on, you know, five days of intensive rabbit training, blowing the brains out. It's quite hard work. So I'm not putting any other software down, but I think we'll get to it. So you can kind of move along gently from 2d to 3d to BIM workflow. So I think, I think, yes, everything has a steep learning curve to get to the ultimate. There's so much stuff to learn, but I think it's achievable. Definitely. Okay. To
how does it compare price wise to the other big,
the other beam software? Well, I wouldn't talk about that i All I'll say is I know that works is the most cost effective compared to ARCHICAD and Revit. I won't go into specific prices. Anyone in the UK come and talk to me, of course, I'm a reseller, and you know, but the good thing with Vectorworks is, you now have a subscription model, which is fairly low entry cost I'd say for a few months and if you didn't get on with it, you could move away but you know, you can get a yearly subscription as well. But yeah, it's definitely the lowest cost compared to ARCHICAD and Revit. By a long way, hardware requirement. You can have it running on not a very powerful Mac if you don't need you know, you can run it on Mac or Windows which is really nice across Revit you need a bit of a supercomputer properly. So And lastly, how does it handle IFC format? Good. Yeah, it's it's really good that too. It's IFC. Basically, they've probably pioneered it more so than Autodesk are, in my view, because Autodesk, quite like the idea of a fairly closed system of everyone using Autodesk Revit. But that means I've had to be very open and really push the IFC. They're all of it is really kind of built in input IFC, like either a really wide range of input file formats in Vectorworks, or the DWG s, IFC, Revit, file, even import native Revit. These days, all the image file formats. And then loads of 3d file formats, including SketchUp come in really well, you know, going the other way, there's even more, even more file formats that you can export as well. So I've never found that I was stuck not being able to get something in or out of Vectorworks in some way or another. It's pretty good for that. Anyway.
Alright, question that from Chris as well. Chris, Jonah on social media?
Sure. Typically, I was wondering how Vectorworks was more sort of more ideational drawings, rather than, like photorealistic I can even share a screen. It's a drawing that I had one of my employees did in 2011. And every one I tried to get to do a similar drawing now gives me this hyper realistic drawing, and we're looking at a bush, you know, in the background, rather than understanding the concept. And oh, sorry, it's not letting me share my screen. But I don't know if you have any examples of more like something that replicates say a pencil sketch or something like that. Oh,
I see. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, let me see if I can demo.
If you drop the image into the into the chat, the chat
and I'll open up. That's good. Oh, let me let me open. Let me open just quick project here. And we're almost on to the final sort of few projects I wanted to talk about. Okay, so yeah, this, this is a another nice little project I was privileged to work on for an eco home. And it was a decent sized sort of single family residence, actually pretty big house, it ended up in the end. Okay, and you'll see why I'm showing you this, because in Vectorworks, I've got some really nice renderings. And I've got some nice vertical saved views. And I can kind of jump around, tell the story to the client of what their building is like. And that really helps sell it to the client as well as to the planners. And if I go on to my sheets, just like that, animate, I've also got these, you know, really nice sort of different types of drawings. So, you know, we've got the kind of those are viewports turned off, I've got this sort of rendered floor plan, which I think is quite sort of conceptual. And a rendered, plan here, there is a nice little sketch filter that you can turn on, if you want to. And it's not quite the same as SketchUp in that sense. But if you go to foreground rendering, hidden line, you can also introduce a whole bunch of sort of sketch renderings in here. So yeah, it does have this little wiggly wobbliness that you can create, create. And that's something that I'm quite keen myself to do at the early stages of designing, I don't like show final renders until I'm ready for them. And I will often show quite sort of, you know, sketchy stuff as well. Now, when do it right now, because it takes a few minutes to render. I don't want to have to wait for that. But basically, yes, I think you can create a wide range of different styles using the Vectorworks rendering. We've also got things like site sections, which are quite nice as well. And now with that new depth of field, which haven't yet tried on these that could really help Ryan in terms of fading out those trees in the background. I really like drawings like this kind of kind of exploded sort of isometric sort of graphics. These are cool, you know, these are easy to achieve just using viewports. Basically splitting the model apart in its natural way. You've built it in different layers. And just representing those. Also love this tool here. Now this is this is a notes tool. And the way this works is basically you go into the call out kind of drag off a note, tap into a database, potentially because I've got like a database of notes here. That isn't actually my database, but doesn't matter. And you know, I add a note onto the drawing. And then basically, if I do want to I can do places keynote, so it actually adds the note to my keynotes as opposed to on the drawing itself. So a great little tool. The keynotes are worth checking out that one. That's a big time saver. Good. So the reason I was showing you this is
Chris has put that image in the chat box there.
Let me see if I can find it. In the chat. Yeah, okay. I'm just going to open up. That's nice. This looks like so how was this created? You know what software we
we put it in was basically in SketchUp. And then this is this is going back a number of years it was SketchUp and then taken into a rendering software. And I think these are two images superimposed one with a pencil setting and SketchUp. The other with a more realistic rendering. And the whole point of the drawing was just to focus on the interior and nothing else. It's an ideational kind of drawing. And that's what I'm actually having trouble with the most in my office right now in terms of output, more so than action drawings.
Let me let me close this file down. Because I've got some, I'm not going to go into this right now, obviously, but we can, we can have a look at this if we did a bit of training together. But I think depending on what you want to achieve, let's open this file, something called viewport styles, which is a brand new feature that was introduced. Okay. So here we are in the building model, the previous bar was the site file where I'd referenced the model in the building model. And so I quite like keeping my building model and my site separate. So that then I can, you know, just kind of represent plans in a different way. You can see also one really nice aspect is this level of detail. So here, I've just got this sort of, you know, blacked out, push a type effect, here, I've got the detail. And here I've got the render floor plan again. So got these renovations. So what you can do, if you like the look of this style as an office, I'm not saying you do, but if you do, you can create something called a new viewport style. So when I create a new viewport style, basically, I can call this elevation. Typed really badly. Okay, but basically, what this means is, I can set up all the aspects of the viewport in terms of the visibility's of layers and classes, maybe, maybe scale, as well as the rendering style. The only thing that I might want to change, though, of course, is the actual view itself. Alright, so I'm going to turn off the view itself. But everything else, I'll keep the same, I might want to change the class visibility's as well, but that's okay. So basically, what that means is, I can use this viewport, if I drag it off, and just change the view to a different view, we just go to a different view, that's the back view, you'll notice that I can essentially use the same rendering style, or I could click Replace, and replace it with a different viewport style. So effectively, it's actually do give you quite a few different viewport styles. But these are just examples of the kinds of things that you can do. What it means is, what I'm trying to say is if you can develop a style north in high style that you like, then it's easy for everyone in the team to share that style, because it's just a resource that you can drag and drop in to your document and apply to a viewport like a Plan A section or elevation. So this is a bit of a revolutionary new feature. And it means that you can basically save a lot of time, you know, I don't know what these are going to look like. So I'm not going to risk it. But if I've created them, I will know what they look like. And I'll be happy to use them. So it makes sense. So, in fact, who is having different styles, Chris could be the answer to that you might not get 100% there, you know, there might be one extra little tickler in Photoshop. But if you can get the 95% there. I think that's pretty damn good. So those are the kinds of things that you would want to use the viewport styles for, you'd play around until you refined it and you cracked it to a point that you're happy. And then you've got it as an office resource that anybody can drag in. You know, you don't know how you don't need to know how to create the resource or the style of rendering. You just get one of the office juniors to spend half an hour a couple of hours refining it. And then you've got it. So yeah, viewport styles. Really, really cool feature. Definitely. Okay, we go back. So that was the viewport styles. Alright, so now coming on to the final couple of things kinda we're gonna run short of time. I just wanted to show you two things. In fact, I might save this one right to the end. And this is my if it's going to crash it will crash on this okay, which is the live and escape demo. So let me close this file down. And as we were just on that project, is this your house Tron fun? No, no, I wish I wish Ryan That'd be nice. This was done with BBA architects
to remember. Oh, right. Yes.
Really nice firm in Chicago. So that was that was a project working with Edie at a BBA, who's not here today. But Hi, Ed, if you're watching some time, and he doesn't mind, he said, I could check this project before. So if I click on to this, so here's the Eco home here, basically, I just want to click onto this. And I just wanted to talk about, like, where twin motion comes in for a minute. Okay, so you've seen the kind of rendering that I'm getting out of Vectorworks, all day long, you know, really quite good, in my view for design and BIM software. But twin motion just takes it to another level, you know, the rendering is better, you've got animated birds and trees moving in the wind, you could see if you're a bit closer, you know, really nice lighting. And just this ability to have unbelievable amounts of landscape, and trees and hedges and things that you couldn't dream of, in your CAD software. Okay, so you know, the amounts of blades of grass back to it's just no cut off, I could handle that. So this is where real time software comes in, you know, you take the model that you've made as a BIM model for your planning and design and documentation, take it into emotional landscape, and then add the icing on the cake, you know, the cat, to personalize it, the, the movement of the lighting and the shadows during the day. And I really love doing this. It's the fun bit, it's really fun. But, you know, I really kind of think this encapsulates the ability to step up to another level of rendering, don't you think? So, you know, to take that sort of design. And within real time rendering software, please don't take long to create that sort of time, they used to that 72 hours for that one image, Ryan. Now, I can do this in in minutes, while using my Mac or Windows system. So it's pretty cool.
And you navigate in real time. So you have the model at this level of graphics, and just kind of,
yeah, you pretty much can actually, I would say these are 4k, you can pretty much get about 90% to this level of quality in real time, you got to have a good machine, okay, it's no good having an old machine, it's got to be really good apple silicon or Windows machine. Windows does have a bit of an advantage in that has path tracing, but even on the Mac, now we've got lumen, which is a real time ray tracing solution, which is pretty cool. So yeah, they're definitely fun to do, I'm not going to render out a twin motion live in front of you. In fact, I normally use my Windows PC, because my Mac laptop you can imagine is not as powerful as the Windows PC with a big graphics card. So you know, I really, I really, really enjoy cross platform work workflow. But let me come on to my final thing, then, which is my escape demo. And I will attempt to show you how this works. By opening up this wonderful BBA project from our disciplines, click on this kitchen. Alright, so to begin with, let this is a bit of a different flavor. Really, it's just showing you a little isolated model of a really kind of well, beautifully designed space, I think. And the way this was designed, was basically with lots of cabinetry and you know, really kind of all night sort of refinements here. You can see I've got these nice views, I think, again, you know, the lighting looked kinda nice, just from Vectorworks. Right, but what I'm going to attempt today is showing you how we can take it to the next level within Skype. So anyone ready for this? We'll go to N scape. And within Skype, it now sits on the Mac, as well as Windows, which is awesome. You can plug it into your workspace simply by going up to third party and adding it to your workspace. Once you've downloaded the installer, you can get a trial for this. And basically look, watch this. Here we go. I'm going to click N scape and click a single button and launch right over here. on my other screen and scope is now loading in. Give it a second to load the model who's used and scope before the group. Anybody? Yes. Oh, Todd, what do you think Todd? Do you like it? I think so not. So, yeah, I love it. It's It's amazing. You know, here I am already an endoscope. Now again, I'm on my Mac, I'm zooming you know, lots of data flowing around. So this isn't the best it can be I can turn up the notch again to high level quality but I think you will see that it's pretty good. I can navigate around in real time. I can spin the camera a little bit. I can use my UK and iKey to change that sun coming into the Loading is pretty nice, doesn't it? What's really cool is I can slide that across to bear with me. It's gonna slide Vectorworks across as well. If I, if I do that, yeah, that was that a good way, if that will. Oops, how hopefully dock it halfway, there we go. So this is what I have to do when I'm doing my YouTube because I can only share one, one screen. Okay, so let me do that little trick where I hide those palettes to say we've got two full screens, okay? Now watch this, if I click Synchronize, that works and landscape are now synchronized in terms of the view. So what I can do is using my walkthrough tool in Vectorworks. On the other screen, I can walk around in landscape now if I've got a better computer, it will look even better and a bit smoother. And you know, but I think that's still pretty good. And I can have that on my other big screen. As I'm working. I think this is the benefit of N scape, this real time navigation. If I go to my different view, I can double click into that works on the view. And that will navigate across into Inscape. I really like that I think that's a really cool feature. And then vice versa. If I let's pop this into full screen mode, if I want to pop out my view panel, if there was a new view that I wanted to create, let's say I just come across a bit here and look at that kind of breakfast bar. Yep, that's nice. I can click CREATE VIEW. And what this allows me to do is basically, as well as changing the lighting live, when I'm ready, I can click What's it telling me here, synchronize views. Okay, I need Vectorworks in a different form perspective. But basically, if I click create that will go back to that to it. So we've got this two way dialogue between my cutoff where and my rendering software, which is quite nice. So the final thing then, is let's do a render, when this is going to push it. So I'm going to go up to my settings. And as well as the I like the white card renders, sometimes these are quite nice, where you just sort of do that conceptual, Chris, sort of white cardi type render. And again, you've got the option to maybe have some sort of outlining stuff. So that's quite conceptual, isn't it? That's not quite the same as you showed me. But similar. Let's go back to fully rendered with outlines. And one thing I really like within the scope that you can't do with twin motion, so there are differences. I like both, I really like both, and people always ask me, which is better. And one is better for some things, and the other is better for another in a way you need both tools in the armory. Basically, if I change that to a PNG, you'll notice that I can apply alpha channels. And I can also export all these different depth channels and things as well. So while we're doing some questions, I thought it'd be kind of fun to render that image out. And let it go. So that's the video oh, it has a video editor now, which it didn't used to before. It's kind of a that this is render out. And I just need to choose a default folder, we just choose that default folder
here we go and scape kitchen rendering, so I'll do Okay, so that's it, it's going to render out in the background. It's a 4k image and we're doing not just the rendering of the image itself but all the depth channels so I can then take it into Photoshop and using the things like the the ID of the material just do all this final sort of CGI tweaking you know, in a bigger office your your rendering experts will know what we're talking about here. So it makes it much easier to do post adjustment. So looks pretty cool. So I think that's just kind of rendering away I'm just gonna move that to the other screen guys well while it's over there, I mean I could potentially carry on working
if I open up my finder I think I'm gonna let it I'm think I'm just gonna let it carry on Ryan. See if I can show you show you in a minute. So far away with some some questions. It's nearly done. It's on 56%
Mahmoud
for escape. Once To transfer it over, do you have to edit the materials? Or like the materials from Vectorworks? Carry pretty well?
Yeah, that's a good question. So I quite like taking the materials as far as I can in Vectorworks, which is a reasonably decent way, you know, because I quite like applying them in backwards and seeing them in my preview of updates, but you're never gonna get all the bump and the refinement and sort of diffusion, all the refining characteristics of high end CGI in Vectorworks, okay, what you can do is you can replace materials, you can also. So that's done now, actually, you can also place objects as well. Hopefully, it's going to come back alive. I told you, if it was going to crash this, this would be the time. So let's get my pallets up, bring those back. Don't think it's coming back is it may have suffered that fatal crash I was talking about is a bit too much we'll do the zooming. But basically, yes, you can add things like props, you know, glasses of wine wine bottles, and you can edit the materials as well to is pretty cool.
How, how would you suggest for businesses to be made? Like what what are the things they need to be doing when they're thinking about moving from 2d into, say, the 3d capabilities of Vectorworks because again, this is the thing that I see a lot with, with practices, whether they're using Vectorworks, or they're using any other softwares, or they're often just stuck in, like the one capability that they know, that piece of software to do. And what's interesting about Vectorworks is that you can do an enormous amount of work and never have to leave Vectorworks. And we're talking about producing videos, films, short snippets, presentations, individual graphics. I mean, it's quite it's, it's quite a and BIM software and BIM capabilities as well. Well, how would you suggest businesses to start kind of exploring the more capabilities of the software,
I would suggest, so I was just going to open up those final renders, if I if I'm able to get them on that screen, I would suggest, look, obviously, your time is your time, and people are very busy. So you've got to kind of invest that time wisely. Training is obviously designed to invest that time wisely, and shortcut months and months of watching videos here. They're never alone. I make a lot of videos. Yeah, please watch, please watch as many as you can. But you know, you're getting snippets from one or the other. But what you won't get from a 10 minute video is a workflow of hear to hear in two or three hours. You know, that's where the one to one bespoke training, it really pays off. And everybody says everything that kind of makes sense. Do you see what I mean? I think I think honestly, teaching and training and investment in training is in architectural practices. In my view, not that great when I was an architect working for big firms. Any training from anyone, no, never invested in me nothing. I had to do it all myself and time and weekends and evenings. I think things are better now. And people do invest in their staff. But you can't expect them to be twice as productive if you don't invest in them. It's like Tesla. He built a new machine to make his Tesla's and he's twice as productive. And he produces twice as many makes twice as much profit. So yeah, I think it's I think it's about investment.
It's interesting to note when I was at RSA, HP, they would they would they were very heavy on the training for MicroStation. At the time. Yeah. And we would, you'd have to do every employee that started the company would have to do three months of training with the MicroStation. Team. And they had, they had two MicroStation trainers who would come in and was they weren't there. They were both part time. But you know, it was essentially they had one full time MicroStation trainer. Yeah, they would train on individual projects, they would train individual team members, when they first came into the into the business to make sure that all standards were being done exactly the same. Yeah. And whilst it was annoying at the first for the first few months, it just, it was just Yay. I mean, it was it was very, very slick and very, very efficient.
I think that sounds like a rarity. To me, it was everybody knows how much training they've had in different firms as they work their way up to becoming partners. And I think we'll all have different experiences, but my experience was virtually nothing. I mean, you know, people just don't get on with it. Here's a computer, you know, so I had to be self taught. And, you know, I'm pretty good at self teaching. That's what I liked doing. But not everybody is and other people really need mentoring and pushing along. So I think if you're doing 2d, there's a number of things you can do to dramatically improve your 2d workflow, referencing and resource management libraries, Project sharing, using walls, windows and doors, even if you're using 2d much faster than drafting lines and shapes. But then once you start using walls, windows and doors and slabs, you're kind of 80% there for a 3d BIM model. So why not push that extra bit and start getting plans and elevations and sections from your model, which are all coordinated. And I don't think anybody would disagree that it makes sense, you know, they might disagree, it's too hard, or they just can't do it, or the learning curves too high. But ultimately, all the BIM software, Revit, ArchiCAD, and Vectorworks can do this stuff. So your choice of tool is your choice of tool. But, you know, if you are using a tool, don't jump ship to another tool that's even harder to learn make the most of the one you have, before you jumped ship, you know, you'd have to have a good reason for not using Vectorworks, then if you haven't explored 3d and BIM, that BIM in Vectorworks, then I would say that's the next natural step from drafting. Very enjoyable as well. It really is enjoyable. Here, by the way, it's the rendering that we did in Inscape. So why do you think it looks cool?
And even better than 72 hours? Yeah, not
bad. And you know, you've also got these other sort of channels like the ID and the Material ID as well, which is cool, because that means that you can then tweak the shadows, tweak, reflections, all that sort of stuff. Beautiful, beautiful light. Yes, very nice, very nice lighting. You know, people always ask me for a summary of what's better and escape between motion. I'm not gonna go into that today. But I really like both and you should definitely use both they both have massive advantages for certain workflows. Maybe that's a whole nother whole nother webinar and, you know, real time render, there's another new block or a kid on the block D five render, which is also pretty amazing. So there are, you know, a few choices now there's three, but only one on the Mac, two in motion are no two and scope. But endoscope isn't completely fully featured yet, like twin motion is but it's coming. It's getting there. I think it will get there. So yeah, it's good to see it opening up. Brilliant. Pushing the 3d rendering as well. But you know, it's just not doesn't need to be real time and you don't need people walking around. And you're back to its mobile. Yeah, absolutely.
Wonderful. And that's a wrap. And one more thing. If you haven't already, please do head on over to iTunes or Spotify. And leave us a review. We'd love to read your name out here on the show. And we'd love to get your feedback. And we'd love to hear what it is you'd like to see more of and what you love about the show already. This episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architectures flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment, and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this, please visit smart practice method.com Or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how we might be able to help you please follow the link in the information. The views expressed on this show by my guests do not represent those of the host and I make no representation, promise guarantee, pledge warranty, contract, bond or commitment except to help you the unstoppable
