Issues exporting to Vectorworks 11

[Rick Thompson]

Can anyone give any feedback what to tell this fellow (or me). He is an intern working for the City of Austin gov. These files are from an exported lbk from PM9 using the default dxf translator, and then opened in Vectorworks 11. I don't think it's me, but being on a Mac it's hard to verify.

"When I open the files you sent me, I see nothing but blank design layers and sheet layers.

I see the page and sheet borders, but there's no drawing visible on any layers or any sheets.

Perhaps the problem was zipping them first or sending them as individual sheets - I'm not sure."

just got this

"I called VectorWorks technical support to walk me thru the process and according to them I was importing correctly. I double-checked and triple-checked that all layers were set as "visible." That's one of the things VW tech support mentioned also."

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Rick,

How does Vectorworks handle "paperspace" and DWG? It should adhere to fairly recent specs on DWG so I would use that. I would steer clear of the dxf as it will have less flexibility with the translation process. The frames you're seeing are the viewports exported out (the master layers in PlotMaker speak).

Duplicate the default translator and go through the menu step by step on the copy remnamed to Vectorworks Out.

Plotmaker offers some choices as to how stuff goes out - for example you can put all the views/pmks into model space and the masters as the paperspace - or - squash it all into one.

The translations should be pretty clean as AC has some of the best translators in the business.

[Rick Thompson]

Thanks for the suggestion. He just sent this, so it seems like a scale issue...???


When I open the sheet layer, the drawing is so small on the sheet that I can barely see it. It is a tiny image located in the bottom left corner of the sheet. I only noticed it because I drew a marqee on the sheet and it highlighted the image. When I zoom in 1000% or more, the floor plan finally fills the drawing area on my monitor. So somehow the entire sheet layer drawing is being reduced to a tiny image. I'll see if I can work with it. I'm not sure what the solution is to importing a full size image.

[Anonymous]

Hello from Austin,

What Rich, the other Austin user, has been experiencing is the same I am with AutoCAD 2005. I just zoom extents out of habit. The drawing does only open in the paperspace window with no reference to it in model space. Once I cut and paste it into the drawing window, it is only a block. I have to explode the block to manipulate it but doing so explodes the entire drawing into about a billion 1/8" lines.

This doesn't serve the purpose intended. I would rather open a dwg drawing and work from that format than the dxf format.

Does this program have the capability of saving or exporting to dwg formats?

I can read rich's drawings from vectorworks in my autocad. I should think I could do the same for ArchiCAD.

Thanks for the input.

James Gobel