Sometimes, things are zeitgeisty and come around in waves. This month, it seems the wind is blowing in/from Vectorwork’s direction.
We have no immediate plans to release a VW connector, but a combination of requests, user interviews, and some lovely conversations with the VW team themselves begs the question: How much need is there?
When you ask us for connectivity for your 3D data wherever it is produced, and we don’t yet fully support it, we always ask you a question in return:
What pains you most about being a Vectorworks user?
What would you like to achieve if Speckle connectivity existed?
The answer should usually be more nuanced than opening VW files in Rhino/Revit/PowerBI, but it could be. Please let us know below.
The problem is always collaboration with other Software Users.
Usually we only have IFC.
Which works across all Software but usually not lossless and
and imported IFC files are unfortunately tedious to use if you
want to edit these.
So, although under one a single roof, there is no exchange between
VW and Archicad
(I have Archicad colleagues, friends and clients)
For Revit there is a poor RVT/RFA import, not realistically usable.
And there is a very good DWG import into VW but unfortunately
the DWG export does not export Materials.
Although VW has great exporters and even Exchange for some
3D Apps or Renderers like C4D, FBX, Datasmith, …
There is no realistic way to get any 3D Apps data back into VW.
(Like sketching models in Blender and final planning in VW or such things)
From the VW Forums I also see a demand for VW to Sketchup/Rhino/Archicad/Revit
exchange. Where I think that missing exchange/collaboration with Revit
is the most serious limitation.
If I could have a Speckle VW Connector,
first I finally would have two Apps with Speckle support to test Speckle.
Blender and VW here. (Bricscad also waiting for a connector)
My wished usage for Speckle in general would be primarily exchange
between VW and Bricscad and both with Blender.
With Clients that would be mainly Revit to VW.
Well, it is still that I doubt that those third parties would necessarily use
or offer a Speckle Project for collaboration. More likely just send a RVT.
But now that Speckle gets more popular …
I have been using Rhino for a long time, but now I’m a Vectorworks user. I saw some videos about Rhino and Revit exchange passing through Speckle, and this is exactly what I would love to achieve with Speckle. Vectorworks has some quality features but also a lot of weaknesses, one of them being its lack of interest in development with Rhino.Inside or other software, except for rendering. With BIM, collaboration can be really difficult depending on the software you are using, which is not the main goal of BIM. I see Speckle as a link between all these software, allowing us to have better collaborative workflows
We use Vectorworks for BIM and for 2d documentation. I like Vectorworks very much because it’s easy to use and still realy flexibel. New users in our company are able to pick it up fast. Data-management and the way to manage libraries of hybrid 2d and 3d objects is also very pleasant.
For some tasks, mainly visualization and rendering we use Blender. Right now, the workflow is to export with FBX-exporter and import-it to Blender. The workflow is only one way, so at some point, changes need to be made on both models .blend and .vwx. When important changes happen, a new export as FBX is needed and a lot of cleaning work has to be redone in Blender.
We also work with Revizto. Revizto has a plug-in for Vectoworks. Right now, we are getting in touch with Autodesk for BIM-collaboration in Navisworks, Autodesk Docs and BIM-Collaborate.
At some point, the lack of compatibility could become a real problem for our use of Vectorworks.
I hope my description is kind of understandable.
Thanks for keeping up.
To exchange also 2D objects with Rhino. it would be also great to remap VW classes to Rhino layers with all its properties.
VW has a cool Terrain generation tool. It would be great to be able to transfer ithe generated Terrain to clean geometry in Rhino.
VW 2024 has a live sync functionality with Excel. I didn’t use it yet but that’s something worth to mention. a lot of Architects in Switzerland use VW and ArchiCad. so exchange between both would also be great. Thanks Speckle
