Dan Monaghan, VP of Marketing, explains that his aim for Vectorworks is to have the architect, the principal end user of Vectorworks, be aware of the context of their designs, and how they relate to the smaller objects that they design, like the furniture, as well as to larger objects, such as the setting in which the building is situated, including neighboring buildings.
Monaghan also hopes to draw upon the advantages of achieving some cohesiveness with Nemetschek’s other divisions (Vectorworks is part of the Nemetschek Group, a holding company that includes products familiar to architects: Allplan, ArchiCAD, SCIA and the most recently acquired Bluebeam. This seems to be more of an overarching goal, a wish for the future. But it’s hard to get away from years of competing. In our discussion, ArchiCAD is mentioned as competition as often as is Autodesk’s Revit.
Methods of realizing the bigger world—everything around a building that an architect is being commissioned to create, like the neighborhood or the street—involve using two key technologies that are included in Vectorworks.
One is Point Cloud, which is aptly demonstrated by Luc Lefevre, senior architect product specialist at Vectorworks, in the photo above.
Photogrammetry, the ability to create 3D models based on multiple photographs, is also being studied in Vectorworks labs.
Vectorworks can give some geometrical assistance to those modeling objects using point clouds from 3D scans in an experimental version still in the Vectorworks labs, which will be released to Vectorworks users at an undisclosed date.
Vectorworks brings in a point cloud of a laser scan, which appears as a 3D photograph if the point cloud has captured the color information of each point it has scanned.
Vectorworks will export an interactive 3D model from a 3D model it has created. The model can be viewed on a tablet or smartphone. If the model is of a building, you can move around in it. It falls short of being an immersive experience on a flat screen, however.