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This past Thursday, Sean Flaherty, CEO of Nemetschek North America, the makers of Vectorworks, visited a customer of ours to learn how interiorcad is used in a typical production workflow. Sean was staying in Essen to visit the DEUBAU building fair and took the opportunity to see Droste Innenausbau, a medium sized interior design and production company in Gelsenkirchen, some 22 km away from the fair. Together with him, Carlos Lüthy, CEO of Computerworks Germany, Andreas Thierer, also an employee at Computerworks and Stephan Mönninghoff, CEO of extragroup were given a „guided tour" through what makes up a typical fileset of rendered presentations, production drawings, cutting lists and, finally, CNC code generation.

„It was interesting to see how a Vectorworks product is used in fields other than architectural planning or design." Says Sean Flaherty. „While rendered images are also used by our architect customers, the end result is much different - not a printed plan but a set of boards, complete with all drillings, routings and edgebanding".

Droste owns 4 copies of Vectorworks interiorcad including VectorWOP, our CAM interface, and is a recent switcher from another CAD package. Sven Vogler, technician at Droste states that „switching to Vectorworks interiorcad gave us much greater flexibility when designing in 3D. Making last-minute changes to a design or set of production drawings used to be tedious when working in 2D. Thanks to sophisticated viewports and live sections, changing details in a design does not mean a major overhaul of the complete drawing now."

After a lively discussion over some Vectorworks files, Henner Droste, owner of Droste Innenausbau, took everyone down to the large workshop, where a horizontal beam saw, fully automated edgebanding machine and large IMA CNC router make for fast and first class production conditions.

Thanks to all who participated, first and foremost, Henner Droste who gave some interesting insight into his production facilities.

More news on Vectorworks can be found at Planet Vectorworks.

Make sure to check this blog by Gytis Simaitis, a long-time Vectorworks interiorcad user from NYC. He's off to a great start presenting some detailed shop-drawings.

If you still wonder if VectorWorks is the way to go, check out this great review for VectorWorks Architect.

Did we mention that VectorWorks Architect & interiorcad make a great combo :-)

Jonathan Pickup is shipping the interiorCAD 3.5 manual.

If you are using interiorCAD to build kitchen cabinetry or if you want to freshen up your interiorCAD skills, make sure to check it out.

Jonathan Pickup calls interiorCAD 3.5 a big leap forward (and we haven't bribed him into saying so :-)

If you are looking for interiorCAD training, Jonathan offers on-line training for both VectorWorks and interiorCAD.

interiorCAD 3.5 beta-testing is about to start. Anybody interested should contact us at interiorcad@extragroup.de (Note: You will need to run VW 12.5 on either MacOS or Windows to beta-test interiorCAD 3.5).

interiorCAD 3.5 is not only a mere compatibility update with VectorWorks 12.5, it features an impressive array of new features, too:

• Unit plug-in objects (instead of symbols) - double-clickable, 3D-reshapable und editable via the object-info palette - Including tools for insertion in both 2D & 3D views
• New, substantially improved functional hardware selection dialogs
• Visualization of material used in every dialog
• Windows XP look & feel of all dialogs
• Bifold doors
• New lists outputting whole units and work instructions for each part
• More information on unit (# of doors, materials used etc.) in quotes

Of course, it will be a free update for all existing interiorCAD users.

Watch this space for more details on interiorCAD 3.5!

Though VectorWorks and interiorCAD are rock solid working applications, there are circumstances which can cause unexpected crashes. This is due to todays complex software ecosystems.

There are two kinds of crashes: Crashes on unspecified actions and crashes on specified actions. There are no generally known issues, but anyway we'll try to share some knowledge about issues we have seen in the past on certain machines.

• As a CAD system, VectorWorks depends on certain features of your graphics card. If it doesn't work properly, the operating system will quit VectorWorks as soon as it tries to access functionality of the card it doesn't support well. To solve this, try installing the latest driver for your card. For NVidia cards, you will find frequently updated and easy to install drivers on their webpages. Other manufacturers also update their drivers, but NVidia is one of the most conscientious manufacturers when it comes to driver maintenance
• If updating the driver doesn't help, try switching off the hardware acceleration of the graphics card. This can help to work around driver insufficiencies.
• If this doesn't help, check if you are running virus protection or firewalling software. VectorWorks needs to access system calls for communicating with the hardware dongle, for serial number checking and while rendering. Try switching off your system protection software temporarily. If this helps, update it to avoid problems
• Sometimes (though it doesn't appear often) it can happen that your template drawing is damaged. It is obvious that an error in the template drawing gets duplicated each time you create a new document based on it. Try copying all elements of your drawing to a new, blank drawing and work with it. If the crashes disappear, we recommend to create a new template file based on a new, blank drawing. After that delete the damaged template file
• Even though we put huge efforts into quality assurance, we can not guarantee by 110% that interiorCAD doesn't contain bugs. If you have found one which is reproducable, please don't work around it without informing us. Send the file in question to the interiorCAD support team and add a short description like:

  Attached you'll find a zip archive containing a VectorWorks drawing. After opening it, edit the selected unit named "Base unit 500". Go to front design and select the leftmost door. Then try assigning the handle with the ID 099 55 679. Now try pressing the OK button. At this moment VectorWorks crashes.

  Don't trust we will find the error by ourselves. Chances are given that a bug which passed our QA system once can pass it a second time and thus persist in the next version. Thanks for your help!