Say Hello to #Vectorworks2021

The day is here — #Vectorworks2021 is now available! 

If you’ve been following our recent posts, you’re probably familiar with the focus of this release — simplicity to design the complex. It’s about bringing you better performance, upgraded BIM features, improvements to most-used tools, and a simplified user interface.

“Vectorworks 2021 is the continuation of our commitment to quality and performance and is something that will further drive our mission to provide best-in-class design and BIM tools to AEC, landscape, and entertainment professionals,” said Vectorworks’ CEO, Dr. Biplab Sarkar.

“When you drill down to this year’s launch theme of ‘simplicity to design the complex,’ you can see how we’ve re-engineered our most frequently used tools to keep the feature set reliable and cutting edge.”

The industries Vectorworks serves — architecture, landscape, entertainment — are all evolving in a variety of ways. This is our driving challenge, our motivator — to stay in touch with this evolution, to embrace it and anticipate the next round of solutions that will keep your work moving forward in response to it.

Here are a few of the hallmark additions to the new version.

Work Smarter and Faster with Usability Improvements

An organized workspace brings clarity to your workflow. 

The new Smart Options Display is a customizable interface that keeps your most-used tools at the tip of your cursor, allowing you to change tools, modes, and views without moving your mouse from the drawing area or without memorizing keyboard shortcuts.

Quick Search helps you find the tools you need without slowing down your process. You can quickly find and activate any tool or menu command simply by entering it into the search bar.

With both of these updates, you can completely hide your tool palettes to save valuable screen space. The time savings and streamlined operations have the potential to truly revolutionize your workflows.

Push 3D Modeling to the Next Level

Your designs are an important first step in the production process, so your software shouldn’t be slowing you down.

Eleven different tools and popular objects such as Lines, 3D polygons, and NURBS curves, have brand new modes as an extension of our Push/Pull feature. Now when you draw on the face of an extrude or other solid object, you can select a face to extrude or perform a modifying operation like Add or Subtract Solids.

And to edit the history for solid modeled objects, simply right click to directly edit the modifiers. Once you’ve finished, easily return to your project without needing to click multiple times to exit the modeling history. 

Smoother Documentation with BIM Improvements

Extracting drawings from models is central to BIM. The new Smart Markers and 3D Grid tools help to streamline these documentation processes. You now have more freedom to design exactly what you want and can even create your own drawing marker from scratch and define unique graphics.

The new Materials resource keeps construction properties, product data, and physical characteristics of the building material in one place. This enables a unified view of your drawings, leading to more insightful analysis.

Maintain Data with Revit and Excel Collaboration 

No matter the design work you do, collaboration is a crucial aspect of any process.

Vectorworks 2021 can import and export Excel files. You’ll be able to publish multiple reports to Excel with just a push of a button or import native Excel data to Vectorworks; and if you

modify data in Vectorworks, it will export back to Excel while preserving formulas and formatting. 

If you’re working with Revit users, you’ll all save time with enhanced quality in exported objects.

With both of these updates, you’ll see huge improvements to the ways you collaborate during the design progress. These enhancements will save you time by avoiding the tedium of fixing data when sharing across platforms.

See Vectorworks 2021 for yourself.

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