Interview
Vectorworks development With the launch of Vectorworks 2022, Martyn Day caught up with company CEO Biplab Sarkar and CTO Steve Johnson to get their take on a range of issues, from Apple Silicon to the cloud.
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emetschek is an anomaly in the AEC space. It owns three BIM modelling companies Graphisoft (Archicad), Allplan and Vectorworks - which compete against each other, as well as the rest of the market. Each firm retains distinct management, different cultures and sales networks. While Graphisoft and Allplan are big in Europe, Vectorworks has always been the strong Nemetschek BIM brand in the US. Archicad, from its inception, was all about the 3D model, from which to derive 2D drawings; Vectorworks has had a more traditional, evolutionary development journey from 2D draughting to 3D BIM functionality. To achieve this there
has been a lot of ‘under the hood’ development work over the years from a very capable software development team keeping Vectorworks available on both Apple Mac and Windows platforms. In this cycle, Vectorworks has performed the Herculean task of updating Windows and Apple Mac versions, while totally reworking the Mac variant to natively support Apple’s ‘system on a chip’ M1 Silicon. Vectorworks is the first BIM software developer to bring out a true Apple Silicon version, both supporting native CPU (ARM) and native GPU (Metal). While you may think that a software developer could do all this work in-house,
the reality of modern software development is that many sub-components of the software are developed by niche providers and are licensed, such as the Siemens Parasolid solid modelling kernel. To achieve the rapid development of Vectorworks on Apple Silicon would have required a major effort across multiple contributing software companies all developing discrete components native to the new Apple ARM processors. It really isn’t as easy as you would think and getting all the component developers to have their code ported for new operating systems is akin to herding cats. Vectorworks ‘C’ level team are very technical and CEO, Biplab Sarkar, was
Vectorworks 2022 - what’s in the new release? Vectorworks 2022 comes in three flavours: Buildings, Landscapes and Entertainment, so there’s a version for architects, another for landscape architects and a third one for the niche profession of stage and theatre design. While playing second fiddle to Archicad in mainland Europe, Vectorworks is Nemetschek’s top installed BIM solution in the USA. With a paucity of applica-
tions for landscape architects, Vectorworks stands head and shoulders above the competition, although that competition is likely to just be vanilla AutoCAD. With such a focused, niche lighting and stage design product, Vectorworks is the number one solution for entertainment. While Apple Silicon support is obviously some big news especially for those looking for more perfor-
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mance, there are a range of enhancements to capabilities and features. It seems that in economic downturns, and now in pandemics, software developers tend to look for crowd-pleasing functionality as opposed to adding substantial new capabilities. Uncertainty drives the need for certainty. Redshift – Vectorworks has, for some time, supported CPU-biased rendering tech-
nologies from Maxon with Renderworks, but new support for Maxon Redshift means users can now render with their workstation’s GPU. This has two benefits: One, it takes the pressure off the CPU and two, it can take advantage of massive speed improvements from the latest GPU designs like Nvidia RTX, even in complex scenes with reflections, volumetric effects, camera effects, and anti-aliasing.
Twinmotion – it’s now possible to directly link Vectorworks models with Twinmotion from Epic Games. Vectorworks has incorporated the Datasmith link into the standard toolset. As designs progress, updates can be sent at the push of a button, ensuring Twinmotion has the latest design, with no additional set-up required. Surface texturing - upgrades to the texturing workflow
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September / October 2021
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02/10/2021 16:04
