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As we kick off 2023, it’s a good time to recap what’s been happening with our Public Roadmap.
If you’ve been following along on the Roadmap webpage, then this blog post will serve as a succinct summary of major developments over the past year. And if you haven’t yet seen the Roadmap, well, this will be a perfect introduction!
The Vectorworks Public Roadmap — A Brief History
The Roadmap is relatively new, launched to the public toward the end of 2020.
“Every business has to have long-term strategies, and in order to execute those strategies, you need a roadmap. Plain and simple. We’ve been a business for over 35 years — and how do we stay in business? Because we listen to our customers. And the Public Roadmap is an excellent vehicle for that,” said Vectorworks CEO Dr. Biplab Sarkar.
From the start, the roadmap was built for transparency. The intention was to provide a way for the Vectorworks community to follow along with our engineering team, plus have the ability to offer feedback and, recently, submit feature requests.
The Roadmap page is split into three sections. We’ve always thought of development in these categories — the Roadmap gives us a way to share that with you.
- Active Research – This is where we place feature ideas from you or us for which we’re investigating possible solutions.
- In Development – Teams are actively working on the project. This transitions to Scheduled once the feature is demonstrated as ready.
- Scheduled – Development for the feature is far enough along that we can commit it to a high-quality release.
As you browse the webpage, you might take notice of our major areas of investment. These areas include quality and performance, user experience, building information modeling (BIM) in both architecture and landscape architecture, interoperability, and supporting the diverse disciplines in entertainment design.
Major Development Tasks Implemented with Vectorworks 2023
Several features that started in the Public Roadmap were made available with the release of Vectorworks 2023, Service Pack 2, and Service Pack 3.
Many of these features — Shaded Rendering, for example — are the result of customer ideas submitted in the Roadmap! Updates to the Shaded Render Mode eliminate the previous eight-light limit, giving you more design freedom.
With the release of Vectorworks 2023, Graphic Legends and Direct Modeling of Doors and Windows were added to your design toolbelt. The former allows you to automatically coordinate with the resources you've used with an easy editing and customization process to ensure the accuracy of legends and drawing keys for documentation.
With Direct Modeling of Doors and Windows, we’ve developed a feature that lets you create and edit doors and windows by simply drawing a rectangle on the face of the wall in 3D or a line spanning the opening in 2D.
Another development task completed with the release of Vectorworks 2023 is the improved Section Viewports. Designed with user experience in mind, these improvements ensure that your documentation workflows are more efficient. Viewports can update up to six times faster, while taking up to 80% less memory.
And the innovation doesn’t stop there. Better collaboration with Revit files has also made the transition from Public Roadmap to Vectorworks software, as have improvements to site grading.
Taking the Technological Revolution by Its Reins
You may have seen that Vectorworks is the first design and BIM software to be able to run on Apple’s M1 processors. As technology continues to evolve, we’d like to continue being at the forefront of our industries’ technological advancements. Take a look at some of the exciting things we have in the works, directly from the Scheduled tab.
- USD file format integration – A new feature that enables importing and exporting of the USD file format
- Omniverse connector – A new feature that allows you to send Vectorworks 3D models to NVIDIA’s Omniverse
- View bar/Mode bar redesign – The View Bar and Mode Bar are scheduled to get a new look that makes it easier for you to organize and navigate your files
- Hardscape drape mode – The Hardscape tool is getting a new mode to “drape” a hardscape over a site model while maintaining hardscape components
Send Your Opinions to Our Engineering Team
New this year is the addition of the “Submit Your Idea” button at the very top of the Roadmap webpage.
Here you can send us what you’d like to see implemented into Vectorworks software. The Hedgerow tool and object implemented in Vectorworks 2023 came from a customer request. We read these submissions — all of them.
And it’s simple to use. Just go to the webpage, click the white button that says “SUBMIT YOUR IDEA,” and fill out the form that appears.
You can also leave feedback on tasks that we’re already working on. Along with submitting ideas via the method above, the In Development tab is where your voice could have a lasting impact on Vectorworks software.
Continue the Conversation!
You can talk about all things related to the Public Roadmap on our Community Forum, where hundreds from the Vectorworks community go to discuss the software. Follow the link below to get started.
