Planeta Vectorworks

Congratulations to Alan Hanson, winner of the 2013 iSquint.net and Stage Directions Student Lighting Design Competition! Hanson’s design for the musical Chess was selected by the judges as the grand prize winner.

Hanson is a Montana native who has spent years traveling and working in the entertainment industry. He’s finishing his MFA at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) in Lighting Design. After graduation, he hopes to get a job designing, drafting, and rendering somewhere on the West Coast.

Alan Hanson

In addition to Chess, his design work at CCM has been seen in productions of Don Giovanni, Arcadia, The Threepenny Opera, and Parade. He also designs the annual production of The Medora Musical in Medora, North Dakota. He has toured nationally with the Montana Repertory Theatre, Chamber Theatre of Boston, Troupe America Inc., and the Moscow Ballet. He has designed productions throughout Montana for companies such as Montana Rep Missoula, Bigfork Summer Playhouse, Missoula Children’s Theatre, and Fort Peck Summer Theatre.

To see more images from his design of Chess, visit his website: www.alanmhanson.com.

As the grand prize winner of the competition, Hanson will receive a professional license of Vectorworks Spotlight 2013 with Renderworks software, a personal license of Lightwright 5, a single license of Field Template SoftSymbols V3.5, a copy of Light Plot Deconstructed by Gregg Hillmar, and a copy of Entertainment Design: Scenery, Lighting, and Sound with Vectorworks Spotlight by Kevin Lee Allen.

The Student Lighting Design Competition is sponsored by Nemetschek Vectorworks, City Theatrical, and Field Template. This year, the panel of judges included lighting designer, writer, and editor Justin Lang from iSquint; software engineer and lighting design industry expert Kevin Linzey from Nemetschek Vectorworks; author and lighting designer Steve Shelley of Field Template, developer of Soft Symbols; lighting designer, author and Vectorworks expert Gregg Hillmar; lighting designer and developer of Lightwright John McKernon; and artist, author, and scenic and lighting designer Kevin Lee Allen.

Vectorworks Nomad is now available for Kindle Fire through the Amazon app store.

We are proud to offer Vectorworks Nomad on all major tablet operating systems, as the app is also available for iOS and Android devices. We recently improved the offline and synchronization features for all three platforms, adding tools that allow users to annotate their projects on site, even without a network connection, and sync the updated information when they are online again.

Kindle Fire users can download the app from the Amazon app store here.

Vectorworks Nomad is the mobile application for Vectorworks Cloud Services, which is available exclusively for members of Vectorworks Service Select.

Veteran scenic and lighting designer Gregg Hillmar has succeeded again with Light Plot Deconstructed for Vectorworks Spotlight, Fifth Edition. The guide, written in an easy-to-follow and insightful manner, reflects Hillmar’s drafting style and functions as a companion handbook to the software to help readers draft light plots more easily.

This new edition reflects updates in the 2013 version of Vectorworks Spotlight software, including the re-engineered lighting device object, color options for lighting devices, unlimited fields in Label Legends, the new Clip Cube mode and Auto Hybrid command, improved rendering capabilities, increased navigation speed, and more. Readers will gain a better handle on how to approach design and create more spectacular shows.

Light Plot Deconstructed for Vectorworks Spotlight, Fifth Edition, will be available to ship on May 10. Please visit our Training Guides page for pricing and ordering information.

We’ve been going through some exciting changes here at Nemetschek Vectorworks, and we thought we’d take you inside our Columbia, Maryland headquarters to see what’s been going on.

Investing in the development of an ever-improving product means investing in high-performing people, and to that end we’ve increased our staff by 50% in the last few years. Some highlights include the addition of a cloud engineering team to focus on our Vectorworks Cloud Services offering and the addition of regional sales representatives in the United States to provide local presences in San Diego, Dallas, and Chicago.

The Bulgaria-based members of the Nemetschek Vectorworks cloud engineering team work with additional team members based in the U.S.

All this growth has created a need for bigger and better office space. We recently renovated our main building to add more conference rooms, a bigger kitchen and cafe area, and skylights to let in lots of natural light. A short time later, we expanded to include space in a nearby building. The new space–The Studio–has an open concept to encourage creative collaboration among team members.

The new Studio space encourages collaboration through open workspaces.

Our renovated headquarters showcases projects designed by Vectorworks users throughout the building.

We’ve expanded our presence around the world, as well, with new distributors in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ukraine, and China. A Chinese-language version of Vectorworks software was launched in 2012 to meet the needs of this growing market. We also expanded our Vectorworks Service Select subscription offerings, bringing benefits such as free updates, preferred support status, Cloud Services and expanded libraries to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, France, Norway, and Sweden. And, we’ve brought our BIM Camp program to cities across the United States, Brazil, and the Benelux region.

We will continue to grow and invest in our products, services, and people in order to bring the best solutions possible to our customers. We hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse inside Nemetschek Vectorworks!

Presented by Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc., MAXON Computer, DOSCH DESIGN, Arroway Textures® and AMD FireProTM graphics, “Your World, Reimagined: A Global Design Competition” asks professional and student designers to tackle an old, dilapidated, or run-down locale and redesign it for a new, improved use. Entries can range in focus from adaptive reuse to landscape reclamation or object redesign.

Winners will be selected by a panel of judges from around the world, including designer and sculptor Nicholas Dunand; digital artist Shinya Fujimura from 3D-KOBO; architect François Lévy; lighting and production designer Tyler Littman of Sholight, LLC; architectural visualizer Alejandro Nogueira from DECC 3D Art; architect Peter Petz from German-Architects.com; digital animator Marc Potocnik from renderbaron; architectural visualizer Erik Recke from Datenland; assistant professor Katherine Bambrick Ambroziak from the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and project architects Maxime Czvek, Thomas Rigby and Tom Boogaerts from BOGDAN & VAN BROECK ARCHITECTS.

In addition to an overall award for Best Overall Design Concept, winners will be selected in the following categories: Best Computer Rendering, Best Animation, Best 3D Modeling, and Best 2D Plan. Prize packages include Visa gift cards and software bundles.

Submissions will be accepted until August 16, 2013. Entries can range from a conceptual design to a completed project with full design development and may consist of up to two design boards or one design board and a movie file that demonstrates their design’s conceptual imagery. Each submission should explain what site existed prior to the new, reimagined design. All submissions must use Vectorworks or CINEMA 4D software, and a free, 30-day trial of Vectorworks software or a free, 42-day trial of CINEMA 4D is available for download.

To enter or for more information, including the complete competition rules, please click here.

Grand prize winner Brian Gilmartin.

Congratulations to Brian Gilmartin, a student at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, who won the grand prize in this year’s Behind the Scenes raffle, which took place at the USITT Annual Conference & Stage Expo in March. Brian was awarded a professional license of Vectorworks Spotlight with Renderworks software.

Behind the Scenes provides financial support to entertainment technology industry professionals when they are ill or injured, or to their surviving family members. Funds can be used for medical care, basic living costs, and funeral expenses. To view a video of some of the past grant recipients telling their stories, please visit the ESTA Foundation website.

A clearly articulated design with accurate measurements ensured
the installation of the light set in just one day and with time to spare.

As founder of Lightscape Design, Ltd. in England, David Lee creates lightscapes that leave lasting impressions. The light set he designed for the U.K. breakout pop band One Direction’s first headlining show at New York’s Madison Square Garden was no different.

For the sold-out concert, Lee envisioned multiple ways to invigorate the show while meeting the requirements posed by the production team. These constraints included fitting his light set around an 80’x30’ video screen and installing his design in just one day. Plus, Lee had only three weeks until show time to execute a plan. Read the full story about Lee’s work on the One Direction concert and what tools in the Vectorworks Spotlight platform helped him achieve stunning results here.

David Lee’s fixture placement, seen here rendered in the Vectorworks software, verified that sight lines and
fixture selection were coordinated with the 80’x30’ video screen.

Images courtesy of Lightscape Design, Ltd.

We’ve released a new version of the Vectorworks Cloud Services mobile application, Vectorworks Nomad 2.0.

This updated version of Vectorworks Nomad addresses requests from users about ways to view, share, measure, and annotate files. Enhancements include new redline drawing shapes, a sheet layer sidebar palette, angle and path measurement modes, improved download and upload performance, and improved annotation text objects. Plus, the ability to work in an offline mode provides even greater freedom as users can make design decisions in the field without a network connection.

The app is now available for both iOS and Android devices and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

Vectorworks Cloud Services is available to members of the Vectorworks Service Select subscription program.

Here are this month’s tech tip videos:

Applying Sketch Styles in Vectorworks
This video demonstrates how to apply sketch styles to individual objects, allowing you to customize your renderings.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Replacing Wall Styles In Vectorworks
This video shows how to replace an existing wall style with a new wall style, as well as what can happen if this action is performed improperly.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

We’re proud to sponsor the 2013 Architectural Record Cocktail Napkin Sketch Contest. Through this contest, architects and related professionals in the United States are asked to share a creative concept on a five-inch-by-five-inch cocktail napkin.

“We’re thrilled to have Nemetschek Vectorworks as a sponsor of our third annual Cocktail Napkin Sketch Competition,” said Laura Viscusi, vice president of McGraw-Hill Construction Media and publisher of Architectural Record, GreenSource and SNAP. “This unique competition builds on the tradition of the great architects who sketched some of their greatest works on napkins.”

Past entries have included drawings of iconic buildings, sketches of ancient masterworks and studies on the design process. Two grand prize winning submissions will be published in Architectural Record, and winners will receive a box of napkins printed with their sketches.

To complement the contest, the Vectorworks design team will demonstrate how architects can turn a hand-drawn sketch into a building information model (BIM) in Vectorworks software. Visitors to the Vectorworks: From Sketch to BIM site will have the opportunity to vote on a project and design details. All voters at each phase will be registered for a chance to win a Wacom® Intuos5 pen tablet, a tool that provides users with a completely natural and intuitive platform for drawing and sketching digitally.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.