Exporting from Vectorworks to another ie Autocad

As I close down my practice, which will be the subject of a much longer blog, I have handed over one project to another Architects office. Now I work within the Vectorworks environment, I like the way it works and feels, for me it feels like home. But the new practice want to work in Autocad Lt, this is a slight problem, the project file I have is quite large and although it is need of a clean, it works fine on my version of Vectorworks, But as I export the complete file to dwg, thins started to go slightly wrong, and yes before you ask, I did check and load the exported file into my copy of Autocad, all be it on a Mac, and it worked just fine, given a little patience.

So I had a call, the file you sent over keeps crashing, what are you loading it into, oh an old copy of Autocad lt, ah I say, best I come over, do you have a copy of Vectorworks, yes they replied, good.

To cut a long story short, I managed to export the model to Vectorworks 2016, and show the practice how to deal with this type of model, splitting up the various levels into different files for Autocad, and making Xrefs to a series of master site plans.

You might ask why not use IFC after all its what I teach at University, but in real life the output was a lot of work to make work and often dam difficult. The Autocad export offered the route of least resistance.

This is only the start, I have several other projects being exported to Archicad, which is a Nemetschek company, same as Vectorworks, but there is no real export link other than IFC or using dwg, both ways of importing the projects into Archicad seem to indicate spending a lot of time correcting,

So there it is retirement is not a simple process, apart from the legal bits of shutting down, the need for my PI runoff etc, I thought the drawing side would be a piece of cake, not so.