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scottmoore

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Everything posted by scottmoore

  1. Another option is getting a silhouette online and import the image. Enact the trace bitmap tool, clean up the resulting geometry. Add a fill and then extrude by an 1” or so. Don’t forget to rotate them upright and set their feet at Z=0. The advantage is it will show up correctly regardless of rendering type. bonus points by assigning the piece of extrusion to a class and set their fill color and texture by class. You can add some text or 2D geometry in plan view and then turn all that into a hybrid symbol. Now you can change the appearance of all your little silhouette people in one step by changing the class texture/color. Want them to be semi transparent? No problem. Want them to be blue? Easy. Want them to glow? Why not. Want them to appear to be on fire? Ok, but why?
  2. I have a script with a shortcut assigned to my StreamDeck so it’s just a button push to activate the none class. Quite handy.
  3. To add to the questions, how does one create a viewport from something other than the top/plan view using geometry if you cannot use the screen plane?
  4. I often use my symbols and then add a piece of geometry in front for the image. I am curious about your comment though. The LED tool is kind of ideal for custom aspect ratios. Just type in what you need. You can use the actual tile sizes or just make the display one big tile. Is the issue a custom shape or perhaps curved?
  5. Thanks for the kind words. Peter. https://www.edgelightrgb.com/
  6. I would absolutely agree with that. It's frustrating to accidentally undock a palette or inadvertently stretch a palette across your entire workspace. I've got them set up the way I want, now stay there!
  7. The advantage to Spotlight fixtures is you can focus them in the software. I am pretty sure that you cannot use ies files as a light source but may be wrong. You can define the parameters of the light object (beam, field, maximum intensity) however. There is a new (2021) focus tool that would be really helpful for this. Creating those symbols is a bit of a process but there are some tutorials regarding that. Lots of steps to follow.
  8. That looks great. It would not be difficult to create what you are looking forward using the Spotlight toolset. The interesting part would be integrating the appropriate IES file.
  9. Time to create some old school gobo geometry.
  10. It depends on how many projects I am working on simultaneously! I voted 3-5. Also, I try to get in the habit of creating new symbols in a blank file, then saving that to my symbol file and then importing into a project file. The blank file helps avoid mistakes and placing the new symbol into the symbol file seems to be a good workflow to avoid frustration later on. Sometimes I have to open a reference file to make an update but not often.
  11. Just reaching out to see if that worked for you.
  12. It looks like this should work. The alert is just stating that the student version will not be readable by a professional version of VWX. That said, I don’t really have any experience with student versions of the program.
  13. Actually, when you say it doesn’t work, what about it doesn’t work? Can you not open the file? Will the symbols not import into a drawing? Note that the symbols are located in a folder in the Resource Manager. I’ve had several users that were concerned when the symbols did not simply populate the file when opened. Let me know if this solved the issue for you. Otherwise, this will give me more information to try and track down a solution.
  14. Actually, I have no idea. These are basic symbols with no plug-in functionality whatsoever. I’ll check with service select and see if they have any suggestions.
  15. “….might be able to create an Apple script…” You are assuming I am much smarter than I actually am! If there isn’t a button I can check, I am pretty much lost. By the way, I am a big fan of all your posts Pat.
  16. It sounds like textures would be the solution to most of this. Textures are simple to create and allow for a ton of flexibility. Client decides to change that shade of green? Just edit your texture. Otherwise you have to go to every wall using that color and change the fill (not cool). You could even go to the point of creating textures for each room. For instance “living room standard” “living room accent”. Even if all those colors are originally identical, (simply duplicate your textures) it would allow you to go back and change things really quickly if needed by editing the correct texture. If you decide later to add a bit of physical texture to your walls, again, this is as simple as editing your RW texture with either the image of some texture or a physical bump shader. Add some sheen for the client who insists on a semi-gloss wall? No problem. Textures can also be used for multi-colored walls. Draw out your to-scale pattern with simple polygons, colorize as necessary, take a screen shot and create your texture. (Make sure to set your texture size correctly) The only caveat is mapping it correctly to the wall. VWX can be tedious in that regard.
  17. Can one lock your palettes in position? It’s so annoying when your are in a hurry and inadvertently undock or dock a palette. You have to stop and clean up your mess.
  18. That is a good point and worth considering. That said, there have been a considerable number of people reporting render cache issues for several years now (which seems to have improved perhaps?) and certainly texture issues.
  19. Copy that. I think at one point that was not the case so the aforementioned black light has been my go to for a long time.
  20. I would think so. It’s not at all difficult, and I highly recommend adding various types of ambient light to your drawing template. You might have to adjust the Z coordinate per design, but otherwise it will be quite useful and become part of your workflow since you will always know on what class/layer these are located. If your ambient lights receive color by class it becomes very quick to adjust overall ambient light color and intensity via the class color. I also include a “black light” object on its own class which is basically an ambient light turned down to 1% and colored dark gray. Turning this on allows me to “fool” VWX so the app will turn off the global illumination. This is crucial when lighting a scene with nothing but textures.
  21. Oh I knew exactly what you meant by “render buckets” but did not know that was the term. Cool. My comment regarding the dpi of the design layer (I believe mine is defaulted to 72 dpi) is that the resolution of a render on the design layer at 72dpi is far greater than a render bitmap at 72dpi. This makes render bitmaps even less appealing to me.
  22. One more rant; when working on a laptop on battery, the render bitmap tool runs through the battery in a hurry due to having to wait for the entire image to render. When I say "entire" I mean whatever section of the screen I choose to render not the entire screen.
  23. That is true. By the way, is "render buckets" the actual term for that?? 🙂 I've never entirely understood the DPI settings of the design layer. I believe it defaults to 72 dpi but is also impacted by the display upon which you work. The end result is that a final quality render on the design layer is typically quicker and infinitely better resolution than a 72 dpi render bitmap. I typically have to use render bitmaps at 150 dpi which take far longer and still do not look nearly as good. The only way to get a render bitmap to look anywhere near as good as final quality on the design layer would take forever. Just a personal note on my process: I have the standard keyboard shortcuts for OpenGL and Final Quality Renderworks. I also have a keyboard shortcut for Custom Renderworks. I completely understand that Final Quality is not ideal but it is a quick way for me to toggle between low quality and high quality renderworks (custom set to lower quality and final quality) while drawing. I always output with custom renderworks. I should also add that for the longest time (a long time ago), my output renders were just screen grabs of design layer renderings before I understood the SLVP method and never had any issues with it. Seems like the render cache issue was the first bug but it has since become worse and worse.
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