Mattheng

At the moment all of my bespoke stuff (plants etc) is on Dropbox but each user then has to download it to their hard drive. We all use multiple computers and it is getting a bit hard to work out who has which version of what. Are there any reasons why I could not set up Vectorworks on each computer to look at Dropbox instead of \Applications\Library\default etc and avoid the downloading step? Matt

I have set up a fairly detailed site model and placed several Renderworks cameras around it. I have imported one DWG and referenced another via a blank vectorworks file I use Unified View to view all the layers together when rendering. Somewhere along the line ( I am on version 10 at the moment) everything got moved about and the objects and page itself (ie the grey outline that shows what will print) got shifted way down and to the right. I shifted everything back and to the left and double clicked on Move Page command to align the page with the Origin. Unfortunately when I double click on one of the cameras they try to render back down and to the right of the sheet border, ie where the page used to be. The sheet border, however, has recognised the Move Page command and gone with it with the result that the sheet border lies misses the render completely. Also when I click on the fit to page area button it goes back to the where the page used to be so I can't see anything Anybody know how to fix this?

Ok Ok So you all spotted my deliberate mistake ie the horizon IS fixed as I described above, I just need to select a simple sky background without a horizon If I want to have extreme angles of view and something like a sky behind it. Nothing like answering your own question and realising it was a dud at the same time. DOH!

We all like HDRI backgrounds but I like raised perspectives too. Which means I am perpetually looking at the boring bit that is supposed to be below the horizon because the background does not roll with my change in perspective. If that makes sense is there any way, preferably an easy one, round this. Ideally you could set the horizontal by doing a Front View or equivalent and then tell it to move with the model. Is this even remotely possible?

Yeah, but surely that applies equally to both computers...? The four core point is a valid one. Indirect lighting is mainly for indoor shots, doesn't really work outdoors (which mine are), you lose all the detail and it is way slower than using ambient lighting. Can look good in the right places, though. Check out some of Billtheia's posts Getting rid of the HDRI really speeds things up and you can get pretty close with multiple light sources. I have measured the times a bit more accurately and it is 38 secs vs 25 secs. Still way slower than I would have expected. Should still be around 15 secs at worst..?

Am running some movies with 600 frames. When going from a Mac Book pro with a 2.53 gHz Core 2 Duo and 3 gB of RAM to an iMac with a 2.8gHz i7 8 core with 8 gB of RAM the render time per frame goes from 38 seconds to 21 seconds. Nice but somehow not as nice as I expected. Am rendering in Custom Renderworks, no indirect lighting, no HDRI, four independent light sources and everything everything low except environment lighting which is on very high. Nor sure if the environment lighting needs to be high either Any idea how much extra grunt is necessary to make things run, say, 4 - 5 times faster which is kind of what I was expecting (8 / 2 * 2.8 / 2.53 = 4.4, never mind the extra RAM...)?

Ok, in my never-ending quest for decent 3D plants that I do not have to pay for I have turned to Sketchup and have had a modest amount of success. From a side view they are not as convincing as a good image prop apart from the very best ones but from the top down they are useable whereas image props aren't. So, on balance, I like them. But I have hit a problem and this one does seem terminal, for VW 2011 at least. I was completely unable to create combined 3D symbols with these Sketchup imorted plants in a file that I was working on in 2011. I guessed it was a memory problem as the file was quite full so used a blank "shuttle" file to create them and then imported them. The imported symbols looked fine in top/plan view and would just about render in OpenGl but if I asked for any sort of Renderworks, even Fast, the memory gauge in the Activity Monitor on my Mac would just wind up to full and stay there. I have 8 gb of RAM. Tried everything, no success. In desperation dropped it back to 2010 and boom! Not only did it work but, if I dropped the HDRI lighting 2010's runtime bugbear, it flies. I can get useable FQR renders out in less than a minute. Is 2010 that much more efficient at memory management, even with files created in 2011? Matt

JR, Ignore Computers Unlimited and talk to Tamsin Slatter. She is all over this site and gives the most amazing advice. Concise, informed and completely straight about everything. I'm starting to suspect that she is actually one of the head techs doing a "good cop" act to balance out the rest. Matt

Dan, Thanks for the response but it's pretty easy to knock up image props from photos of real plants that would look much better than these. The whole point is that they are truly 3D. Also image props do limit you in terms of angles as they are really just billboards, top down views are impossible for example but true 3D models let you shoot from any angle. Which is what I wanted these for. This is really disappointing as the models are excellent, from what I can see of them, but unusable. Is there really no way to get the 3D models to work in Vectorworks.? I did notice that someone had asked for them to be made available in Vectorworks format in the comments underneath but had not received an answer. Impossible? Matt

ok, I did a lot of work on lighting after this and the results seemed to warrant another thread. If you look in "Lighting Quality and Exporting" you can see some results

Now some Indirect lighting. The quality of the Indirect lighting does make a difference to the effect of the HDRI lighting under the table, the number of bounces brightens everything up and does seem to spread the light more evenly.

Next lot

It looks like you can reduce the grain in your environment lit exports by pushing up the DPI as well as the quality of the lighting in your Custom Renderworks settings. It also seems that if you just ignore HDRI lighting (ie use an HDRI as the Vectorworks background but do NOT select it as a light source and use Ambient plus a few light sources) you get no grain at all, decent shadows if you want them and everything runs noticeably more quickly. To prove all this I ran the same scene and exported it to a PDF as different DPI's with all the different qualities of environment lighting and then with Indirect lighting for all the different bounce settings. I then dropped the HDRI and put in Ambient at 51% ( not 35% as it was a bit gloomy) and ran it at medium for environment lighting and Indirect with one bounce just to see what non HDRI looked like. This took a loooong time and generated far too many files to post so I will just put the extremes (still going to take a few posts) but it does make very interesting viewing.

There are some excellent free plants and trees going on Xfrog but I can't get them into Vectorworks in a sensible way, there is no explicit Vectorworks format. Free Xfrog plants 3ds works and all the formatting is intact but the files are absolutely enormous to the point where three or more will crash a previously empty file. I have 8gB of RAM and am running an i7 8 core chip, do I need more or am I missing something...? Matt

Thanks for the suggestions, I did place an image prop texture on one face of a wall to see what happened. Unsurprisingly it looked like I had painted the wall with plants. Not really what I was looking for but it is the best solution so far. Interestingly I don't use the reports at all in VW. To make the visuals compelling you have to stick so many plants in that it would be ludicrously expensive to buy them all. As a result we do all the plant costings in Excel. It probably is a complete waste of time but we did send out a VW report from a visual by mistake and the client hit the roof over the ridiculous plant budget so we dumped it.... BCD, I have used your suggestion when using climbers and it works as they do grow up the wall. However, this time I am trying to model plants that grow OUT of the wall so it is just frustratingly difficult......

Kaare, Up to now I have been using HDRI and a light source for shadows but in 2011 I am still unhappy with the results and am thinking of ditching HDRI and using multiple light sources like you suggest. 2011 seems to be set up to work better with indirect lighting than environment lighting and, whilst it does spread the light around nicely, it does seem to almost totally remove the effect of any HDRI backgrounds used to light the scene. As you say, they still work well as backgrounds. My question is could you set up one set of three light sources to work for multiple views of the same scene without having to set up a full set of lighting for each view? ? I think the answer must be "you can't" but I do a lot of multiple views and would end up with dozens of light sources..... Either way I think you have hit the nail on the head here. Matt

Yes I know I am posting quite a bit but I am showing a lot of new renders from 2011 to clients and I am getting quite a bit of flak. The latest comment from a firm of architects (I am working in landscape design) was that I should have a look at Photoshop in order to improve things. They also said I should look at Artlantis and, judging by some of the comments I have seen on here, that does cast a bit of doubt onto whether they knew what they were talking about. I have never used Photoshop and am relatively new to the whole world of design and rendering. I was hoping that Renderworks would be all that I needed, how important is Photoshop? Matt

Tamsin. Thanks again, you are a one woman answer factory! Genius, I don't know what they pay you but it isn't enough! There is one question that does just beg to be asked though. If all this technology is already built into the Roof Face (which is a bit of an obscure option) why can't they just build it directly into the Hardscape (which is one of the most important tools in Vectorworks). I thought 2011 was where all this kind of stuff came together...? To be fair, Tamsin, I am just musing out loud here to everyone, you have already been more helpful than I could have expected. Many thanks again. Matt

Just moved this from General discussion to here because I think this only applies if you have Renderworks. The default mapping always seems to to tile the texture right in the middle of the hardscape making it look strange. To solve this I fire up the attribute mapping tool which then opens a new window, puts axes and dots all over the screen, lets me drag them all over the place and does precisely nothing to the texture when I'm finished. If I use an extrude instead of a hardscape I can change the mapping type to planar and use the object info palette to sort it quite nicely. Problem is that I am using a DTM and need the hardscape as a pad to alter the terrain. I could change the DTM by using site modifiers and then putting extrudes on top but the hardscape just seems to be irresistibly simpler, I can combine 2D views with 3D views (I would have to use a 2D polygon with the extrude to be able to see it in plan mode whilst the hardscape works in both plan and 3D mode by default) with a site modifier all in one go. What am I doing wrong? Matt

Does it? The default mapping always seems to to tile the texture right in the middle of the hardscape making it look strange. To solve this I fire up the attribute mapping tool which then opens a new window, puts axes and dots all over the screen, lets me drag them all over the place and does precisely nothing to the texture when I'm finished. If I use an extrude instead of a hardscape I can change the mapping type to planar and use the object info palette to sort it quite nicely. Problem is that I am using a DTM and need the hardscape as a pad to alter the terrain. I could change the DTM by using site modifiers and then putting extrudes on top but the hardscape just seems to be irresistably simpler, I can combine 2D views with 3D views (I would have to use a 2D polygon with the Extrude to be able to see it in plan mode whilst the hardscape works in both plan and 3D mode by default) with a site modifier all in one go. What am I doing wrong? Matt

Tamsin, Thanks for this, I really need to have plants growing out of the wall so this probably isn't going to work but it's good to know that I CAN'T do it rather than struggling for hours in the desperate hope that it might be me. Thanks again, Matt

I don't mean on top of it. I mean the face of the wall that you see when standing in a garden. I have built an extrude as the wall, set the working plane to the vertical face. placed some plants on the ground, but when I try to align the plants with the working plane I get this. Any ideas? Just to clarify, in spite of what the message says I am not using a wall, it's an extrude. I can only guess that the plant object qualifies as a wall or roof for this message? Matt

Gideon, sorry I missed this in my rush to post all the renders. I am taking a lot of renders into 2011 from 2011, am doing some in 2011 and have even exported back from 2011 to 2010 to compare. As a side issue, It seems like the new HDRI backgrounds in 2011 don't export back into 2010. To answer your question directly there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get the same vividness, HDRI backgrounds just don't have the same impact in 2011. The indirect lighting gets rid of the graininess but also most of the effect, leaving indirect lighting off is better but still nowhere near 2010. Looks like the best solution is to study lighting a bit more closely, forget about HDRI as a one stop solution to atmosphere and actually light the scene "properly". There was an old Renderworks tuition video that I saw a few years back that showed you how to set up lights from various angles, intensities and colours to give a realistic effect, that was before HDRI's were really big news (at least for me, anyway). Looks like I should dig around and see if I can find it somewhere.... Matt

Bill, I reckon I could reduce the intensity by about 50% as well but it was set to a level of 100 which I read in one of the many bits of information is the correct number for 2011. I have to say that I'm with you on this one, Bill. 2011 looks intriguing but it certainly doesn't work the same way as 2010. I was getting into HDRI lighting in 2010 and I can't get the same effect in 2011. (yet, I'm still trying) I would love to try turning off the gamma correction built into 2011 (Linear workflow?) to see what difference that makes. The good thing about 2011 is that the render times might double but they won't rise exponentially as in 2010 with HDRI and, especially, radiosity. (Have to say I haven't tested Kaare's idea about blurry textures, this might be its Achilles heel) The bad thing is it looks different and, if you don't care about HDRI lighting, FQR is quite a bit slower. Matt

Here are the white environment lit versions with a lightsource to add shadows. It does seem that you have to be careful with the level of the environment lighting in 2010 when you add a light source otherwise it blows out a bit. 2011 just seems crazy even by two bounces, looks like you are better off without the indirect lighting. The gamma correction point that you made, Bill, seems to be a good one. The Linear workflow C4D issue is all that I can think it might be. Can we turn it off? Matt