MikeB

April 15, 2003

Cherie,

I do some moonlighting, E-Mail me as to what you are looking for.

ezra466@aol.com

April 3, 2003

Whats happening is VW is trying to maintain the last view it was instructed to give you. If you told it to render in final renderworks mode, it will keep trying to render in that mode until you tell it to do something else.

What you need to do is when you get the rending to quit, select wireframe from the view menu, then you can manipulate the object and they will stay in wireframe, or what I do is hit the 5 key on the key pad, this switches to the "top/Plan" view, which is always in wireframe, then I go about editing the objects.

Good Luck

April 1, 2003

Also remeber that RW is a RayTrace Renderer,it cannot "bounce" light. What this means in your rendering is if you have sunlight coming thru a window or a spot light shining down on to a reflective floor RW will not bounce that light back up to the walls and ceiling, so while the floor may be well lit, the ceiling will still be black, You have to set secondary light sources to fake the natural light works, or rather to fake the "bounce".

Like bclydeb said, look carefully around you and you will begin to notice how often things a lit indirectly by objects around them.

Most of the higher end rendering packages have Radiosity Rendering engins in addition to a ray trace engine, The radiosity engins can more accuratly render the characterists of natural light and can bounce light, but they can easily add hours or days to the time it takes to render a scene

What I'm trying to get at is, particularly with interior rendering, you have to fake the way natrual light works to get the scene to better represent reality.

Good Luck

March 28, 2003

Katie,

He's talking about the small square (or cube depending on the view of the layer) next to the layer name in the layer list that drops down. It is a Sq if the layer is in a 2-D view, and it is a Cube if the layer is in a 3-D view.

March 26, 2003

This is an easy mistake to make, the key pad is programmed to switch views, so if you hit #2 your view will change to the front elevation. The problem is that if you are drawing in 2-D only, you won't see any change, you will simply lose the ability to snap to other layers. If you don't realize this you could easily accidentaly hit a number on the key pad and not realize what has happened. Another way to get your layer back to 2-D - Top/Plan is to make the layer active and then hit #0 on the Key pad.

Good Luck

March 12, 2003

I can't comment on the PDF issue, but as far as your rendering speed there are a few things that wlll siginifigantly increase your rendering time.

Multiple light sources

reflective materials

transparent materials

complex geometry.

Also, what do you consider a long rendering time. When it comes to ray trace rendering in VW/RW, some of my more complex scenes can take up to 45 mins to render on screen, and several hours to export an image file (G4 733, 384 Mb ram, OS 10.2.4). Its just the nature of the beast for ray trace renderers, they are processor intensive, and memory hogs. Also dont forget that your dual processor machine is acting like a single 500 Mhz machine when using VW/RW, VW is not a multithread app.

I would suggest moving to OS X if possible, it seems a bit quicker, and OS X is optimized to use your dual processors more effeciently.

Good Luck

March 11, 2003

Well, if you put all your "containers" in the none class and keep the none class visible, wouldn't that accomplish the same thing without changing the basic structure of the class/layer organization?

I guess I think of class as the "classification" of the objects, or like the species where the layers are the physical location of the objects in space.

Personally, I'm always a little leary of adding another layer of complexity to an already complex situation.

March 11, 2003

Oh, and trim works fine on my PC under Win XP and VW 10.1

P3 800 Mhz

256 Mb ram

March 11, 2003

Again, from personal experience, if you go the PC route, you need to buy from one of the better manufacturers. My wife has a small business, of the 4 PC's over there 2 are Gateways, 1 is an IBM, and the last is an HP. One of the Gateways is 6 or 7 years old and is still running fine, slow but fine with Win 98 SE. The HP on the other hand is maybe 2 years old and is pretty much a boat anchor. At the time we got the HP the business was tight on cash so we opted to save and it has cost us in the long run. I suppose with Apple you are at least certain you are getting quality components, but with a high end PC from one of the better companies you can get the same reliaibility.

March 11, 2003

Yes, I misunderstood what you were trying to do.

[big Grin]

March 11, 2003

quote:

Originally posted by CEA:

Thanks for the replys.

We are using Mac OS 10.2.4 and Vectorworks 10.1.

We have not used the "move Page Tool" and we have not moved the drawings on the original file.

Are you moving the referenced drawings in the target , if you are, this is your problem.

You cannot directly move a WGR, you have to create a layer link from the WGR layer into a new layer and move the link, not the WGR.

Good Luck

March 10, 2003

Again, if I understand you correctly you should look into the Mask Transparency option under the transparency shader in the Material Creation dialogue. What you can do (in VW 10) is select a color in your image based textures, and assign that color to be transparent.

It also exists in VW 9, but in a more primitive form.

Good Luck.

March 9, 2003

quote:

Originally posted by Kaare Baekgaard:

2: The ability to apply a texture called "Alpha". Any object with this texture will create transparent areas in the rendering - or a separate alpha channel in the resulting image file.

In VW 9 and 10 you can do this, its called mask transparency and its under the transparency shader in the texture dialogue box.

Good Luck

March 9, 2003

I work cross platform daily, with a G4 733 OS 10.2.3 at work and a PC 800 Win XP at home. VW is virtually identical, and files can be moved freely back and forth, with the only issue being font substitutions.

As far a value, thats hard to judge, if you already have alot of Mac software, keep in mind that you will have to buy new licenses for the PC. But if you need new software anyway the cost may be minimal.

Personally, at this point in time, I think PC's do offer a greater value, esp if you buy Gateway or Dell. Both of those companies use quality components, and offer a 3 year warrenty (which I highly recommend). I lean toward gateway, only because they have a local store here, and if I need service I can just drop the machine off, but that only happened once and was due to a ATI vidio card burning up.

Now later this year it is rumored that Apple may make a jump in speed so its hard to say where well be next year.

My 2 cents

March 5, 2003

Katie,

I think the problem manifests itself when you have multiple scales, try a file with a 1 to 1 layer and a 1/4" Layer. I had this problem when upgrading, and I've had this problem with my own plugins, basically when a plug in that is dependant on the layer scale to generate its size is edited in a drawing with multiple scales VW will redraw some of the plugins incorrectly on some layers depending on the scale, the fix is to simply select the plug in objects and force VW to redraw the plugin (by selecting the text size for example)

Something must have been changed in the drawing label tool in the last upgrade, fortunately this is easily fixed.

February 27, 2003

quote:

Originally posted by ionw:

When did you add the ability to double click on a layer link to edit the corresponding layer. i.e. in a Perspective view of a four story bldg, double clicking on the third floor makes Mod-Floor-3 active.

I found this by accident, were there clues out there that I missed?

If you use Layer links this is a great tool for cleaning up minor issues!

thanks

It's a new feature in VW 10. Under VW 9 you could right click (or option click for the mac) and a contextual menus would appear with an edit option, selecting this while haveing a layer link selected would take you to the source layer. In VW 10 double clicking on any object automatically puts you in the correct edit environment for that object, so thats why you end up in the source layer of a link when you double click just like you end up in symbol edit it you double click a symbol.

It's a really nice improvment

February 22, 2003

You can set up your texture to use a filtered image, this lets you "tint" the texture. But to edit the origional image file, you need to have the origional image file, edit in Photoshop, or something, and then reapply the image to the texture

Good Luck

February 21, 2003

quote:

Originally posted by Hunterb913:

I've had some Serious crashing problems....

So ya'll are saying that I have to make sure that no two objects, that are textured, are occupying the same space and that NO "image objects" have a transperancy set on it.

So... after I make sure of this my rendering should not crash???

I don't know about the two objects occupying the same space, in my model there must be hundreds of objects that overlap each other.

The transparency setting on image based textures may be true, if it were me that's where I would start. Now that I think about it, I dont think any of my textures are image based and transparent, the only transparent texture I've used in my model is glass, and its transparency is controlled by the reflectivity shader not the transparency shader. And like I said, I'm not having any problems.

Good Luck

February 20, 2003

quote:

Originally posted by wpak:

MikeB: thanks for the info-i'll check it out. it does seem a shame that one has to go outside or create one's own texture when i thought that is what i paid rw for.

Accually what we paid for is a license to use the Lightworks rendering engine. Most 3-D rendering packages come with some stock textures, but if you look closely at some of the most successful renderings out there, I'd be willing to bet 90% of the textures are custom made.

Here's a few of my rendering if your interested in looking

http://www.lilypix.com/photos/showalbum.php?aid=97&uuid=ezra466

You should also try www.vectordepot.com I haven't been there for awhile but last time I checked they had a pretty big database of Vectorworks resources developing. But I do see what your saying, it would be nice to have better textures in the package.

Good Luck

February 20, 2003

Mine seems to work fine,

VWA/RW 10.0.1

Win XP Home

800 Mhz P-3 processor

256 Mb ram

I am working on a file that is hovering around 30 MB with lots of textures (reflective and transparent), backgrounds, and a rediculous number of objects. I have also exported renderings out of VWA/RW 10 at fairly high resolution (300 dpi at 8" x 10"). Over all VWA/RW 10 seems very stable to me.

Whats your system?

Have you reinstalled?

Good Luck

February 19, 2003

Yup,

I've noticed that some of NNA's textures don't tile very smoothly either.

You should look around on the web, there are lots of free textures that tile reasonable well. Try www.3dcafe.com for example

Another option is to make your own image file in photoshop.

Good Luck

February 19, 2003

You could create your own, I accually use very few of the Renderworks textures, instead I creat custom textures using the accual materials that will be in the project.

Good Luck

January 27, 2003

OK, I admit this is probably low priority, but I work on a PC at home and a Mac in the office, this weekend I put in around 20+ hours on the PC in VW, and now all morning I've been trying to use the controll key on the Mac instead of the command key to access my menu shortcuts, would it be possible to set up a preference to swap these keys either on the PC of the Mac.

Thanks

January 22, 2003

Kristins right, you have to set the pixel dimension. Something around 3000 pixels wide is usually pretty good.

Good Luck [big Grin]

January 22, 2003

I thought of that, so I reimported my DWG into VW and the objects really aren't there.

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