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Anthony Neary

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Posts posted by Anthony Neary

  1. I am going to put this here in case others are looking in the future.  On my Windows 11 machine, it looks like Windows has taken over assigning programs to the graphics card, so I had to go in to System > Display Settings > Graphics, and in there list Vectorworks to only use the GPU via the windows dialogue box.  Things seem to be behaving better now.

     

    Making those selections/decisions inside the Nvidia control panel were having no effect.

  2. This might be reviving a bit of an old thread at this point, when running a Redshift render with Denoise as on is it expected that the denoise phase should run on the CPU?  Right now that phase runs on the CPU for me, not the GPU.  I am not seeing the Cinema 4d process in my process list, but in the Nvidia settings VW lists as Maxon Cinema 4d, so I suspect everything is configured correctly there.

  3.  

    Having a weird issue, and I'm not sure when it started cropping up, but recently I can't move Vectorworks from my laptop display to the external.  The program locks up completely and stops responding.  If I open VW with no file open I can move the program window to the second monitor and everything is fine until I open a file, then it locks up once the file loads.

     

    I don't think this is a VW issue specifically, Zoom does the same thing.  If I move an open meeting window across monitors it completely locks up graphically until closed and re-opened.  This is just a graphical issue as audio on Zoom keeps working.

     

    So not specifically a VW issue but maybe someone else ran across this and figured out the fix.

     

    VW is running on the graphics card, and the external monitor is running on the graphics card.  Both confirmed via the GPU activity display.

     

    Not sure if the signature has updated, so just in case:
     

    VW 2023 SP5 - Build 702742

    Alienware M15 Ryzen R5

    AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX 3.3Ghz

    NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

    GeForce Game Ready Driver 536.4 - latest update available

     

    Hoping someone might have some thoughts.  Thanks.

  4. 13 hours ago, C. Andrew Dunning said:

     

    Not just you - though, the default Z value I'm seeing doesn't seem to be linked to any of the model data.  And...instances I place have a negative Z value.

     

    For me this is what I see.  If I drop a TV using the tool, it gets a negative Z value as you also seem to be seeing:


    image.png.0198acd4698fb6c10108272985a778cc.png

     

    But if i look in the symbol itself at the Record data:

    image.png.3852209e4874cf165e9520a9f6f05dd2.png

     

    The negative Z height is the same as the Height value, and seems to be for every TV I drop using the tool.  This is new behaviour in 2023.  At first I thought maybe TVs no longer need an entered height and width, but the generic ones all still have a value entered for those.

  5. I am seeing something weird, and I don't think it's just me or the custom symbols I am using.

     

    If I add a TV object using the default Spotlight tool, the TV object is placed with a Z height (even when dropped from plan view).  The Z height seems to be improperly looking at the "Height" screen parameter stored in the TV screen data in the symbol.  This is something new happening for 2023 after moving resource files over.  This is also happening when inserting the stock symbols as well, so I would not think that there has been a change to the tool and what the fields mean/do.

     

    Anyone else run in to this?  It's minor, just having to correct the Z height, but it's bugging me.

  6. 19 hours ago, Kevin Allen said:

    So, I'm not sure and I haven't tested, but why couldn't you have a texture with the color shader set to object attributes and have the transparency as you like?

     

    For the lens on a spotlight lighting device, that's set in the Spotlight Preferences.There must be a lens object, grouped with the body and the lens need a class with a texture (glow shader, object attributes, Cast Shadows turned off). In the spotlight prefs Modify lighting instrument color set to color field, and only the lens class. 

    Once you apply transparency the texture ignores the object colour and just uses the colour set in the transparency shader.

     

    With the lens object using a glow texture, let's say you have a render where you're looking at the lens, the glow texture doesn't give that "staring at a light" effect.  If you turn the glow texture brightness up it mucks with the colour saturation, eventually just turning white.  You can muck around with a renderworks camera and go through the exposure etc, and try to balance all of the other lighting objects, but If I could put a really bright white glow texture "inside" the fixture, and have the lens object by a transparency, then my bright glow object would be coloured by the transparency and I solve my "not being able to turn up a glow texture brightness" issue.

  7. On 1/20/2020 at 11:03 AM, Kevin Allen said:

    While I think I understand, I still feel a bit confused. That said, I often wish there was a way to copy some settings from texture to texture, OR have a 'master' shader applied to multiple textures. Particularly true of transparency and bump

    Right now, in a drawing, if I want green, red, and blue glass, I need to create separate green, red, and blue glass textures.  But I can use a single glow texture, apply it to ten different objects, give them a different object fill colour, and the glow texture for each object changes colour.

     

    If I could have a single transparency texture and apply it to different objects, and have it use the object colour for the transparency, there are a number of things I can now do with that texture.  One of them would be to play around with using a transparency texture on a 'gel' object in front of a spotlight instrument, and my rendering might look more realistic than the glow texture, which has limitations in brightness capability.

  8. 2 hours ago, Kevin Allen said:

    curious how you see this affection g the transparency?

    Right now we can use a single texture for things like glow textures, across multiple items, and the glow texture uses the object colour.  If we could do that with transparencies, you could have one glass texture and use it across multiple items and have the object colour affect the glass transparency colour.  Seems like a useful option.

  9. I would really like to see Glow Textures get "fixed" so that if you increase the brightness over 100 it doesn't 'over-expose' the colour to white (or give us an option either way). 

     

    I'm trying to make my fixtures look like the fronts are glowing relatively realistically in renders, and re-balancing the entire drawing (camera exposure, other glow texture brightness, render light brightness, etc) around trying to make the lens glow texture flare as if you are looking at the fixture is a real pain in the ass.  It would seem far easier to just be able to turn up the brightness on my lens glow texture without it washing the colour out to white when I do so.

     

    To me this seems like a simply fix.

    • Like 1
  10. Did a quick search but didn't see a topic about this already.

     

    So 2020 is doing a weird thing.  Every so often my menus go grey and stop functioning.  For example File>Save is greyed out and will not perform it's action.  The only way I can save is to close the program and say Yes to the save prompt. 

     

    All of my menu options get greyed out and nothing works.

     

    Restarting VW corrects the issue.

  11. I'm not sure what I am doing incorrectly here.

     

    I am playing around with the Renderworks Camera Tool with the exposure, bloom, etc settings, and I am not seeing any differences when rendering.

     

    Now, I am just in my design layer and using a selection of custom render styles to mess around here.  Is there a setting in the render styles that has to be active for the camera effects to be applied?  Or do they only work on viewports in sheet layers?

     

    Otherwise as I said, I am not seeing any change in my results when adjusting camera settings like exposure and bloom.

     

    What I am playing around with is wanting to adjust exposure and bloom so that my spotlight lens glow texture looks like the fixture is actually emitting light as in real life.  Then will adjust exposure and spotlight object light brightness to get my renders looking more realistic.  This was a suggestion from Jim a while ago I just haven't had time to sit down and play around with it.

     

    I feel like I'm missing something.

     

    Running 2020 SP2.

    • Like 1
  12. I might be splitting hairs on this, but I find it constantly annoying.

     

    Alright, let's say I create a cropped viewport on a sheet layer, then I go in to the viewport and move the crop, I would really like Vectorworks to be a bit smarter and keep the viewport crop centered on the sheet layer where it was originally and not make me run after the viewport and move the object back to where it was on the sheet layer.  Surely this is feasible?

    • Like 2
  13. Update, the culprit seems to be the desktop background image slide show.  The hiccups were aligned to just after the desktop changed to a new image, disabled the slide show on the desktop and VW seems to be happier.  So MS seems to have done something to the backend causing screen processing or refreshing issues or something.

    • Like 1
  14. Updated to Windows 10 - 1903 yesterday at the end of the day.  Today VW is running rather... unsmoothly….  Every couple of minutes I get a short hangup.  Anyone else noticing stability issues or do I need to go monkeying around in my settings to figure out what Microsoft just buggered around with.

     

    At first I thought it might have to do with the autosave cycle, so turned that off to see, and made no difference.

  15. Is there a way to get more brightness out of a glow texture other than increasing the glow intensity, which starts to wash out the colour and turn it white?

     

    Right now I use glow textures to re create things like LED tubes, etc, that are in view of audience, and I find they don't get enough "kick" in the renders.  If I turn up the brightness setting for the texture it gets brighter for sure, but also starts to desaturate the colour.

     

    Thoughts?

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