[Renders Turning Black Once Updated]

Not sure if this helps, but I had a render crank through and then turn black, all I did was nudge the VP over and it refreshed perfectly fine.  I've been seeing minor issues with screen refresh of objects that the occasional nudge seems to correct.

[Component 2d Symbol Geometry]

Spotlight

[Symbol insertion not via Insertion Point]

Yep, that would do it.  I blame 2019 for resetting things.  I have never touched that setting before.  Thanks Kevin.

[Symbol insertion not via Insertion Point]

Here's a weird thing I'm seeing since moving up to 2019.  My symbols are not inserting via the Insertion Point, but rather it seems the very most screen left piece of geometry.

 

Two images below:

 

One shows my symbol if I go in to edit 2d geometry.  The table and locus points are centered around the 0,0 coordinates for the symbol, and it lists as insertion point properly.

 

 

Two shoes me inserting the symbol on to a Design Layer, notice the symbol is being handles by the far left locus, not the 0,0 Insertion Point of the symbol.

 

 

 

I'm guessing something is going funky, and that I am not missing a new "Insertion Point" feature where to can manually set the point off of the 0,0 for the symbol?

[Component 2d Symbol Geometry]

I am referring to this:

 

When I place the cursor over the fields to input a scale value I get the tooltip note noted at the bottom.  It does seem to function, but if I set the values, close the window, and open the window again, the values are "locked in" and greyed out, and I can only adjust them after turning off the auto display and turning it back on.

[Component 2d Symbol Geometry]

I saw that, but the tooltip at the bottom of the window indicated that the function was only available to Architect keys, and would not function with my Spotlight only key, so I left it alone.  It does seem to function, but as intended only when I re-scale the entire drawing layer space does it take affect.  So there is not a way to select which detail level to use like in a viewport then?

[Component 2d Symbol Geometry]

Query about the new Component Symbol Geometry, I am not seeing a way to take advantage of the layers of detail if working on the Design Layers.  I see it functioning on the Sheet Layers, and it's a great feature, I'm just curious if there's a way to leverage the tool when rendering directly from the Design Layer space.  Not that I render from there much except for OpenGL on occasion.

[Graphics glitch?]

 

I have encountered the same problem, and was not entertained.  Had also forgotten to add 2019 to the program list.

[Export Current View w/ Clip Cube on]

I’m away from my computer at the moment, but all I’m doing is looking at my design layer in normal perspective via OpenGL, cutting with the cube, then using the export PDF command from file export.

 

if I go back to iso perspective and try the same thing the cut works fine.  Once I activate perspective it doesn’t.

 

 

[Export Current View w/ Clip Cube on]

This is weird.  I want to take a quick screen capture of a room layout to send to a colleague.  I am in OpenGL with Perspective, and have the Clip Cube active to remove the "fourth wall", but my PDF export is ignoring the Clip Cube.  That seems weird.

 

Thoughts?

[Do not buy a 4K Laptop if you plan on using 2nd Monitor]

I don't have the crashing issue, but even on a non-4k display I end up with scaling issues with the second monitor at 100%.  It grabs the scale from whichever monitor the main window is on it seems, which can throw off the pallettes on the other.  I run my secondary monitors at the same scale as the laptop display, 125%.  Does that fix your crashing issue if you set your off-board to 200% as well?

[3d Locus not visible in wireframe Orthogonal view]

Just now, Kevin McAllister said:

This is easily reproducible so I've bug submitted it.

 

Kevin

 

so have I, though I may have also submitted twice accidentally

[3d Locus not visible in wireframe Orthogonal view]

So this is new.  My 3d loci are not showing up and the culprit seems to be Unified View.  3d loci are set to display in wireframe, but do not, until I turn off Unified View.  This is new, and I do not like it.  Thoughts?  I don't recall having this issue before the latest service pack update.

[Spotlight Objects not rendering in Section View]

1 hour ago, Rob Books said:

Are the lights on and at a level where they would be visible.  Spotlight lighting objects work slightly different than regular lighting objects, they require either Designer or Spotlight license to work properly if I recall.

In every other viewport they are working as intended, it's just the section viewport.  When I have a spare moment I'm going to create a completely blank file and run a test to see if I can replicate in a fresh file.

[Spotlight Objects not rendering in Section View]

Here's an oddity I'm running across.  I have a file I'm working on for some client renders, there is a mix of spotlight fixtures and regular visualisation light objects.  If I cut a section out from the drawing, in this case a front stage view, using the clip cube it technically works, but in rendering it will not visualise the spotlight fixtures, their lights aren't rendered.  It's not a huge deal, I'm just missing a couple of gobo breakups on the furniture and my front wash. My workaround has been to just use Vis Light objects for the stage wash, but is this normal behaviour?

 

I haven't tested this yet in a fresh blank file to see if it's something file specific.  I normally don't bother with section cuts but decided to do one this time around and then ran in to this little annoyance.

 

Thoughts?

[Slider for Zoom Fixtures beam size]

This is something I would love to see, which would make my life insanely easier and hopefully others.

 

Right now Spotlight fixture objects can only handle a single set of beam/field and candlepower figures, but why can't we put the beam, field, and candlepower values in for a low and high end of a zoom range and then have a slider to move along between them in the OIP?  Practically every moving light has a zoom parameter, and conventional zooms and fresnels all have posted values for the narrow and wide extremes.  As it is, if I adjust the zoom factor of a fixture but want to take advantage of the light calculators I need to manually do the inverse square math on the candlepower values to find the correct number.  Surely the object info pallete can handle this level of math and make dealing with zoom fixtures much easier.

 

Thoughts?

[Focus Rendering Attention]

18 hours ago, Matt Overton said:

Many times you let a render run in the background only to find an error (human mostly) that means some part of the scene hasn't worked properly. A texture hasn't taken the the way you thought it would, it's scales all out or to reflective.

 

So you fix then re-render the viewport. The change you have made is a long way from where the viewport starts the rendering so it's going to be a while be before you see the result.

 

It would be great if there was a way to direct the renders attention to the most relevant parts of the image first. Then just let it go on it's marry way. 

Say by hovering the cursor over the target location or setting hot spots by pressing a key over those locations.

 

What I do is fly around in the design layers bouncing between OpenGL and Fast Renderworks in the walkthrough tool, only looking at small pieces at a time before I page up a viewport and start a full render.  Would definitely be on board for an option along the lines of 'focus center of rendering on next mouse click' or something.  Also I would just love to be able to put the power of my GPU in to the process and speed the whole thing up.

[Visualisation Lights renaming themselves]

Has anyone else had the issue of visualisation light objects renaming themselves after being edited?  If I have a number of light objects and I've renamed them Front-1, Up-1, Back-1 etc in series, often after right clicking and selecting edit from the visualisation pallete and making some adjustments my names revert back to a default Light-1, Light-2 etc and I lose my organisation?  Thoughts?

[Glow textures]

23 minutes ago, JimW said:

Yes, it's the only real exposure control at the moment. I use camera objects in conjunction with sheet layer viewports. If you already have a viewport set up in a perspective walkthrough view, you can add a camera by simply editing the viewport, selecting Edit Camera (even if it wasnt create from one) then placing a camera anywhere and clicking Match Current View" in the cameras object info palette, then you don't have to use walkthrough to set the view up again and can still start enabling camera effect.

Awesome, thanks Jim

[Glow textures]

23 minutes ago, JimW said:

Ahh that can mess with the color values as well, any time you get the brightness over 200-300 or even just above 100, the colors will wash out or combine strangely. You can avoid this by increasing the brightness of the scene using a Renderworks Camera's Exposure camera effect instead of manually turning the brightness way up.

 

Is the only way to increase exposure to use a camera object?  Or can this also be done in walkthrough as well?  That could potentially solve two issues at the same time.

[Glow textures]

9 minutes ago, JimW said:

I normally recommend controlling the glow's color via the Glow shader itself directly, and leaving the base Color shader of the texture set to pure white or a warm/cool white instead. This means creating and applying more than one Glow texture, but I find it's much better at giving me control over the end result. 

OpenGL will not show Glow at all, nor will it give an accurate representation of what a texture color will look like in a scene that is utilizing indirect lighting. 

You MIGHT be able to get proper results if your base attribute colors on the tubes are the only thing controlling color, and the Glow shader is using a pure white, but if that still doesn't seem to be working for you, or if thats what you tried in the first place, send me your file and I can take a closer look.

 

I'll give that a shot and see what the results are compared to what I am doing right now.  Right now my glow texture is set to take the object colour, with the glow set to white.  This was more for speed, this way I can have one texture to worry about and can quickly assign colours by simply selecting the objects and changing the object fill colour.  Right now I have the glow texture set to brightness 400 to get the amount of light I want out of them, but I'm wondering if that is causing the colours to 'bloom' to white.

[Glow textures]

Does anyone have an explanation or a fix for why the "light" from a glow texture is usually a completely different shade from the fill colour?  I have a bunch of LED tubes I'm rendering with a glow texture set to the fill colour of the objects.  In OpenGL I set the fills and get a nice selection of blues and purples across the stage, but when I render I basically get two colours, light cyan/blue and magenta.  Thoughts?  Or do other people run in to this as well?

[Renderworks Viz Lights Renaming Themselves]

So here's what I want to be able to do:

 

Build a drawing, drop in some 3d venue geometry and scenery etc, add some visualisation lights, and then fly around in OpenGL and tweak the visualisation lights until I'm somewhat happy, then bounce in and out of fast render to double check everything before final render.

 

Here's what happens:

 

If I go in to OpenGL view and select a group of visualisation light objects in the pallete I can turn them off and on until the cows come home, but I get one time I can right click from the pallete and go to edit the light objects.  After that one time that functionality stops working.  What then also happens is after a while being able to turn lights on and off stops working and the whole light objects functionality stops completely until I restart the program.  The Vis pallete says I am turning lights on and off but in OpenGL and renders nothing changes.  Needless to say this is getting very annoying having to restart every five minutes tweaking a file for rendering.

 

Edit:  And I also forgot to mention, if I rename Visualisation light objects to more easily find them in the pallete, they will rename themselves back to the Light-# standard after performing an edit on them.

 

Is anyone else running in to a brick wall with working with visualisation lights or is it just me?

 

Alienware 15 R2

i7-6700HQ 2.6Ghz

16 GB Ram

NVidia GeForce GTX 970M

 

[Ungroup option for Hybrid Symbols]

Personally I think this should be a standard part of the convert to group command.  Only being able to retain either 2d or 3d geometry of a symbol being converted is annoying.  This would also fix "insert as group" symbols, as you can lose geometry in a symbol when inserted.

[Title Block 2018]

Thread created in the Troubleshooting forum, thanks Nikolay.