Cloud Hidden

All the alternative ways are fine, but I'll continue hoping for the QTVR feature to be added to RW. The quality is quite sufficient for the clients--considering that these are residential projects, and for the niche of a field I'm in, people aren't even getting 3D from other designers and yet typically paying more.....that places VW/RW quality faaaaaaarrrrrr above the standard and becomes a real selling point for me. So there's no profit in getting Artlantis or spending the time it takes to roll my own, so to speak. Given VW's already pretty darn good QT support, I'd speculate that adding QTVR support would involve an almost trivial amount of development time and yield great results. I've watched clients viewing a 576K QTVR and spinning around and back and forth, and it's a great sales tool.....iff the work involved in creating it isn't onorous.

So on that first photo, which textures are your images? And the bkg, sky, trees...a photo you overlaid the bldg on, or other way of doing it?

I have some long renderings, so the time spent watching gives me time to think. Instead of the light gray checkerboard pattern, which gets really boring, how about displaying the wireframe, and having the rendering work its way down over that. At least we'd see something relevant, and beats a test pattern.

I'd love to double-click an object and have the OIP open if it was closed. Used this all the time on DenebaCAD. Here, it's a menu item only, so I tend to leave the OIP open at the cost of screen space.

I can do the Convert Copy to Line thing with hidden lines to create an elevation. But with the compound curve surfaces I use, the triangulated surface lines are driving me crazy. I have what must be thousands of them I have to select and delete to get down to the bare necessities, which is the outline of the building. Any tricks for getting just the ooutline as an elevation, rather than all the many, many line segments? And while we're here, it doesn't seem that VW calcs the surface area of my object, which is a nurbs surface that became a solid subtraction. This wiuld be HUGELY useful, because from that number I can accurately calculate a whole buncha different construction costs. Without it, I gotta make some crazy guesses. Any tricks for finding the area of the surface of this kind of object?

[ 09-09-2002: Message edited by: Cloud Hidden ]

Yeah, I knew I _could_, but it's kinda like the North symbols in my mind, and I thought they might have a pretty one already there.

Is there a CL symbol hiding out somewhere in the Object Browser or elsewhere? The Find from Resources doesn't wanna seem to work. And I hate having to make my own overlapped CL symbol all the time...

QuickTime Virtual Reality. Used it a lot in DenebaCAD. With all of your QT support, it seems like a gimme. Best 2 things about it....smaller files than a movie...and the user controls are great for seeing the interior of a room.

Exporting Image. I use a Mac....I will NEVER export a BMP. But it is always the selection in the dialog, and I ALWAYS have to change it when I export. Perhaps you have it in your hearts to retain the last setting of file type as a convenience to us long suffering fools out here...

Extrude a shape and you can use perimeter mapping to place the texture. Did this for a funly shaped counter top, and the "end" was actually the top surface, which worked well. But if you subtract a solid from it, for example to put a whole into the counter, you can no longer use perimeter mapping (not even an option), and so the surface doesn't get the texture properly. Is there a better way to do a countertop so that a marble texture, for example, shows up nicely?

Does VW support QuickTime Virtual Reality? If so I can't find it. It's similar to the rotation animation, but often better in that it creates a much smaller file, and the controls for viewing it are more efficient than a linear movie. Rotation is cool, too, because you can spin around something from the outside, but for looking at the inside of a room, QTVR can't be beat.

So when you select objects in an unlocked linked layer, you're really selecting the layer the objects belong to, rather than the drawing object itself? Odd. Seems like an unnecessary complication. My assumption was that the Create Layer Link command would always highlight the layers linked to the current layer, and that either unselecting them or selecting new ones is how you'd change the composition of the set--after all, it's just a list with multiple selections. Oh well. Thanks for the explanations.

You expressed my feelings well. It's great that it can do all it can do. I grow fonder of the product all the time. But the first 24 hrs with DTM's was not exactly a case of mutual attraction. Took LOTS of experiments to get the steps right, thrown off by it not working the same in two different files. But finally got it, and the painful memories are receding, and it was a good reason to clean up the file anyway...

"Wall Opening" in VW Architect Sampler. Perfect. Thanks!

Re that Edit|Unlock, it's disabled....unless you select an object, which I never tended to do in a Linked Layer, and in which case I woulda figured it to Unlock the object, rather than the layer, but I see now how they do it. It seems I can add new layers into the link by successive uses of the Link command, but I cannot remove layers. Right? None of this is a complaint about LL, be/c they're totally cool and convenient. I use them constantly. Just trying to figure out the nuances, which, shall we say, are not exactly exhaustively documented.

Thanks for the guidance. I understand it, except... >each becomes a separate locked "layer link object". >You can always unlock and delete the ones that refer to layers you don't want linked anymore. I've noticed it's locked by selecting an object and looking in OIP. But I can't find where to look for the way to unlock it. Not "Layers..." or anywhere else I've snooped around. Got a hint? Thanks.

Gotta put a hole in a wall. Know I can't do a solids subtraction or I lose the wall characteristics. Other ideas? Thanks.

Ended up being easier to copy all the layers and objects from the original to the one whose DTM behaved, than fight with the textures. Still curious how I could have learned the class controlling the contour texture besides trial and error...

I have a file with complex 3D shapes that renders fine. It's about 10 Mg. Tried to add a DTM to it to make a depression for an on-site pond. Only about 5 closed polygons. Reduced the 3D Poly complexity. No matter what I try with the DTM-mesh class, when rendering it, it won't show the texture. Created the same thing in a new doc, withexactly the same steps and polys, and it shows perfectly. Have spent all day trying it in all sorts of variations, with same results. Even used this new one as a symbol to place in the original file, and it shows without the texture. Is that the right class to change for Extruded Contours? And where is that even documented, be/c it took a bunch of experimenting to figure even that out? Can the number of other objects in a file affect the way one of them might render? Or might something else cause this?

Well that just sounds just plain illogical. You're likely right, but I can't think of a reason it'd be that way, and the interface, by not disabling the Linked Layer menu item, suggests that it should be possible. Ideally, NNA can make what seems like a simple change to allow links to be redefined. If not, at least the interface should reflect that.

In my latest rendering of a new building, the windows are gray and opaque. Huh? How does this happen. I've used the same Marvin/Generic objects elsewhere and the glass is clear. Can't figure out what I might have done to turn these windows opaque. Ideas? Thanks.

Have you spoken with anyone regarding your cruel streak? Just kidding! That was funny, especially 'cause I was so psyched there was an answer. [1 hour later...] OK, just figured it out, and probably killed off some brain cells from the effort. In the one that worked, I must have used a template that defined some classes, especially Style-Glazing 1. In the ones that didn't work, I was working from a customized template, which didn't include Style-Glazing 1. It wasn't obvious to me at that point that those styles were really classes requiring my attention and definition. I thought they were predefined thingies. I kept focusing on the one thing I knew to be a class, which was the window object, whose class is Window-Main. But it seems--if I'm seeing this accurately--that Window-Main doesn't really apply to anything physical, because if you select that as the current class and display "Active Only", you see absolutely nothing, yet a Select All will select it. The stiles, glass, etc are really a Style class, so Active Only won't display them. Of course, if you display the style class as Active Only, you also see nothing, because the window is the Window-Main class. I imagine there's a certain logic to that, but not to me not right then. How do you just see the windows if not via the class? So I'm guessing that in my standard template I'd better define a few style classes so that I have windows working right from the outset. If there are any other suggestions in this vein, I'd sure appreciate them.

Thanks for the suggestion. Took a while to find it, even with your mention that it's there. It's better than the way I was doing it, so again thanks, but still more steps than is efficient. Elliptical tools are the one (and only) area in which I favor DenebaCAD. Should really be able to drag an ellipse or elliptical arc from a center point. It's not hard at all (at least compared to most of the things I ask for ) and the VW interface would easily handle it with just another option on the tool bar.

Walls in the buildings I design rise to meet a dome, so the exterior surface is a hemisphere, or ellipsoid, or any variant on these. I'm having to split the surface, put it in the same layer as the wall, and then add and drag peaks to the walls to get the wall to neatly fit the dome's shell. While I'm relieved that I can at least accomplish what I need to, doing this for each and every wall takes just slightly less time than the framers need to build the actual wall. A feature that grows a wall to a specific surface (kind of a Connect/Combine tool for walls to other surfaces) would save me more time than any single other feature I can think of. Yeah, I know, it's always "Me, me, me..." Thanks.