Dave Donley

Hello @line-weight and others: We are changing some of the settings we use for Redshift renderings, that will improve performance in a future update. The current Redshift performance in Vectorworks is often slower than the Renderworks render modes that are not using Redshift. This will change. Maxon is committed to Redshift as its built-in rendering for C4D, and we are committed to Redshift as the built-in presentation rendering for Vectorworks. This is a transition, where over time it will be more obvious that Redshift is the best choice for final rendering quality and speed. We are updating both Cineware and Redshift to the latest versions available to us for each Vectorworks release. This helps you get compatibility with Sonoma and M3 sooner. We have work to do in Redshift performance, texture data and UI, and lighting consistency of data and results between the various render modes. And landscape rendering workflows and results too as you mention here. Thanks for the information!

Hello @Elias B try going to NVIDIA's site and update your video drivers. This sounds like an issue with the drivers.

The texture thumbnail looking like that means that Cineware did not launch properly. It either timed out launching, or is missing a system component. This can happen if you copy Vectorworks to a new machine without running the installer, which installs required software components in the system. Or, on first launch, Cineware may take an unusual amount of time, and the second launch should be faster and successful. Or, if you recently updated the OS significantly (like going to a new major version); re-running the installer should help.

One detail that may be helpful for external renderer workflow would be to use referenced image objects. When you import an image into Vectorworks you can have it be done as a reference. Thereafter if you were to update the same image in the same location you would then just update the reference.

Vectorworks 2024 lifts this limitation, in Shaded render mode lit fog can show shadowed fog correctly.

https://enscape3d.com/enscape-for-mac/?utm_campaign=Enscape-Release-2023-h2-MacOS&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter2404&utm_source=hs_email Enscape for macOS is out now, compatible with Vectorworks 2023 SP6 and Vectorworks 2024.

We are using the Altus denoising, which works on all hardware. We will look into detecting that an NVIDIA card is being used and set to Optix on that. More info about Redshift's denoising here: https://help.maxon.net/r3d/katana/en-us/Content/html/Denoising.html

Regarding the Cineware launch times, on macOS the first time after an install the OS will check security on all the files in the Cineware folder. The "Loading Cineware" phase of launching will take awhile because there are many files to check, on my M1 Max 32GB it takes about 15-20 seconds. This happens for each new install location. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc launches should be much faster for the "Loading Cineware" step; for me 3-5 seconds. If you are seeing it always slow that is unexpected.

Yes the new ways are to use AI for upsampling/denoising. And some GPU-accelerated ones are very fast. AI image generation has a direct relationship to denoising. AI image generation is trained by running from a supplied image and adding noise to it to go to a noisy image, the evaluation of the trained model runs this in reverse to go from noise to something like a real image. Neat stuff. https://learnopencv.com/denoising-diffusion-probabilistic-models/

I agree I would turn off denoising. But Luis here and I disagree on use of denoising. I think the result is not noticeable enough to justify the 2x slower rendering. I don't mind the look of grain in the image. Redshift really doesn't like lights that are set to not cast shadows. So avoid that, lights should be set to cast shadows. Might turn down sampling quality to medium if you are trying to save time, but denoising will be the biggest speed improvement. To really see what the various light contributions are, set ambient to zero and turn off indirect lighting and render that. I often see models where almost nothing is coming from the lights and ambient is patching up the scene making it look flat.

@Mark Aceto I also don't understand how the lens is getting a texture in this file. The render pane says texture is set to None. I don't see any face overrides, but the object still acts as if it has the lens glow texture assigned. Turning ambient up and down has no effect on the lens geometry. I converted to group and ungrouped until I go to the generic solid lens.

I don't see FBX on our roadmap for import. We prefer open standards; I would imagine making the glTF support more official in a user-facing way might be something next.

@MGuilfoile 2024 is indeed very awesome, but I am a biased source 🙂

The latest fixes for USDZ import were in SP6. @MGuilfoile try SP6 or SP7 this is probably fixed there, can't tell without the file.

Haven't caught up with this energetic thread fully yet. Regarding the choice of the term "texture" instead of "material", when these were first added I tried to call them materials but was told by an experienced and well-respected architect the term "material" means something else to architects and something perhaps more important than the use for mere rendering. Hence using the term texture for this. In the source code these objects and dialog boxes were called "materialXXX" for many years despite the UI term being "texture". In rendering it really doesn't matter all that much, use of the term texture is not way incorrect despite the way the industry has coalesced around material as a standard term in the software, in the time since textures were added to MiniCad. I really like how Substance used that term, it's cool IMO. Now Vectorworks does have Materials and that term is fully occupied, and all the uses of "material" in the source code that previously meant "texture" were renamed. I like some of the suggestions, and you can know this thread is being read by responsible parties who can make these changes if that is decided.