Dave Donley

Hello ED08: Can you attach the image files to the post? What OS? It would not be expected for the app to crash when importing 2MB image files. Version 12 had a limitation of images less than 4096 pixels wide, but 2008 and 2009 do not have image width limitations.

Hello highpass: Try a Granite color shader with different shades of green (several very dark green), and a Wrapped Leather bump shader with all amplitudes except Fold Amplitude turned down.

Do all the viewports have the same background? Can you tell which of the settings might not have carried over in the copy? If the file size is not huge you could try emailing the file to me and I can try to figure out what happened there...

Hello CS1: Try the following (assuming a viewport): 1. Set the viewport ambient lighting to less than 10%, say 5%. 2. Set the viewport background render mode to Fast RW. 3. Set the sheet layer DPI to something low like 20 or 40 DPI. 2. Update the viewport to verify the brightness of the directional lighting, mainly to make sure that ambient wasn't the only lighting affecting the model. Adjust directional (don't touch ambient!) light levels until the model is lit adequately, leaving space for some indirect lighting as well. Try just the directional light from the sun to start with. 3. Set the viewport to Custom RW render mode. 4. In the Custom RW Options, turn on Final Gather, set the Detail Size to 1 foot (or 300mm) and Accuracy to 10%. 5. Render the viewport. 6. Either tweak the light brightness, or enable auto exposure in the Custom RW Options Render pane to adjust brightness further. 7. Try importing an HDRI file to be used as a RW Background resource, to give softer lighting and more depth and interest. I usually set the saturation for the background to 50%, and the brightness to 100%. http://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=109376#Post109376 8. When the lighting is working well for the model, increase the sheet layer DPI to a reasonable resolution for printing. Note that not all printouts require 300 DPI or more - sometimes 150 DPI is adequate. 9. Increase the final gather accuracy to get smooth light gradients going across your surfaces, reduce the detail size to resolve tighter indirect lighting. I use accuracy values like 10%, 50%, 70%, and sizes of 1', 4", 1", for example. Start with 1' and 10% first though; a lot of times that does the job.

The attached files above used brightnesses of 1000% which is too bright. Try these which are set to 100% instead.

Hello M5d: It is a feature of VW that bitmap objects with None fill draw transparent where the pixels are white. Set the viewport's fill to solid to disable this behavior.

Hello petensen: This usually is caused by overlapping geometry, which can happen if you have a layer's geometry linked in multiple times. Are the speckly parts of a particular texture like glass?

Hello again Bill: Try this instead of using Custom Radiosity and increasing the values in there. Custom RenderWorks Options Enable Final Gather in the Final Gather pane Set size to 1' Set Accuracy to 10% Go to Render pane, enable Auto Exposure Set Brightness to 180% Render with Custom RW mode. That should work faster and have less annoying artifacts than using Fast Radiosity. Radiosity will look better with smaller sizes set through Custom Radiosity, the trick with this file is the model is very simple and Fast Radiosity sets the sizes pretty coarse. It assumes more detail is in the model.

Hello Graham: The Attribute Mapping tool lets you adjust the texture mappings' 2D parameters (offset, scale, and rotation), using the mouse rather than with sliders and entering numbers like the Edit Mapping dialog.

Hello billtheia: It looks like the triangulation for the house is extremely coarse with Fast Radiosity. Custom Radiosity would allow more triangles and more accuracy. Otherwise send me the file and I can look into it. Some of the vertices are likely inside the roof or the floor and that is why they aren't lit. These are called shadow leaks.

Hello jmurray: In general you can help reduce render times by 1. Reducing complexity of geometry (i.e. lots of geometric detail to less detail) 2. Reducing amount of geometry (hiding things using classes) 3. Number of pixels (sheet layer DPI is one example) 4. Number of shadows and/or complexity of shadows (area and line lights fall here because they are like adding many more lights with shadows to the scene) 5. Amount of reflections and refractions (through reflective textures like glass or mirror, amount of reflections can be controlled through the CustomRW Options) 6. Indirect lighting calculations through radiosity and final gather. The controls for these features are intended to balance speed versus quality. Hope this helps!

Hello: The QuickTime VR "viewer" is built into Quicktime, so anyone who has iTunes or Quicktime can view these models.

Hello Maxbrandt: Create a new texture, and choose the Mirror reflectivity shader. If you want it to be a pure mirror set the mirror slider to 100% and the ambient, diffuse, and specular sliders to zero. HTH,

Hi DWood: You could do this by extracting the image prop's mask image (right click on the texture resource in the Resource Browser) and changing the mask in Photoshop or other imaging app to have reduced contrast. Rather than going from white to black the mask image should from gray to black. White is completely opaque and black is completely transparent. HTH!

Hello gov: This chopping board is from the maxwell materials forum. If you download it you can use the image(s) to create a RW texture. http://mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com/search.php#page=1&mode=1&id=1848&search=chopping HTH,

I bet they are arrowheads. Maybe the layer scale needs to be adjusted...

Hi Graham: The Edit Texture dialog's Size field is important because it is the starting point for everything. The easiest way to do it would be to set the Edit Texture dialog's size field to 1", set the grid shader's width and height fields to 6 and the Grid Size field to 2. That way "6" means 6 times 1 inch. This technique can be problematic when the shader values get to be large; sometimes the shader dialogs may not let you type in values over a certain number (like 100 or more).

Hello Graham: The units are similar for most widths and heights in the shader edit dialogs. They are fractions relative to the texture size in the Edit Texture dialog. So if the texture size were 1m and you typed in 0.5 for the grid width that would render as 0.5m. HTH!

Hello CS1, Try turning on GDI+ in the VW display prefs?

Hi Peter, the ribs are from a bump shader that is not image-based, so OpenGL doesn't see them. The stripes might could be done using colors so that OpenGL renders them too.

Hello Sofia: This is a texture I have been using to simulate corrugated polycarbonate for a greenhouse. Might make the size smaller for the smaller ribs. Make sure to create a 3D object with thickness so that the refraction renders correctly. One way is to clip a large circle with a very slightly smaller circle and extruding it. That object would be like a thin-walled tube that would render OK. HTH.

Hello again Grant: It may be disabled because that texture is not from a "wrapped" shader (ones with an asterisk next their names *). Those kinds of shaders are 3D; they aren't like wrapping a piece of veneer around the wood but more like the object is made from one solid/3D/continuous piece of wood. Thanks for the ideas Peter!

Hello Grant: 1. Shouldn't the default be that the wood grain follows the longest edge of the object? Is the wood image oriented with the grain going horizontally in the dialog or vertically? The default mapping assumes that the wood image's grain is horizontal. Does setting the mapping rotation to 90 degrees help this? 2. Do you mean that the texture size for the texture resource isn't enough to set the size of the texture? By rotation do you mean 90 degrees or arbitrary angles? If you have any images that illustrate these problems that would help document this wish. Thanks!

Hello clb: So the machine is overheating and shutting down?

Hello domer1322: Uncheck the Render Geometry checkbox for the light. The line will never show in the rendering for image export, printing, viewports, etc. unless the render geometry checkbox is on for the light. If you're talking about the line that shows in wireframe, the VW Preferences->Display->Display Light Objects preference can turn off the wireframe line. Note that the help text in the VW prefs is incorrect, render speed is not affected by the preference (showing the wireframe light representations does not slow rendering at all).