Dave Donley

Hello: If you use a Constant Reflectivity shader in your texture it will not be affected by any light sources. It's not the same as glow, but having an object not affected by light sources can make it looks like it is a light source.

Hello again David: This is a bug with swept lines and transparent or reflective shaders. The renderer gets confused about which side of the sweep surface is in front of the other. We generate two sides for the swept line so that it doesn't disappear when you are looking at the backside of the sweep. I will fix this bug for a future version. Until it is fixed, you can get a correct rendering by drawing a polygon instead of a line for the sweep. I created a shape similar to yours by duplicating your lines and offsetting them slightly, then tracing a polygon around the endpoints of both sets of lines, then deleted the lines leaving only the polygon. When you render, in Custom RW mode make sure that the ray tracing recursion level is around 5 or more, because there will be more surfaces that the ray has to go through. Thanks for the info,

Hello Heather: In 8.5 the Document Prefs, Raster Render pane has a setting for Export DPI. If you export PICT this setting will produce more pixels in your image.

Hi David: Please send me the files at dave@nemetschek.net

UPDATE: VW 10 has STL export!

Hello RW Users: The Textures files in RW 10 need to be re-saved in order to avoid a problem when importing these textures into a file from previous versions of VW/RW. If you open, for example, a VW 9 file with textures into 10, then try to import one of the textures in the Textures folder, you may get an alert that mentions that the format NNAPhong already exists and the operation is canceled. We will fix this problem in future product CDs, but if you encounter this problem, open each file in the Textures folder and re-save it. Create a rectangle or other object then delete it so that the application thinks that the file has changed (so that the Save operation will do something). This should clear up the problem. Sorry for the omission,

Hello Heather: Use the Render Bitmap Tool to generate your renderings, you can specify any DPI for the generated bitmap.

Hello Marc: The rendering modes are layer-specific. Do you have like Show other layers on with multiple rendered layers or something? Layer links?

Hello Marc: quote: 1. Conducter a. Ambient b. Diffuse c. Specular d. Roughness e. Refraction f. Absorption 2. Dialectric a. Transmission b. Refraction 3. Phong a. Specular Exponent 1. The Conductor shader is an accurate metallic shader. You can simulate almost any common kind of metal with it if you have the physical constants for that metal (like from a physics textbook). a. Ambient: Set this higher to make the color shader used with the conductor reflectivity shader more pronounced. For example, if you have a blue marble color shader with a conductor reflectivity shader, setting the ambient value higher will make the blue marble more visible. b. Same thing for diffuse, but diffuse light is affected by the direction of the light hitting the object. c. Specular light is the highlight you see on shiny objects. Set this value higher to make the highlight brighter/more pronounced. d. Roughness: set this higher to make the metal seem more soft/dull/brushed rather than hard/shiny. e. Refraction: These are physical coefficients that define the behavior of light on metallic surfaces. You need a physics reference to set these values reliably. f. Absorption: Same thing. 2. Dielectric: This is an accurate glass shader. a. Transmission: Basically the same thing as transparency, set it higher to make the material more transparent. b. Refraction: Different transparent materials bend light more or less compared to other materials. For example, diamond bends light more than glass, which bends light more than water. Set this higher to bend the light more. 3. Phong: This is a basic shiny shader, invented by a dude named Phong. a. Specular Exponent: This value sets the sharpness of the specular highlight on shiny-looking materials. The higher this value is, the more "hard" the object will look. If you set it high the object would tend to look like a pool ball, lower values and it would tend to look like soft plastic. BTW, In RW 10 there is a help view in the edit shader dialogs that kind of describe the parameters better. There is also an appendix in the RW 10 manual that describes the shaders and their parameters pretty well. HTH,

Hello again Mike: It looks as if the NURBS surfaces are behaving as if they have two sides to them, and you get something similar as if you had 3D polygons that were coplanar (the "comb" effect). I will try to fix this as soon as I can.

Hello: If a directional light source is selected the Set Sun Position menu item will modify that light's direction, rather than creating a new light, so the deletions won't be necessary. You can definitely create the movie using VS, as that is how the Solar Animator itself was implemented (by Frank Brault). We have routines to create a movie file, create each frame, and close the movie. In between you have to modify the light's direction vector and rerender the document. There are about six equations to determine the sun direction vector; the formulas are available on the web if you are interested. HTH!

Hello Mike: What shaders are being used for the mirrored ball? What render settings were used, is this Final? I haven't been able to get the same result here with spheres or swept arcs, although I have seen these artifacts before.

Hello Mike: There is no distance blur feature in RW 10.

Hello: I added some information on how to create these kinds of things: http://www.nemetschek.net/cgi/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=17&t=000238

Hello Cloud Hidden: Go here to see how you can create these things with RW 9: http://www.nemetschek.net/cgi/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=17&t=000238

Hi everybody: Here is how Image Props in VW/RW 10 work: There are two features of image props that cannot be done with VW 9. One is the automatic transparent color mask generation feature, where a dialog lets you pick a transparent color to use for the mask for the prop. For example if you have an image of a tree and it has a yellow background you can click on one of the yellow pixels and the mask will be generated so that the yellow parts are transparent. The other is the auto-rotate feature, where the image prop will automatically rotate itself around the z-axis so that is it always facing toward the viewer. In VW 9 you can create prop objects manually, like this: 1. If you want the object to have a mask, you need to generate a grayscale bitmap where the white pixels are the opaque parts and the black pixels are the transparent part of the mask. 2. Determine the aspect ratio of your source images, ex. an image that is 300 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall has an aspect ratio of (height / width) = 2 / 3. 3. Create a rectangle with the height or width that you want, and use the aspect ratio of the source image to determine the other dimension. For example, if you wanted the width to be 6' then the height of the rectangle should be 6' * (2 / 3) = 4'. Create the rectangle with these dimensions and convert it to a 3D Polygon. 4. Create a new texture, using the source image for an Image Color shader, and using the mask image for a Mask Transparency shader. If you want the object to not be shaded by the lights on your model, set the Reflectivity shader to Constant. A good case for doing this is when you have pictures of trees that have sunlight and shadows already on them. 5. Click the Set By Image... button to set the size of the material to the size of the 3D polygon. If your polygon is 6' tall, then you can adjust the feature size segment so that it is oriented vertically from like the top left to the bottom left corner, and then type in 6' for the dimension. Or if you know the horizontal dimension just type it into the Size field in the Edit Texture dialog. 6. Apply the texture to the 3D polygon. You may have to flip the polygon to get the texture oriented correctly. Textures applied to 3D polygons are oriented so that the first edge of the polygon is the texture's x axis, by default. 7. To see the mask make sure that the RW mode has transparency on if Custom, or use Final as it has transparency turned on. - or - 1. Upgrade to VW/RW 10, and all this work will be done for you by the Image Prop feature! p.s. The Image Props can also be resized by the Object Info palette, the texture will resize to fit the object automatically.