propstuff

I agree with all of the above. It would be good to do some more rationalisation of the interface and the AP/OIP thing seems obvious, but I also have niggling doubts that it might make things worse than better (for reasons that I can't define). Another one that seems to be superfluous is the Navigation and Organisation pallettes. There are probably reasons that these 2 should be kept separate and not merged, but I can't put my finger on it. cheers

You would want to model it in 3D and use viewports to show the various views and sections. A simple form like that can aesily be modeled with extrusions of the various parts made from 2D views. You only need to make 1 ring, and 1 each of the different tabs. cheers

If you double click the locus tool the default location is 0,0 and you can just hit enter. :-)

Thanks Katie, I had forgotten that. We had tried the Callout tool and given up on it because of the difficulty of aligning and arranging multiple callouts on the page. I'll try using the callout tool with no text. cheers, N.

Dimension ticks thickness can be adjusted. I would like to be able to make the thickness of arrow head lines different to the leader line thickness. Specifically: big fat arrowheads for Concept and Masterplans. N.

Hi again Katie, The forum structure prior to the current version never did this to me, and I can't recall ever reading a complaint about it. Equally, I have used other BB's with apparently the same structure and never had a problem. On the other hand, pretty well as soon as this new version of the BB was introduced, something in it started "cutting off" people, and there has been regular anguish ever since. While the problem does seem random to some extent, it's happening to lots of people on different computers with different connections and different providers all over the world, and the only consistent factor is that it's this BB thats doing it. Having a Help forum that regularly destroys the help offered by members is not very.....helpfull. Please don't tell us that NNA expects this to be a permanent "feature" of the BB from now on. regards, N. PS, the only way for me to fix it is to turn Cookies back on in Safari to reload the page before turning them off again . Then it will work for a while, or a long while, or a short while. In fact it just did it to me again when posting the above, luckily I'm on the Mac, so I didn't loose it all. This time after turning on the cookies and reloading the page I was not logged in to the forum and had to log in again. That's never happened before. {:-?

It was to edit a post you have made. Different issue completely. Cheers, N.

Peter, I've had this happen after having just opened the browser 5 minutes before, and has nothing to do with being logged in as far as I can tell. You can do what you said on a Mac, but on Windows using the back button goes back to an empty field!!! This really is a MAJOR PITA, and is driving me (and everone else it seems) up the wall. Please fix it NNA.

I dont have time for a long reply, but Dave has written a good detailed guide for optimising Radiosity knowledge base -renderworks Also, if you search the forum, there are some detailed discussions on getting white walls to look white. It's an on-going problem that everyone has with RW plenty to work through there.. cheers

For your comparison: (ignore the artifacts at the wall/ceiing junction, that's just bad geometry on my part) This is the same scene set up as Dave suggested. Area lights just inside the window glazing 20,000lux 100% Sharp falloff, pale blue Area lights down the hall 20,00 lux 50% (100 was too much), sharp falloff, pale blue. Sun 20,000 lux 100%, pale yellow. No Ambient No HDRI Auto exposure, Otherwise settings as before. What you see here is pretty typical of the results I get whatever I try with Auto exposure turned on. EG; The brown "rammed earth" wall is orange and over saturated. The White walls, ceiling, kitchen, and refrigerator are almost uniformly grey and don't even look vaguely white. The texture of the floor has no colour or definition. The sun outside is way overexposed even though the sun spilling into the room is modest. Generally it looks "dead" As you can see; I can't manage Auto Exposure at all.

There was a recent post about "Stone Cad" -I think it was. It includes some quite good hatches including flagstones. Do a Search on the forum for more details. N.

I'm usually loathe to participate in the traditional sport of Mac Vs PC baiting -unless I'm bored or the competitors are particularly feisty. ;-D but I will weigh in here. The conventional wisdom -which agrees with my personal experience, is that Mac are far more "reliable" in the "usability" stakes. Their by-line is "it just works", and for me that's been 99.5% true. (certified by independant trueness auditors) I've managed to crash OS X twice since it came out (OS 10.1), hung the operating system a few times, and the most recent update I had to re-install because the first time it was busted. On the other hand I cant remember how many times Win2K and XP have pranged on me, and the number of peripherals that haven't worked, the general cludginess of the interface, and of course there's the Virus problem. Vista is still something of an unknown as it's so new. If Usability is important to you, if you want to just work, and don't want to spend time fiddling with computers, get a Mac: there; I've said it, -with a middle level Video card, and at least 1Gb of RAM. Good Luck :-)

Jim, That paticular experiment I used equal Lux values following Dave's advice that Lux is "light"/m2. I was trying to establish the relative values for the different lights and I reasoned that if the lights all had the same Lux value, it would provide a "bench mark", and I would get a better idea of the relative levels. This logic might be completely erroneous, and I'm not suggesting that you should do it that way; it's simply illustrating relative levels that might work for you. In general, I am just as likely to start with all the dimmers at 100% and go through the process of estimating and adjusting Lux levels that I outlined originally. I have never been able to produce a radiosity render with Auto Exposure that doesn't look washed out and un-natural to me. Others like dave use it successfully, but after literally hundreds and hundreds of test renders, I'm damned if I can set up lighting that looks satisfactory to me. I also use Custom nearly always because of the control. The exceptions are Fast Renderworks for setting non radiosity lighting levels, and Final quality Renderworks where radiosty is not needed and I dont need to tweak things extensively. HDRI is an example of the latter (and one of the few instances of "easy answers" ); radiosity can improve an HDRI, but generally the results are so satisfactory that it's not "needed". The amplifier enclosures above could have been lit with HDRI and tweaked in days rather than weeks! Another tip: My experience is that setting Energy levels much above 75% doesn't have much effect on the quality of the render, but increases time considerably. On the other hand, increasing Accuracy to 90% (from say 75%) improves the smoothness of the lighting a lot, but does not effect the time significantly. N.

George, perhaps I should rephrase that: They frequently don't line up. I don't know why; they have never really worked for me. I just made a new file and it was OK as you said, but it's been so often wrong that I just gave up on them. (BTW, I almost never use Stack layers) I'm at a loss. N.

Jim, As Dave said, he and I have been discussing lighting renders for a long time, including set-ups to make it easier to start. As far as "tried and true" suggestions are concerned; unfortunately,..well, everything effects everything else, and, well,..................... there are no easy answers... (well not many anyway) I wrote you a detailed reply but lost it all to the "form no longer valid" bug, and I'm not going to do it all again. Here are some examples though, Area lights in the kitchen/dining windows (inclined inwards/downwards about 12?) each 1000 lux, 150%; Area lights in the Entrance and adjacent doorways, each 1000 lux, 50% All area lights at smooth fall off. Sun 1000 lux, 3% Radiosity 75% accuracy, 75% energy, ambient set to layer; 24% Background; that particular HDRI set at 150% Auto Exposure turned off Note : this was test render No 27 of the second batch of test renders of the same file; adjusting lighting at each test. This is a another version of the file with similar settings and the Ambient set to "remaining energy" This is exactly the same settings, except Ambient is set to Layer Ambient (at about 20% I think) You'll note significant colour shifts even though the overall light levels are almost the same, and the file is otherwise identical. In particular; with the previous version, the Ambient "remaining" energy is applying the reddish tint from the floor texture to the scene and making everything (particularly the walls) look excessively red. By using Layer ambient I've tried to control that and make the white walls actually appear white. One of the more "realistic" renders I've seen out of RW -even if I do say so myself ;-) is this one done in VW10, (prior to radiosity or HDRI) lit with a version of Dave's "skydome" object,.... and about 6 weeks of test renders every night. Your project might be "simple" Jim, but lighting renders is not. Try out the settings I posted above and let us know what happens. HTH, N.

Jim, There are no easy answers to setting up lighting. If lights are too bright/dark do another test at 50%/200% of existing levels. If still way out of whack change by 10%/1000% of original to determine the general levels required before getting down to tweaking. To make things faster to do test renders, set the Custom Radiosity settings to low accuracy, NURBS, etc, and turn off anti-ailiasing. Also reduce the actual perspective window to reduce the render time. HTH, N.

Ronin, the rulers don't have any relationship at all to 3D behaviour. (that I can see anyway) They are purely for top/plan. Obviously, for perspective and other non-orthogonal views, they couldnt make any sense, but it is unfortunate that the rulers dont work in standard face/side views. N.

This has happened to me sometimes. Also, sometimes the preview mostly works, but the Triangles don't show up. I haven't been able to discern any pattern as to why: it seems quite random. Generally re-starting the program fixes it for me. N.

Fill is set to Solid in the Attributes pallette?

The "Archoncad" "Essential" manual would be about the best staring point. www.archoncad.co.nz N.

Darrell, AFAIK the Place Plant tool is a generic LM tool and not one of Julian's add-ons. Perhaps this has not happened to anyone else? N.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to how DWG's import. For a start it depends how the file was set up in the first place. Our default imports are frequently out of scale by a factor of 25.4 because the import seems to insist on using blasted inches as a unit........ but that's getting off the track..... You should be able to just go staright to the design layers and edit them. Perhaps someone else knows what has been done to the original file to cause it to import as a symbol.

are you saying the design layer from which the viewport is made consists of a symbol? "Normally" you would not manipulate the Viewport object content, but the design layer objects. Then you look at the design layer through the viewport. Can you not do this?

I've been using the Place Plant tool and setting the graphic attributes. So far so good. With a number of the plant styles if I edit the Plant Appearance via the OIP, the size of the placed plant spontaneously changes! sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. Um?..............wha? ..... {:-O No discernable pattern yet. Is this Known? Edit; New mystery: I changed the background fill of one of the standard plants to a Gradient. If I change the size if the Tick at the centre of the plant, the gradient changes appearance!

AhHa! Excellent! (you too Katie) N.