propstuff

Hi again Mike, Thanks for that, and another question on the same theme: When I'm changing the sun position manually (not animated) to check shade etc; SOMETIMES chosing a new time or month will generate a new light object instead of moving the existing one. (This had me puzzled for a bit ;-) ) Same question; is THIS a bug?? cheers, N.

Yep; processor speed. See also my rant on the General board under :VW 10 on a brand new 800 mhz iBook? ;-) I'd really be interested to see a tractor pull of a nice big render B/W a "Top spec" Mac and "equivalent" PC. But maybe that's just morbid. quote: I tried the CPU monitor. Cool! And thanks! What do the two colors on the dynamic graph represent? Also, what is "Y.M.M.V."? There are three colours actually. The top (larger) one is the application allocation, the lower one is the system allocation, and the lowest (which doesn't appear much) is um, er, um, I've forgotten. (System maintenance I think???) "Your Mileage May Vary"; another of the many Bulletin Board abbreviations FWIW (For What It's Worth) I quite enjoy watching the development of this dialect. There's a Sociology Thesis in it for sure if you were keen :-)) Your rendering times don't seem that excessive really (if they are A4 sheet, hi-res, print quality renders) A couple of minutes seems modest for that. IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) I wonder when the SMS generation will start talking in abbreviations? ;-)) cheers, N.

I've been running some interior test solar animations with my new RW, and in each one the animation has functioned correctly but the initial sun/shadows have remained in the animation. That is, the sun and shadows move, but throughout the whole "day" the original "morning" sun remains in the same place. Am I doing something wrong here, or is this a bug?? TIA N.

Leonard, I have found that available RAM is not largely NOT used in rendering processes. (Y.M.M.V. etc etc) To see what is actually being used in OS10, go to Applications/ Utilities/ CPU monitor; from the processes menu choose: Display Expanded Window, and also: Open Process Viewer. From the top right drop menu choose: User Processes, and then highlight VectorWorks. At the drop arrow at the lower left, choose: More Info, and hit the Statistics tab. Now arrange the windows so you can see them when you start the Rendering. The CPU monitor will show you a simple graph (in "real time") of how the CPU resources are being allocated and the Process viewer will give you details including RAM and Virt Memory usage. Let us know what you find. BTW, how long are your 10Mb renderings taking?? cheers, N.

Hugo, My TiBk (sadly outdated -from Feb this year! :-O ) has a 16Mb video card. Experimenting with the CPU Monitor and Process Viewer while using VW has yielded some interesting information. VW, for some reason, virtually max's the CPU WHENEVER it's running and rapidly causes the cooling fans to start; regardless of whether it's actually executing a process or not. When processing (eg rendering), all available CPU capacity is used. On the other hand; memory is not. With only VW running, a rendering job used only about 100Mb of the 500Mb RAM I have and about 120Mb of Virtual memory. I.E., "Speed" is nearly all down to the processors and Bus capability. For my system, having to WAIT for a rotated wireframe to redraw is simply PATHETIC. (Not very 21st Century at all!) It's only that it's a small part of my business that makes it commercially feasable. It's very hard to get a real understanding of the various merits of Mac vs Pc systems that's free of the partisan B.S. that goes around, but my guess is that until Apple get some "current" processing hardware (IBM Power PC chips next year???) in their machines, Mac, rendering, and processing speed are going to be mutually exclusive terms. :-( That being said; unless you are doing complex 3D, lots of NURBS, large renderings, or Gaming till 3.00am every night, these speed issues are NOT going to be a problem. Make sure you get the 14" screen not the 12", and if you're doing "regular" drafting you'll be racing. For me, Apples hardware issues are somewhere between sad and laughable, but I'd still rather have my Mac than a PC any day ;-)) N.

I'm currently having this very problem as well. Its very inconvenient for my work that VW doesnt import vector formats (other than Acad) but what is really bizzare is that VW exports EPS files as vectors, but imports the very SAME file as a Pict. What is the point of this?

Hi Katie, Is there a command as in Photoshop "clear History" which will purge the undo memory, or is this not an issue? Perhaps it just rewrites over the oldest?

I seem to recall when I did it a few months ago, I just opened the workspace editor, grabbed the 3D PP tools on the left hand side and dragged them over to the existing 3D pallette on the other side. I then had 2 workspaces in the w/s editor; a standard and a 3Dpp. I hope I remember this correctly and don't send your workspace into hyperspace {:-O

Installed 10.2.2 the other day Email chaos ensued. "Mail" is behaving bizzarely; cant find the port or says that the "server is refusing the connection" . Entourage, however still works (erratic) MANY people on Apple's tech boards screaming about network, mail and printing problems. Beware!

An update for those who are interested; Not all is joy. The GIMPprint driver for the 1520 is still buggy. specific issues to date are; The thick line printing mentioned previously IS associated with the driver, not the ink. The printable area HAS shrunk somewhat. The driver had a little episode where it would spool, and then there would be a message in the Print Centre window saying "Waiting for printer", but nothing happened. Turning the printer on and off, rebooting the computer etc didn't help. Finaly I had to reboot in OS9 to print the job. After this I tried again in OSX and it worked........?? Printing with the 720dpi"microweave" setting (used by the Epson OS9 driver for "quality" printing) modifies the drg into interesting Modern Art. (!!??) However the 360dpi microweave setting prints ok (but thick as mentioned) So it's a case of "buyer" beware. HTH, N.

I have had this (intermittent) problem since upgrading to VW9, (usually with nothing else running at the time) however it's particular tools that won't "let go". Specifically; the Locus tool is often reluctant to give up the cursor and 2D select has to be chosen from the pallette. Likewise using "G" to set data points works unreliably for me. N.

Hi Bruce, For me (and I imagine many "Mechanical" users) this ability would be a useful increase in productivity. It seems to my (ignorant) mind that, as isometric dimensions CAN be done (by the layer link rigramole), then it shouldn't be too hard to include this function into the body of the program. Is there interest, or plans, for including isometric dimensions in the future? thanks, N.

Question for you: Do the new associative and linear dimensioning tools in VW10 enable isometric Drgs to be dimensioned directly without having to muck around with layer links to get the dimensions to project into 3D? TIA, N.

Hi Henry, when you said quote: However, can you tell me the name of the parallel print spooler you ended up getting?I gather you mean the Parallel (36 pin Centronics male) to USB adapter (?) It is an "Aten" product, go to www.aten.com this was not a deliberate choice; simply what the local PC shop had on the shelf. It cost $60 Australian. Since the original post I've printed more sheets and found a couple of differences b/w the old OS9 Epson driver and the new GIMP/Script combo. The printer area margin seems to be a touch smaller than the old one and the lines thicker and blacker. This last might be due to re-filled ink cartriges (I cant remember if it was an original or not), or perhaps it is the driver (?) good luck, N.

Techworks, you wrote: quote: Ghostprint by the way is another open-source developed software (and of course OS X, *IX compatible) designed to handle PostScript documents to these listed printers (similar to the old Epson RIP software) in OS 9. It's probably not as much of interest to you folks but more to Adobe product users, but good to know it's available and free! Sorry, we have neither ethernet or Appletalk cards installed, so can't help you there. Re the above; The first test print came out as raw Adobe postscript data, and one of the hiccups mentioned in my original post was having to specify for GIMP Print to use the Postscript definitions included in the (seperate) Ghost Script download. I gather that most people would need to install both GIMP Print and Ghostscript. "Available and free!" Yes!, again, a big thankyou to all the Open-source geeks out there for donating your work to the computing world! N.

Hi Katie (et al) Some time ago when we talked about printing problems, I inadvertantly implied I was printing from OSX to an Epson 1520, and you asked me how I was doing that. (given that Epson weren't writing drivers). I made the first test print to the Epson about an hour ago from VW; and it's go! You probably know of the "GIMP" open-source image manipulation program that's been around for a while. The writers have just released (about 1 week ago) an updated version of the GIMP printer drivers and postscript descriptions suite for older printers (which started life as a LINUX project I think?) -ported for OS10.2. There is an older version which I gather is for OS10.1, but I didn't look too closely at that. The suite contains a LARGE collection of older printers. It was fairly simple to down load and install, and although the setup is not a simple click-the-button, it is not complicated, and the hiccups I had were all covered clearly in the setup instructions and FAQs section. One IMPORTANT PROVISO; I was using a "Keyspan" parallel to USB converter, but for some reason the Keyspan does not agree with GIMP-Print. This is a known bug. Changing to another (cheaper) brand worked. Although it's not a fast print; we now have our full bleed A3 printer back on line for $60, instaid of $1100 for a new printer. Thankyou Propellor-Heads! Here's where to go; there's a LOT more at the source-forge site for those who are keen http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php3 cheers, and good printing N

Well call me Mr Stupid!; I didn't realise either that there was a torus object ( and an elipsiod) hidden away back there. I got out my VW9 manual and looked it up; NO mention of torus in the index, and I couldn't find reference to it in the sections on 3D. Time to go hunting for other interesting things that VW includes but they forgot to mention (!?) Alexandre; you're quite right of course. Actually the toruses (tori?) that I had in mind I had converted to NURBS which takes them beyond the grasp of the edit group command. :-( P Retondo; I agree with you also; having the elements move their "origin" when using Edit Group is a pain. cheers, N.

To make a torus in VW9.5 I make 2 circles: 1 at the pitch centre dia, and 1 at the dia of the "body" cross section, and then use the :Model>Extrude along path command. This works fine, but cannot be edited in the object info box like a regular cicle, or extrusion. If you want to change its dimensions you have to make a new one. Is this what you meant?

I'm using an external monitor with the TiBk, and wanted to use the second to compare 2 sheets of the same file. It's not a big headache to swap between them, but it would be convenient to have more than one open at the same time. Does anyone know if this can be done? cheers, N.

Mat, on an Apple it's Option+zero (on the keyboard not the separate keypad) Checkout "KeyCaps" for all the special characters cheers, N

Interesting Update FYI On the weekend, for some cheap (?!) entertainment, I installed OS 10.2.1 (Jaguar) Running VW had some odd results. Moving NURBS objects was MUCH faster -maybe 2X previous. If the promised VW10 speed improvements are added to this, it should change the impossible wait to only a second or two. Very workable. The other curious thing I noticed to date is a huge lag in scrolling down the Font menu. It was like surfing; waiting for the highlighting on the selected font to catch up with the scrolling of the menu and the cursor position. Trippy! I'll wait for the VW 9.5.3 patch to be finished and see what happens. N.

Thanks for the info guys, thats sounding reassuring cheers N.

Hi Katie, thanks for the reply; you wrote: Depending on what objects were used to create the model, ........Five seconds isn't a long time for very complex operations to move or change views of. I understand this, but in the case of the 375Kb file, it's a cylinder, a cylinder with nurbs filets, and a mounting knuckle at each end made from solid subraction with nurbs filets. This couldn't be called a complex file surely? With regards to waiting time; when it comes to even a simple moving operation like Nudging; each 1 second instruction followed by a 10 second wait comes out at about a 90% loss of productivity! As for upgrading; I'm considering it, but having paid to upgrade not many months ago I'm reluctant to shell out again so soon. :-O Would you like to take a guess at putting a number to the speed improvement I would see with my set up if I upgraded???? Also; how does Vw10 and Jaguar combine in this respect??? thanks N.

Hello all, I've finally sat down to learn the 3D PP and I have some "issues" -as they say. Specifically: hopelessly slow operations when manipulating the model. The piece of furniture I'm working on is currently a 3.9Mb file, and a long way from finished, but doing ANYTHING to it involves a minimum of about 10 seconds of waiting for the spinning beach ball of death to stop before I can continue. I extracted just one element (basically just a simple Gas-lift strut) on to a new file. It only weighs 375Kb; but still takes about 6 seconds to even move it sideways a bit! :eek! This lag is unusable for practical purposes. Questions: Is this normal (generaly)? Is this normal with Apples? Is this normal with my set up? Hope you can give me some good news on making this work! The results are great; the business just can't aford to wait for them! Cheers, N.