PVA - Admin

Getting emitted light to bounce is another matter all together, but if the goal is to get geometry to reflect; I created a texture with a mirror reflectivity of 99% (100 wont work as that would reflect so much light that the object wouldnt be visible) and in custom renderworks set Max Reflections to 5 and I do see the expected levels of reflection in the mirrored surfaces in a quick example file:

Which rendering mode are you currently using? To get light and reflection to keep bouncing like that (which would take a significant amount of time to render) you'd probably want to use custom renderworks and turn up the Max Reflections value near the bottom. I think it defaults to only 2-4. Depending upon what kinds of light you are trying to reflect, you may need to increase the number of indirect lighting bounces in Lighting options as well.

Would this be resolved by having the type of rails be controlled by each flight and platform separately, rather than one for the entire stair object?

Replicated a similar issue here, submitting now. If you could also post or send me that stair in a VWX as well it would be useful, thank you.

Post a VWX with that stair if you can please.

I see what you mean now, submitting. Misunderstood the example initially, I saw the same problem when I tried to align the corner of the square to an edge instead of to a corner/midpoint.

To clarify: Do you mean that during rotation, the rotated object would be actively rescaled based on the length of the rotation arm at the time of the final click? More of a Rotate-and-Scale option rather than just rotation?

Submitted.

Unfortunately even if I did come across any early knowledge of an upcoming feature in Vectorworks I would not able to discuss it until it was announced officially.

Submitted a feature request for this after the 2014 release, a few people mentioned it would be useful.

Quick Preferences allows you to toggle it right from the main Vectorworks UI, but unfortunately this feature wasn't added until I believe Vectorworks 2011/2012. In later versions (I think 2012 was the first) you can also set your sheet layers and design layers to have different background colors, if thats what you meant by layout areas.

I have checked from 2014 back to 2011 and can not alter the opacity of a viewport via the attributes palette in any of them, which version are you able to alter it in?

Confirmed. Even in brand new docs, with a renderworks style applied to a viewport, purge will still attempt to remove that style. The viewports rendering mode then just reverts to default settings of Custom Renderworks. Submitting as an issue now.

THAT makes sense, thank you for explaining. Submitting now.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by this. (On occasion my lack of industry knowledge compared to my technical knowledge shows through. Especially in feature requests.)

Submitting now.

I agree that it is currently somewhat cumbersome, but how do you think this should be implemented? If the fonts are actually altered to different values based on zoom level, then I can see massive slowness as hundreds/thousands of text objects are updated with every turn of the mouse wheel. If the UI simply inflates the fonts artificially, then I am not sure how you would be able to align text in the proper location without going back to 100% zoom every time. I don't see how this can go well, but as always, i'm open to suggestions... much like Rob Ford.

Submitting now! You are going to be pleased with future releases.

To clarify: Do you mean when a working plane is enabled, the flyover origin should still use the original location, rather that resetting to the center of the working plane and making the user have to click the center of the working plane manually with the flyover tool to recenter it?

Submitting request for quicker or easier viewing of note text from a callout/keynote object.

in 2014 I am currently able to select multiple viewports and alter both their background and foreground render modes as well as the perspectives, are you not able to do this on your machines? Separately: submitting a request for Viewport Render Mode (with the ability to control whether projection is included or not) to be added to eyedropper separate from the rest of the current Viewport options.

Do you think this should be tied to an object directly, sort of how a Symbol has a Wall Hole Component, or would it make more sense as a command that could be run with the clipping object selected? Something like: 1) Place object in the location it should clip a slab (as an example). 2) Select Object. 3) AEC > Clip Intersecting Slabs. 4) Dialogue asks which slab objects should be clipped to fit the geometry of the selected object, (along with an option for an offset perhaps?)

On Win7 64bit here, using Vectorworks 2014 SP2, snapping is indeed suspended in testing. Does the Snapping palette gray out as expected while pressing ` or does it stay active for you?

Running Vectorworks 12.5 on OS X 10.8 can do that, you may also get odd hatching across the rulers and a few other weird errors with incompatible OSes. To confirm, yes 10.5 Leopard was the las Mac OS that 12.5 was supported on.

90% of the time when we get rendering issues, it is file-specific. A main part of that problem is that it can simply be one symbol, even something miniscule like a screw or nut used repeatedly as a symbol, that brings the entire application to a crawl. This isnt that "Users are doing it wrong" but it IS a different issue every time. recently we isolated a problem where Sweep objects were defaulting to an insanely small seg value which caused even basic sweeps to create hundreds of thousands of vertices which would cause problems all over the place. That one was easy enough to address in service packs/releases but its just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Im still tackling any files I get with rendering slowness, but there are a LOT of different things, compounded in files that are brought from versions pre-parasolids (anything from before or during the 2008-2009 era) that can cause the exact same symptoms of slowness and crashing. Any time you come across files or a workflow that leads to slowness, get my attention and we will work through it. Engineering is working on MANY tasks that will all be a part of fixing this, but a lot of those tasks come directly from specific cases like these and every little bit helps.