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Chris D

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Posts posted by Chris D

  1. Funny, I was asking about GPU rendering yesterday in the Renderworks forum.

    Twinmotion sounds interesting, but it's a pity it's DirectX rather than open standards.

    The Twinmotion workflow is export/import based which kind of defeats the object of 'real time' rendering, but it sounds like real time rendering inside 3D design apps isn't more than a few more years away. I hope VW doesn't get left behind.

  2. The constraints feature doesn't currently work with 3D objects except walls.

    I'd like to see parametric constraints available for all 3D objects including 3D symbols and PIOs.

    Imagine a furniture object that is constrained to always sit a certain distance from a wall for instance

    Or objects that are constrained to sit a certain distance from other objects on a trigger class.

    Another step towards intelligence basically.

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  3. I attended a briefing today about ActivePlan which opened my eyes about the intelligence of spaces. They have developed a system that links with AutoCAD/Revit to associate objects and data to Room Spaces. The thing is that Vectorworks can almost do this itself with just a little more intelligence.

    http://www.activeplan.co.uk/overview.asp

    One of the key things to make this work is that if you put a piece of furniture (or any other symbol or PIO) in a space, then it should know that is in that space.

    This should be very easy because space volumes can be defined in their settings - does the insertion point of the symbol or PIO overlap with the volume of a space? You can probably write a script to do this now.

    The other minor thing is that spaces need to report which storey they are in.

    This opens up a whole realm of being able to schedule:

    - Spaces by Storey

    - Fixture and Fittings by Space

    and with intelligent objects, or even with Record Formats attached to symbols, you have a lot of scheduling power at your disposal.

  4. Update: There is a issue when you use the zoom with the MagicMouse, the zoom just go forever or if you stop the zoom, the lines don?t redraw correctly. The zoom works perfect when you use keyboard shortcuts to zoom....

    It is a little "trigger happy" with a magic mouse isn't it... I'm using Lion / 2012 / magic mouse at home.

    Best to include your setup in your signature by the way.

  5. Background:

    As I work in an office where our whizzkids in the corner traditionally did our visualisations, I haven't done much rendering. Now that we are moving to a BIM workflow where rendering is essential just to get elevations on a sheet, I've been playing with the render settings in Renderworks. What amazes me is that I never knew that the CPU does all the rendering work while the GPU sits idle.

    One quick google later....

    GPU Rendering:

    I note that NVIDIA have produced a GPU rendering engine called iRay, that is now available for Cinema4D. GPU rendering is a magnitude faster than CPU rendering and realistic views can be generated in seconds - google for the videos to see for yourself.

    So my question is when will Renderworks support GPU rendering in some way?

  6. I notice that in one corner of Ecobuild the NBS launch the National BIM Library, whilst in the other corner of the hall Barbour announces support for BIMstore...a competing initiative. My money's on NBL (that's not basketball for US readers...). The trouble is that having two initiatives may divide manufacturers' focus when they decide to make BIM resources available.

    (I wasn't there by the way....just got the two launch emails)

  7. I'm also interested in how people are coping with brickwork.

    In our 2D workflow we use hatches that are correctly scaled and coursed, so a window head and cill will always coincide with a bed joint on the brickwork. We're struggling to do this with textures for the BIM workflow, as for one thing we're having to render sheet layers at ridiculous DPI just to get bed joints to show consistently at 1:100

  8. I've seen the recent discussions about the merits of section viewports versus elevation viewports. What I'm interested in is how users are dealing with any 2D overlays.

    We'd prefer not to have to draw in the annotations part of a sheet layer, as that should be reserved for notes. There doesn't seem to be a way to set up a design layer section viewport that remains static and rendered so that you can draw over it though.

    2D overlays will be required for things that aren't worth modelling or you have insufficient 3D data for, such as adjacent or distant buildings, or for shadows that can't be cast by ghosted buildings etc. Surely you want these assembled in the design layer?

  9. spend more on fixing this program...before persuing Open BIM->IFC (fanciful ideals)..

    This argument is kind of like "why build art galleries when we need more hospitals". The two are not exclusive.

    As a small player Nemetschek has a vested interest in open standards so that they can play ball too.

  10. Open BIM....... Isn't that something good?

    It is, yes. But please don't think I was questioning this...I just wanted to cut through the waffle that passes for an announcement these days. You have advanced the definition a fraction, but really we all knew that NV Inc supports IFC based workflows, so what's new? What does Open BIM mean in practice?

  11. And while I've got the attention of a real Nemetschekian can you request that the forums are updated to accept zip files without having to hide them, and that inline images can be posted directly without having to attach them and re-insert the image from the attachment. Pretty please.

  12. Jeffrey - sample 2012 file attached from a colleague. This is a zipped file so change the extension from .vwx to .zip then unzip it.

    Pick any space and try and turn on 'auto boundary' and then try and do something else - it will spin for at least a minute even in this stripped down version (machine spec same as my signature). Or try and edit a wall and update a space and you will wait for 30 seconds.

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