Danielj1

I think you should really give InteriorCad another, more detailed look. I've had a chance to work with it for some time, and its power, easy-to-use interface and expandability raise it to a professional level that is generally unmatched by other CAD programs. It really competes with professional cabinetry programs such as Planit (http://www.cabnetware.com/) but with the advantage of VW's ease-of-use, and the fact that it is fully integrated into the Vectorworks/Renderworks workflow. They also have terrific customer support, which is an extremely important consideration. If cabinetry and casegoods are an important part of your business, especially with highly-decorative, detailed cabinetry, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't take a close look at InteriorCad. Just my own two cents' worth... Dan Jansenson

Chris, With your cabinet selected, go to the Object Info palette and try changing the dimensions of the top, Mid-, Bottom, Side and Center reveals. If your cabinetry typically has 1/8" between doors or drawers, enter that dimension for the reveals. Dan Jansenson

Crosetti, If you've purchased the Renderworks Recipe Book you should have immediately received an email with a download link. It's not a physical book that ships. The issue of wrapping textures around curved pieces is actually fairly complex and may not lend itself to a simple quick solution. It all depends on how the pieces were modeled, as well as the method used for applying and adjusting the texture locations. Reviewing Help will provide some insight, as will the RRB, but in this case it is truly a matter of learning the basic techniques and then doing quite a bit of trial-and-error testing to get it right. I've taken a look at the file. I believe your best hope of orienting the textures properly is to convert all the objects to NURBS and then adjust the texturing on each NURBS object individually. Also, if you're rendering in OpenGL consider adjusting the settings to their highest levels, for accuracy. Dan Jansenson

Was your file started in an earlier version? Dan J.

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (better battery life) OpenGL: 0.3 Fast RW: 0.6 Fast RW w/Shadows: 0.7 FQRW: 0.8 Custom RW: 0.8 Fast Rad: 1.1 FQRad: 22.5 Custom Rad: 22.2 NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GT (better performance) OpenGL: 0.3 Fast RW: 0.6 Fast RW w/Shadows: 0.7 FQRW: 0.8 Custom RW: 0.8 Fast Rad: 1.1 FQRad: 22.3 Custom Rad: 22.2 MBPro, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo OSX-10.5.8 Dan J.

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What rendering method are you using? Dan J.

It's a bug. Already reported and under review/repair. Dan J.

Jeremy, I think the camera problem may be a bug that occurs with Unified View and sheet layer viewports. It's been reported and they're working on it. You might want to change the height of the camera object to match the model layer's Z-height plus the desired camera height. Any particular reason your file has layer Z-heights that are not zero? Just curious. Dan J.

Jeremy, You'll need the Constant shader in order to create the effect I described in my post. I believe it's been left out of this file. Best, Dan J.

Jeremy, In general you might find it easier to obtain reliable (and perhaps better) results by using a much smaller setting for the Ambient lighting, or turning Ambient off altogether. Use Ambient to control the contrast of a scene (that is, the difference between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites), but using it to make a scene brighter will muddy the waters, so to speak. I think the number of lights you are using is making rendering times excessively long, because each of those lights must be calculated by the program. In general, I have found it best to use lights for illuminating a scene (that is actually casting light for illumination purposes) using as few actual light sources as possible, and then simulating the appearance of lights by using the Constant texture at light lens (or visible source) locations. Unless you need to show shadows coming from specific, particular locations, or you require illumination to be visible on exact spots (as in wallwashers where the light is specifically visible), it can be easier simply to use one or two invisible lights for actual interior illumination and then simulating the light fixtures that can be seen in the rendered view by using realistic 3D models of them. Think of it as a stage set where the lighting source is not visible, but where light fixtures, as props, can be observed in the scene. Dan J.

Jeremy, The transparency of the new texture is created in the Edit Texture dialog box that opens when you create a new texture. You can make a texture transparent by adding a Transparency shader: http://www.danjansenson.com/constant.jpg Dan Jansenson

"Before there used to be a spacing option button and menu ... which has now disappeared in the Object Info palette..." I believe the spacing options are (and were, at least back to VW12) for the keynote object that is created when Place As Keynote is selected in the callout preferences, rather than for the callout itself. Personally I find this tool to be vitally useful in 2D production drawings, and the ability to use database notes a wonderful enhancement. Dan J.

Bruce, These are gorgeous drawings on your web site. Congratulations, and thank you for letting us in on this wonderful talent. Dan Jansenson

The problem traditionally has been that any white 3-D object often renders as grey, and appears excessively dark (I think it actually renders accurately, it's only a perception issue I believe). Adding and adjusting lights is too time-consuming and often yields unexpected results (and increased rendering times). There's no texture combination (meaning with reflectivity, etc.), to my knowledge, that can lighten the appearance of such a 3-D object in a controlled fashion other than Constant, and that one is uniformly white with little ability to accept subtle shadows. There is, however, a way to do this. For a ceiling: make an extruded 3-D object with a white fill. Duplicate it in place, and nudge the duplicate down by a couple of pixels, just enough to see in close-up wireframe. Create a Constant texture, and give it about 80% transparency. Apply this texture to the nudged duplicate 3-D object. The transparency of the Constant texture will allow the underlying object to be seen as a solid, but the 20% texture visibility will create a lighter appearance, while allowing subtle shade and shadow effects upon its surface. An example of such a texture can be seen here: http://www.danjansenson.com/whiteceiling/ Note that the ceiling above and the wall to the right both have white fills. It's only the ceiling duplicate that received the 80% transparent Constant shader. The white-ness of the ceiling can be controlled by altering the amount of transparency in the texture. Dan Jansenson

It would be helpful if you could post a picture or a file. As BCD suggests, it's unlikely the problem is connected to active or screen plane issues, but it is a bit hard to identify possibilities in the absence of more info. Dan J. ps: incidentally, in Architect2010 Stacked Layers have morphed into Unified View, and as BCD suggests, this may well be a clue.

With the callout selected, take a look at the Object Info palette and see if changing the settings in the Max Text Width and Text Margin boxes helps. Dan J.

Kevin, The class override feature available with viewports allows you to edit the class and deselect the texture associated with that class in the viewport. Once you update the viewport the texture will not be displayed, only the color of the underlying object. With the viewport selected, go to the Object Info palette and click on the Classes button. The Viewport Class Properties dialog box will open. Select the appropriate class, then click the Edit button. The Edit Class(es) dialog box will open, and at the bottom of the box deselect the Texture checkbox. This override feature applies only to the selected viewport, so you could duplicate the viewport first, alter the duplicate, and observe a before/after view of the texture application. Dan J.

Out getting a latte, is it. More like warming up a soup in the office microwave, perhaps...excellent idea, Matt. In general, any tool that can be used to explore test renderings relatively quickly (and save the data) is a valuable one. DJ

Thank you, Mike, for your very kind words, they're greatly appreciated. Generally auto-exposure should not, in itself, yield overly-bright results (but as I mention further down, YMMV). The built-in mechanism of the auto-exposure setting will tend to cause the lighting to adjust to a pre-set average-exposure standard for an averagely-lit image. Including too many or too few lights and then rendering with auto-exposure on will often result in properly-exposed, but low-contrast images. That is, it will often lighten up the dark areas of the scene (shaded areas) in a way that some may find unattractive. Your mileage may vary, however, especially when using HDRI lighting on exteriors. In any case, make sure, when using the auto-exposure setting in the Custom options, that it is set to 100% (or less); you'll often get excessively bright results if it is much higher than that, although it is a convenient setting to use at times. In my own work I've found that a scene tends to be too light either when auto-exposure is off and there are too many light objects (or they are set to be excessively strong), or when ambient lighting is set excessively high (or, as mentioned, when the auto-exposure setting is much above 100%). But other people's results may vary, so it is worth experimenting until you find a combination of settings you like; it's a bit hard to make a generalization because of the wide variety of conditions you may encounter. In general it is best to use the fewest possible number of light objects. Users new to Renderworks often assume that if a real-life design has many light fixtures, the Vectorworks model must have many corresponding light objects as well. In reality, it is often best to use the Renderworks light objects simply to illuminate a scene, and then use models of light fixtures that don't actually cast light, but only appear to do so (using, for example, the Constant texture to simulate a light-emitting object such as a bulb) in order to create the appearance of reality. Rendering speed decreases in direct proportion to the number of light objects used in a scene (because of the number of calculations that are required). For this reason it is often useful to think of a scene as a kind of theatrical stage set, containing props that look like real lights, but where the actual illumination comes from hidden light sources (and in our case, as few in number as possible). An exterior view can sometimes appear to be excessively bright when using a relatively large number of light sources and types simultaneously: HDRI, combined with very bright directionals, with added spot lights (and sometimes inadvertently duplicated directionals as well) will often yield unacceptable results. In this situation it is useful to employ a kind of abbreviated scientific method in order to pinpoint a good solution. Turn all the lights off (except for HDRI, say), and then do a successive series of quick renderings, turning on additional light sources in sequence until you detect the problem. Note that rendered sheet layer viewports will sometimes yield results that are a bit different from renderings done in the design layers, due to a variety of factors. Again, experimentation is useful here, but keep in mind that if you render in design layers, you can use the Render Bitmap tool to create a series of test strips, each with different light/rendering settings. The advantage here is testing speed (since you'd be rendering only a portion of the entire scene each time), and also the ability to compare results side-by-side, evaluating the best combination of rendering and lighting settings. Since the bitmap that results is an actual object, you can use the Data tab of the Object Info palette to save information with each bitmap test strip, and in this way maintain a kind of library of test results for different scene types. If you only seriously render a few times a year (as I do in my real-world office work) it can really be useful to have available, as a memory-jog, a saved bunch of test strips side by side, with the settings info for each of these readily accessible. One other scenario in which renderings may appear too bright can happen with multi-layer models, in which light objects can be found on different layers. Sometimes it is easy to forget that a sun has been placed on each of the layers, only to be shocked at the final result. As a simple practice, I find it convenient to have the Visualization palette open to the light tab while setting up a rendering. This way I can see how many light objects are in the model (in case I forgot any), and can control their status directly from the palette. By the way, there is an extremely useful FAQ article in Vectorworks Help that covers many of the basics of radiosity rendering. To access it, launch VW Help, and in the search box at the top enter the title: Frequently Asked Questions about Radiosity. Dan J.

Matt, thank you very much for your kind words, I greatly appreciate it. I'm not sure when the book will be shipping. I understand NNA is taking pre-orders right now; I would expect the book to ship within a couple of weeks perhaps. Sorry, I'm not clued-in to that side of things. Dan J.

Islandmon, I just tried mapping a texture onto a sphere object and it worked with no problem. Perhaps you experienced this with a previous version? Dan J.

I have found that, as Nicholas suggests, an exterior directional light coupled with one or two area lights in the window areas are often sufficient for interior illumination with Custom Radiosity coupled with Final Gather. In this situation I've also found it best to turn ambient lighting off altogether, or just set it at 2%-3% (using it to control contrast more than the actual lighting). Dan Jansenson ps: please forgive the plug: the new Remarkable Renderworks book published by NNA, of which I am the author, has a chapter describing this exact process with precision, including an exercise file.

Jeremy, there seems to be a moir? pattern in the grass area of your latest uploaded image. This suggests the presence of a very finely-scaled texture there. Did you try altering the size/scale of the grass texture? Perhaps that's all that is needed. Dan Jansenson

You can also simply duplicate the viewport (and move it to one side for ease of working if desired), render it in Hidden Line, then do Convert to Group. This will convert the HL-rendered viewport to a group of editable vector lines which you can re-work as desired and then move back on top of the first viewport. Dan Jansenson