David Ormsby

Any one heard from Maxon yet?

Got this from Maxon >> Greetings, We are aware of the issue and have reported it to our development staff. Please be patient as we are looking into finding a resolution to this as soon as possible. Regards, MAXON Technical Support

Believe me, I shot Maxon mail right away as well. Just covering all bases.

I am on XP, and my Cinema export has failed as well. I tried renaming the .rsr and Plug-ins folder, and both had no effect. Please Help!

You should look into the Workgroup reference feature. It allows you to open and view separate files in the file you are working on. For instance, some shows I work on, there is a separate drawing for the scenic, another for the seating, and VW creates a "reference" to the other file. Haven't tried it, but it seems you could make a file for each plot, and create references as needed.

I think it would be a real help to have the Truss appear in the inventory report i.e "50' w/10' interval" "75' w/10' interval" etc As it is, truss is the one thing I have to manually count for my rigging orders.

I think Bruce has it - using layers rather than classes will fit your bill. I almost always use a layer per department; my default drawing has these layers - room, cieling, seating, scenic, video, audio, rigging, light plot, notes, titleblock. I'll then set up sheets to print info per department.

sebflu It's not clear what you are trying to do. I for one have been using the Cinema plug in for the last 8 months and I have made thousands of dollars off this system. I feel that Maxon and NNA sold me exactly what thay advertised. Please note that the plug in was written to support Vectorworks, and not necessarily the add on product Spotlight. For me, Spotlight's an invaluable tool for getting my lighting plots done. If you could be clear about what you expect to accomplish perhaps we could help.

I'm running 10.5 on XP, 1.1 P3, 512M. User since MC7 I've got a drawing that is counting symbols no longer in the drawing. I had a couple of hundred banquet tables in a drawing, then later used the "Replace" command from the OIP. I went to the Symbol Count worksheet I had created, and the count shows counts for both the original symbol and the replaced symbol. I've carefully confirmed the symbols are no where in the drawing, and the only way I could remove the count from the worksheet was to delete the original symbol from the drawing in the resource browser. In the past, simply clicking the recalculate menu would correctly update the sheet - this has me stumped. Thanks

I can confirm having this same problem as well.

Ola - That doesn't sound good - I don't have any trouble like that. 2D and 3D are identical. I've tried changing insertion points on my symbols, different symbols, incremental changes in the size of the Area path. I like to think I'm pretty good at VW, but I could not find a way to make it work.

Oops VW 10.1.2 on Win XP PIII 1.1, 512M, 2x40G

I'm having some issues with the seating tool I can not resolve. I am using an 18x18 chair hybrid symbol. I want the seats to be 18" apart and 36" rows. I have drawn a rectangle 24'x6', my goal to get 2 rows of 15 chairs. What I get is 3 rows of 15 chairs. However, any dimension under 6' gives me only one row! What am I missing? Thanks

Since the units are plug ins, it seems unlikely that one part could be below the symbol and the rest above.. (Circle/Text). What if you edit your symbols to include the circle? That would get it in the right place, and possible reduce your need to tweak Chn # positions...

As jtallen mentioned, the best thing to do is set up you legend, and save that as a template. Use the "Save as Template" from the file menu, give it a useful name, then in the future when you select "New" from the file menu, your template will be available from the list. I've actually got a drawing I saved as "Default.sta" in my templates folder that has all my legends, as well as titleblock, date stamp, etc, and every time I start VW it comes up with that drawing ready to go.

All kidding aside - I think you're stuck with 6. I believe you can use the "+" between 2 colors, and it will lay out right on the plot as well as work with Lightwright. That gets you down to 8 - maybe have a seperate symbol for the 575w/750w units - that's 7....

Yo 6 is enough for me dood

G Afraid I don't know about Truespace, but I thought I was the only one using Bryce for rendering. I too got great results, but man it was a lot of work..... I made the move to Cinema, because of the export plug in that is available. My work flow time has been quartered!

quote: Originally posted by dhruv: How do vectorworks symbols, translate to cinema 4d. As symbols? or do they loose that information? Has anyone performed any tests comparing rendering times between renderworks and cinema 4d. dhruv There are a couple of export options when sending the VW file to C4D, but in general the export plug in will look at Class rather than object, so it depends what classes are embedded in your objects i.e. I have a file that has 30 stacking chair symbols. My 3D chair symbol has 2 classes - Legs and Backs. The resulting Cinema file will have 2 objects - Legs and Backs, for all the chairs. Although this may sound limiting, I don't have any interest in moving things around in Cinema - I always do that in VW, and simply merge the changes into Cinema. It's actually convenient, as all the Legs and Backs will have the same texture anyway. It just takes a little time to update your symbol library to include classes that make sense. Rendering time wise - there is no comparison.

quote: Originally posted by ajs: thanks much, David. I also talked to NNA Sales. They directed me to Maxon to get specifics. I pointed out that Maxon's web site aims the user at VW to get specifics. Hilarity ensued, and I may pursue this further at a later time. I went through that as well - I was very hesitant about buying with out seeing.... and with no one able to give me concrete answers, I nearly blew it off. However, I am sooo glad I did buy into it.

This is text from a post I made in a similar topic; Gents I just made the move to Cinema - I'm a lighting and scenic designer and really need volumetric lighting in my proposals. I can't tell you how happy I am. The renderer looks so good! Sure, there's a bit of a learning curve getting wrapped around Cinema-speak, but it is very flexible and powerful. I just used it on a proposal, and although my client only needed 2 hi res stills, I was able to create a very nice quicktime move with just a glance at the manual. The process of revision was also quite painless via the plug in. After years of going the dxf route, this was a cakewalk. The plugin disc also includes a folder full of architectural textures. Also, I purchased from Maxon direct - they gave me a discount, and the total with the plugin was under $600 - contact Rafi Barbos [r_barbos@maxon.net] she was a big help.

Gents I just made the move to Cinema - I'm a lighting and scenic designer and really need volumetric lighting in my proposals. I can't tell you how happy I am. The renderer looks so good! Sure, there's a bit of a learning curve getting wrapped around Cinema-speak, but it is very flexible and powerful. I just used it on a proposal, and although my client only needed 2 hi res stills, I was able to create a very nice quicktime move with just a glance at the manual. The process of revision was also quite painless via the plug in. After years of going the dxf route, this was a cakewalk. The plugin disc also includes a folder full of architectural textures. Also, I purchased from Maxon direct - they gave me a discount, and the total with the plugin was under $600 - contact Rafi Barbos [r_barbos@maxon.net] she was a big help.

Kevin Not sure if you're still looking at this topic - but I just jumped in to the Cinema plugin and I don't think you'll want to go back. I'm very happy with it.

I don't think the title says it all. I look at stuff in iso all the time and it looks fine. Are you refering to the screen, to print, to renderworks??? If you could elaborate on the circumstance perhaps there would be help to be had.