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mclaugh

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Everything posted by mclaugh

  1. If you knew how to do it, you would know that you wouldn't have either the time, the energy, or the resources to do it.
  2. If it's a one-off, stack the walls on both sides of the window, and insert the window in a full-height wall. Alternatively, you could overlay textured 3d polygons on the wall face covering the area below the chair rail. If you'll be doing something similar on a regular basis, check out Julian Carr's Windoor plugin..
  3. Corrupt font. Delete the font, clean out the font cache, reboot, and reinstall the font.
  4. For large and/or complex renders and animations, we usually break up the job into several different modules, e.g., for stills, landscape layer(s) rendered on one machine, ground floor elements on a second, second floor elements on a third, etc. and combine the final output in Photoshop. Animations get broken into 1-2 min segments w/3-5 sec. overlap, and combined in Final Cut Pro. A bit of a kludge, but it works well enough for our purposes.
  5. eh? Please define professional rendering package DWorks. 12.5 has area lights, HDRI lighting, Radiosity, ray tracing, camera path animation etc etc. What is missing from it to not make it professional level? On this basis you are saying that something like FormZ is not professional level rendering. Despite the fact that RW offers many of the same capabilites as dedicated rendering packages such as Artlantis, C4D, Maxwell, Rhyno, etc., RW is?and always will be?a kludge to VW. Can you produce professional quality output with RW? Sure, but that doesn't make it a "professional" rendering package.
  6. Sorry, but permissions is one of the most intelligent features of *nix systems, especially for those of us who manage multi-user systems. If you don't understand them, either you haven't bothered spending 30 seconds to look up what they are and how they work, or you don't care to understand them.
  7. Rick, While the situation you describe is a common one, it is not the one specified by the OP. Go back and re-read the conditions specified by the OP again carefully. The conditions do NOT specify a rounded corner of radius > 0 tapering down to a square corner: they specify a Zero radius corner as the initial condition tapering down to a zero radius corner, i.e., rectangle to rectangle, not rounded rectangle to rectangle. Are there situations in which a designer might want or need to taper an extrued from a right angle corner to a radius > 0 corner? Possibly; so the capability you describe would indeed be nice addition. But the fact that the conditions specified in the OP crash every version of VW going back to 8.0 (not simply 9.0, as fsung observed), regardless of OS, suggests how rarely that situation arises, and how non-obvious those situations would be to identify for someone who does NOT need to do that as a matter of routine.
  8. I would argue that any event for which the result is indeterminate, as is the case of divide by zero, is NOT a valid event(NB: the quotient of divide by zero is NOT infinity; it is indeterminable) but the philosophical issue aside, I DO get a valid response when in this limited instance (see screenshot above).
  9. The Knowledge Base article is outdated. The graphics cards mentioned were for G5 (pre-Intel) Macs.
  10. Not really surprising, since a extruding a rounded rectangle with a corner radius of Zero means you're dividing by zero.
  11. Tom, While VW does work with any 7.x version, I highly recommend updating to 7.1, which is more efficient, more stable, and more secure than 7.0.x. (The current version is 7.1.5.) Also, keep your eyes peeled for an QT update to patch a security hole, identified last week, in the interaction between QT and JavaScript that allows a remote user to take control of an OS X or Windows system running QT.
  12. Well, then you can plan on sticking with your single core, single processor iMac for another 5-10 years, because this is NOT an Apple issue. The processor whine is an electrical signal noise caused by inductance, which is caused by the field collapse cycle in the power supply that happens when a CPU is idling. It exists on multi core and multi processor systems, regardless of CPU manufacturer, system integrator, and OS, that employ an active power management scheme. The way to prevent it is either to load BOTH CPUs all the time OR to turn the power management (nap) feature off. Not recommending something is not the same as saying it's "Not A Good Idea." Apple doesn't recommend enabling Root (actually, it's stronger than that: Apple recommends not ENABLING Root), even though there are clear and significant performance benefits to be gained by doing so. The fact that Apple doesn't recommend enabling Root doesn't mean that it's "Not A Good Idea"; it simply means that you need to be aware of and accept the potential risks of doing so. Likewise, Apple does not recommend deleting foreign language resources (.lproj files and folders, keyboard resources, etc.) for languages you don't/won't ever use (we're talking about anywhere from 2.5-6 Gb of usless files for OS X alone), even though deleting them in no way compromises system performance or stability. (And, unlike with CHUD Tools, Apple does not provide tools for removing extraneous language resources.) Apple itself provides both the tools to turn off NAP on the OS X install CD/DVD and the instructions of how to turn of NAP. The reasons turning NAP off is not recommended by Apple are that: a) it increases power consumption; b) increased power consumption = increased CPU temperatures (~1-2? F), which in turn leads to increased power consumption as the CPU fans kick in to cool the CPUs and may slightly decrease processor life; and c) under certain conditions, it could produce system or program instability, resulting to crashes and/or kernel panics.
  13. Yes and No: The Processor pref pane is installed by CHUD Tools (Computer Hardware Understanding Developer Tools), so it's straight from Apple, but not part of the default installation. To install CHUD Tools: 1. insert the mac OS X Tiger Install DVD (or Panther CD/DVD if you're running 10.3.9. Make sure you install the version for your OS.) 2. double click the Xcode Tools folder icon 3. review the About Xcode Tools.pdf file 4. double click the XcodeTools.mpkg icon 5. follow the screen prompts until you see the Select Destination Screen 6. click on your hard drive with Tiger installed 7. press the Continue Button 8. Press the Customize button 9. Check CHUD Tools and press Upgrade/Continue You can also download CHUD Tools from macupdate.com or versiontracker.com. Note that you should restart after installing CHUD before fiddling with the Processor CP. (BTW, a lot of other interesting and useful tools in the XCode package. Well worth giving up some real estate on the HD.)
  14. Actually, the processor CAN and DOES whine. This is a longstanding and well-documented issue going back to the introduction of Tiger. Searching for "processor" and "whine" over on the Apple support board returns hundreds of hits on this specific issue. Christiaan, try disabling "Allow Nap" in the Processor Control Panel (System Preferences > Other > Processor. If that solves the issue, consider using CHUD to disable "NAP" permanently. (Disabling NAP via the Processor CP is only temporary: it resets to "Allow Nap" upon reboot.) Note, however, that Apple does NOT recommend permanently disabling NAP.
  15. Installing the combo update may have resolved an issue on your computer, but I have been installing the delta updates via Software Update since 10.1.1 and have never had subsequent issues with VW that were tracable to Sofware Update.
  16. Short answer: Don't use fonts that weren't installed as part of the OS. Reason: most commercial font foundries (Adobe, Linotype, Bitstream, ITC, Monotype, etc.) restrict embedding of their fonts in PDFs because embedding copies the font's metrics to the PDF file, which can be extracted from the PDF, imported into practically any font editor, and used to create an exact duplicate of the original font file. (It really IS that easy.) So to permit embedding would be like to placing the fonts in the Public Domain. Since commercial font foundries derive a not insignificant portion of their revenue from licensing fees, permitting their fonts to be embedded in PDFs (or Postscript/EPS files, for that matter) could be tantamount to committing financial suicide.
  17. I prefer Drive Genius and TT Pro to Disk Warrior because they offer additional diagnostic capabilities, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with DW. For data recovery, I've had significantly better success with Data Rescue II than with Disk Warrior, and on a couple of occasions, I've used Data Rescue II to recover data from HDs that DW refused to mount. George, Fragmentation and corruption are usually thought of as separate issues. "Fragmentation" occurs when a file is broken up into several chunks that are scattered across the HD rather than written in a contiguous block. It doesn't directly affect the integrity of files, it takes longer for a file to load. Optimizing invloves gathering all a given file's chunks together and writes them to a contiguous block on the HD. It generally also involves sorting and prioritizing all the files on a disk by type, so that the most frequently used files of a given type are written toward the rim of the disc (where read/write access is fastest) and less frequently used files are written toward the center. Disk/file corruption occurs when there are problems with integrity of the disk/file, and can render a disk/file unreadable. Examples of corruption include things like crosslinking, scrambled File Allocation Tables, file permission errors, lost clusters, broken file associations, extents, and/or b-trees, time/date errors, etc. If you're familiar with Norton SystemWorks (which, IMO, is a dog with fleas and should be avoided at all costs), "SpeedDisk" deals with file fragmentation; "Norton Disc Doctor" deals with disk/file corruption.
  18. Dang Peter, wish you'd posted this a month ago: would have saved me a TON of time and and what was left of my hair. Oh well, got it bookmarked for next time. :-)
  19. Assign a keystroke combination to the "Move 3D" command via the Workspace Editor (I use CMD-CTL-M) and move it that way.
  20. It's possible, but I think it's unlikely. I haven't mucked around with the scripts recently, but IIRC, they contain a routine to check CPU usage and only run if the processor is idle; if the processor is in use, they hang around in the background until the processor is free. OTOH, if you restarted sometime after the script(s) launched but before they actually ran (because they were idling in the background), they would have run immediately following startup, so, again, it is certainly possible they would have fixed whatever was causing the crashes.) Look at a third party HD utlity like Drive Genius, TechTool Pro or iDefrag. I use both TT Pro and Drive Genius and would not hesitate to recommend either. Although I have not used iDefrag, I know people prefer it to TT Pro and Drive Genius. Last but not least, and as touched upon by 'eas,' presumably while sleep mode must use some (negligble?) amount of power, certainly it uses a lot less power than when the computer is fully functional (including sitting and not 'doing' anything?)? So it seems sleep mode is recommended, and that maybe in Preferences the computer can be scheduled to wake up at 3:00 AM?. Energy consumption depends on model, available memory. HDs, and monitor(s). A quad-core Mac Pro w/the NVidia Quadro FX graphics cards, 8Gb RAM and 4 HDs idles at around 220 watts; spinning down all 4 HDs cuts consumption to around 180 watts; sleeping cuts consumption to around 7 watts; shut down, consumption is around 2 watts. (Like most electronic devices, Macs draw power even when turned off.) You can reduce consumption while idle by setting HDs to spin down when not in use, sleeping the display, and throttling down processor performance in the Energy Saver Preference Pane. To set your computer to wake from sleep at a pre-determined time: Preferences > Energe Saver > Schedule Check "Start up or wake," select date and time, click "OK." If you do sleep your computer, however, you should be aware that in Tiger (10.4.x) time-shifts the execution of the maintenance scripts by the amount of time your computer is sleeping, which may result in the script(s) not running at all. See the FAQ for details. (While you're at it, browse through the other FAQs on the site. Probably wouldn't hurt to bookmark the site as well.)
  21. The maintenance scripts do not defragment memory. Next time you run into memory fragmentation problems, try logging out and logging back in instead of restarting: it's much faster and accomplishes the same thing.
  22. Pete, We're going to have to agree to disagree on the usefulness of guaging stability based on message board posts. The number of complaints may not be lineraly proportional to the size of the user base, but it is demonstrably true that the volume of complaints correlates directly to the size of the user base, i.e., the incidence rate of user complaints rises in proportion to the size of the user base, particularly in technical support forums. So if the proportion of posters on any given board is 80% platform X/15% platform Y/5% both, it should be expected that a disproportionately large number of complaints will come from platform X users, even though the number of [/i]unique[/i] complaints on platform Y may be significantly higher than on platform X.
  23. Will, I don't know who at Apple you spoke with, but some of the information you received is questionable, and some is just plain wrong. While OS X does a much better job of file management than Windows, performance lag due to file fragmentation can still be an issue, particularly as you?approach HD capacity. Also, be aware that OS X only auto-optimizes files < 20Mb, so if you're working with files > 20Mb, you may benefit from optimizing occasionally. Again, I don't know who at Apple you talked to, but shutting down every night is NOT better than leavng the computer running 24/7. OS X, like all *nix systems, runs daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts that clean up a variety of System logs and temporary files and rebuild critical system databases that are essential to maintaining a stable system. By default, these scripts are executed between 03:15 and 05:30 hours local time, depending on the script, so if your system is shut down or in sleep mode during these hours, the maintenance scripts won't run. You can, of course, run the scripts manually or edit them to run at a time when the computer will be on and idle, but for optimum performance, they do need to be run regularly. As for restarting every few days, OS X is based on BSD Unix which is designed for 99% uptime, so while restarting occasionally may not hurt, it is by no means necessary. Except for forced restarts due to power outages or system or VW updates, our dedicated rendering system has run 24/7 since Sept. '05 with no measurable decrease in stability or performance between restarts. The only tangible benefit of restarting OS X occasionally is that it flushes the RAM, which can become fragmented over time, but you can accomplish the same thing by logging out and logging back in.
  24. I don't think comments on the board are at all a useful or meaningful way of gauging the stability of one platform vs. another. Back in the day, Autocad for Mac was a big, ugly, stinking POS, but the number of complaints from the Mac user base was minuscule compared to the number of complaints from Wintel users due to the fact that the Wintel user base was several orders of magnitude larger than the Mac user base. So without knowing the percentages of posters using Macs vs. those using Windows, it's impossible to get any sense of the scale from the number of posts about problems on one platform vs. the other, and even if you do know the percentages, you can't simply count up the posts because if 50 users report having the same problem, it's 50 incidents but only one problem. You also can't necessarily know from tech board posts whether a problem identified on one platform existed on both, but was patched before users on the other platform discovered or got around to reporting it. Case in point: I oversee a mixed Mac/Windows office. After we purchased the 12.5 upgrade but before installing it on any of the office computers, I spent four weeks testing it on my G5 Dual "crash test dummy" system at home. (It's my SOP to thoroughly test new software and upgrades on a non-critical system before we install them on any of the office computers so we don't get burned in case there are any major problems.) Very early on, I encountered a problem with the door and window tools crashing VW every time I followed a particular series of steps within the tools. Nemetschek tech support's initial response was that the problem was caused by some other third-party software on my computer since no one else had reported problems with either tool. After a couple of weeks of trying different things and getting nowhere, I installed a brand new, freshly zeroed and formatted HD. Even with ONLY OS X 10.4.x and VW 12.5 installed, the door and window tools still crashed. (Yes, I actually manually installed and tested every delta update from 10.4.1-10.4.8.) Subsequently, I installed and crashed 12.5 on a Powerbook running 10.3.9, which showed that the crash was neither Tiger- nor G5-specific, and crashed the Windows version in XP PRo on a Dell Inspiron 9600, which established that the problem wasn't Mac-specific. After sending tech support detailed, step-by-step instructions along with screenshots documenting how to produce the crash, Tech Support confirmed that they were able to reproduce the crash on both hardware platforms (PPC and Intel) and both OSes (Mac and Win), and that it was due to a bug introduced in 12.5 that had not been present in 12.0.x. The bug was patched on both platforms in 12.5.1, but since no one else on the tech board posted that they encountered the problem, I didn't bother following up my initial post with a note that the problem also existed in Windows as well, so there are no other post about the crash besides my initial post reporting the crash in the Mac version. So if you go by posts on the tech board, this appears to have been a Mac-specific issue, when in reality, it was a cross-platform problem that was first identified on the Mac and patched before any Windows users stumbled across or reported it.
  25. Maybe we should start a petition for Apple to switch to one of NVidia's bridgable cards like the Quadro FX 5600. (Then again, at an MSRP of $2999 ... maaaaybe not.)
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