grant_PD

@Kevin Allen @Tom W. That's sort of what I'm doing now. But with the softgoods there are a huge amount of records, many of them similar in name (color, length....) so I ended up making a report of everything in the softgoods record, then scrolling through the worksheet to find out what was being reported.

I'm building a worksheet (long overdue) for my soft goods. But I can't find the record format for soft goods in the Resource Browser. I assume it's hidden somewhere. But the only way I can see to discover the records held for that object is to create a report with EVERYTHING contained in it, and then cherry pick the useful bits. Is there another way?

Did some more tinkering and got the renderings down to around a minute. Here's some things I worked over on the file: -Took a camera view instead of just the uncropped shot -Changed the pickleball courts into symbols. They have two sets of courts layered on top of one another. I lifted the color ones up a bit. I would recommend turning off all linework when rendering, it can cause issues. -Your overhead lights have every cut line modeled in the glass, and the texture is set to emit light. I replaced the glass with just a sweep, no faceting, and set the texture to not emit light. -turned off the blurriness options in your custom renderworks. -I was able to get back an approximation of your mesh curtains with reflectivity with these settings.

I also tried to run this file. There are elements causing the memory problems, I would follow @rDesigns advice. There may be more issues, I just haven't delved into it too much. But the fact that it hangs on "pre render" tells me that it is not to the rendering part yet, so the problem as of now is not with the rendering. Typically if there are rendering issues, you will get bad outcomes or very long rendering times per chunk of the visible space. ie, when you render glass with blurriness, it takes a long time to render that part of the scene because that particular area needs a lot of computing power. Look for repeatable elements in your scene, make symbols of them. You should see a lot of improvement.

Referencing will bog down your computer. I would keep the master document in its own file, select only the 2d stuff you need from it and copy/paste in place into your file.

@mjm Good to hear the grass is not that much greener on the other side! I was remembering a friend of mine who builds LED arrays, he works with STEP files and all that manufacturer stuff. He was the one telling me that his M1 laptop could work off the battery for hours even with those files open in VW.

@CW2020 Glad we were able to help. Re: hardware. Get the best graphics card you can. Shaded rendering is all the graphics card, and will also improve your overall 3d experience in VW. @Andy Broomell has a spectacular webinar on data viz somewhere on his website I believe. Definitely worth a watch.

and of course they are in the resource browser....

Does anyone have a vectorworks road case? I'm looking to model a bunch of them up and want to put in the corner protection, handles etc.

Also, when using the shaded+hidden line recipe, be aware that sometimes VW "hangs on" to the shaded render, even if there are changes to the model. Even if you press update. So sometimes you have to change the render mode, which then must dump the render out of memory, then set it back to shaded, and then you can update. AND sometimes VW will get confused as to whether or not to apply the de-saturation effect so you have to reset that as well....but the end effect is good so I'm not complaining about the buggy behavior...today. 😁

Can you post an image of what you are trying to do so we can take a look?

If you actually add the textures to the model, you can render them in the viewport in openGL (shaded) with no lines drawn. Then in the background render select hidden line mode. Finally, use the image effects in the viewport to take out all of the color. You will get a black and white image with textures and very crisp linework.

I've heard from my mac user friends that the macbooks with M1 chips are very battery efficient. I've been a pc user my whole career, and can say that the best way to drain a laptop battery is to to some heavy 3D modelling and rendering. I can get an hour or so of battery life. That said, if you do go the pc laptop route, I would highly recommend MSI laptops. I find them superior to the big brand name computers.

It was indeed, not in my workspace. Perhaps because it was renamed? Anyway, all good now thanks!