grant_PD

@Dave Donley That's great! I stand corrected! Is there an ability to add in a roughness map as well? it looks like the roughnesses are just generic.

So to take it back to the original poster's questions... One thing that VW renderworks will not do is a layering of material reflections. This was a common complaint about render engines some time back, but mostly is fixed these days in decent render engines. If you look at the photo below of a 1966 stingray, you can see that the paint finish actually has multiple reflections. The base coat is more diffuse and providing color and wide specular highlights (diffuse reflections of the sun) and the top clear coat is providing very sharp reflections ( the very bright sun spots on the side facing the camera and the mirror like reflections on the hood). So while you could model this car accurately in vectorworks, and you could give it a glossy blue paint finish, you could not (AFAIK) get the multiple reflections from renderworks.

LOL the rendering threads devolve as quickly as Mac vs PC!

@mikeakar it's called indirect lighting in VW

Hi Liz, can you you send me your portfolio? Grant@gvzmedia.com

@Jonathan Pickup that's not a bad idea. I'm doing a multifaceted arena so there's quite a lot of angles.

I'm really trying to minimize the amount of times I need to "go up" to the top of the screen in my workflow. Is there a way to get the rotate plan onto a key command or contextual menu?

I don't think you've hit the limit to what Renderworks can do. Things that improve renderings: -Make sure your textures are aligned on faces of objects in a realistic manner. I'm looking at your roof trusses and your 2nd story wood. -Realistic modelling techniques. In the real world, objects have material seams, almost never have sharp 90 degree corners, have connectors. -Textures themselves have imperfections and don't look like they repeat. Do some reading online about PBR textures and how they are built. Not all aspects of PBR are achievable in Renderworks but you can apply some of them. ie. you can assign an image map to the reflections that will adjust how things reflect based upon the grayscale values in the image. -Are you using soft shadows, global illumination, and motivated lighting? I can't tell where the shadows on the floor are coming from, and they look pretty sharp. There's a lot of light coming up out of the second story, where is that coming from? You're correct, the outdoor looks pretty washed out even though the photo looks like a sunny day. Is it a light emitting texture? Looking at photographs of real spaces is a great way to really study light and see what "looks real." Global illumination can go a long way to letting light bounce around for a while and mimic how rooms fill with light. These are all things you can do in renderworks without going to a different program. Software like Twinmotion, Cinema 4d, Lumion, they will have quicker/better access to a lot of these features, but in the end you will benefit most from understanding the concepts first.

I just got a dwg file where the outline of every object was changed to be 6.5 pt lineweight. So the lines are all classed properly, but the attributes are over-ridden in only these lines to be something awful. I've tried a custom modification, custom selection, but because a lot of them are in symbols they don't make the switch. How can I do this without going the manual route?

Currently the seating tool just makes me angry. So I avoid it. I will master it one day, but not this week.

@VIRTUALENVIRONS yes. I have had success taking the centerline section (usually all that is provided) and building the corresponding sections against the house walls left and right. From there you have 3 nurbs curves (Left, Center, Right) to create a loft from.

@VIRTUALENVIRONS Your example doesn't really capture what a complex theater house floor is doing. This plan view shows more of the complexity. In this example, the rows are even in height across center/left/right aisles. But the slope can change as the rows move away from the stage towards the back of the house. The aisles must remain level across their width.

Just played around a bit, but this might be the direction you're wanting to go. Here is my custom renderworks shot. You had your floor lights center up in the truss, so I put them back on the floor. I also turned a lot of the lights from "realistic" to "smooth" falloff. RS Biscayne ver1 v2024.vwx

File---Export----Export 2024 version.

Is this a 2025 file? Can you send me a 2024 file or post one?