grant_PD

There's an actual attributes pallete. Turn this on and watch to see what the attributes change to as you're selecting lines, and when you have nothing selected. Down at the bottom of that pallete you will see two check boxes for arrowheads, and a window showing you what type of arrowhead to produce. Your current class will be the one shown in your classes pulldown menu. Opening up the classes menu and editing that class will show you probably that you have arrowheads selected, and that you are also choosing to "use attributes at creation." You can choose to turn this option off or on. Turning it off will leave control back in the attributes pallete. Turning it on will override the attributes pallete and default attributes back to those set at the class.

you're defaulting to lines with arrowheads. This is controlled in two ways: your class settings and your attributes. Check the class that you're defaulting to as you draw, it probably has arrowheads as part of it's attributes. If that isn't solving the problem, try this: With nothing selected, check your attributes pallete. If there are arrowheads selected as part of the attributes, turn them off.

Ambient light is off? That will help a lot. Switch over to one light (spot, not directional) and put it very far away with a distance falloff set to none. Are you viewing the model in perspective? I find the rendering engine to be far more effective in a set view, rather than an isometric.

Setting the dimension for an ellipse should mark out the major and minor axes, as well as place marks for both foci points

I love how Photoshop handles bezier curves with the pen tool. I'd like to see an improvement on Vectorworks' tool, so that the points of each path of a polyline had two handles to adjust, just like photoshop.

Thanks for the help, and the enthusiasm 'bout the renderings. There's more on my own website, feel free to check them out. I'll try setting the recursion settings.

sounds like you need to make a nurbs surface out of your 2d object. Once you've done that you can warp the surface by adjusting the weight along the U, V axes. Look to the section on nurbs in the help files for more info.

www.jhalldesign.com/currentshow/maderenders.html has the pics posted. The first, second and third renders all have blackened, jagged splotches in areas (mostly on the left hand side of the renders.

I think it's important to recognize that people use classes and layers in very different ways, according to their needs. What I hope VW ends up doing is creating a program that is flexable to everyone's needs.

I recently did a rendering that had several walls covered in a semi permeable material (sharkstooth scrim). the rendering from some angles that looked through several of these walls produced jagged black areas that looked like the processor or graphics card gave up there. I'm running a dual 1.8 G5 processor with apple CinemaHD displays.

I'll be making the move soon to a dual processor PC to get into some hefty renderings and animations. Can anyone give me some advice about what to look for when getting these machines? Is there a manufactor that sells one right out of the box, or should I build custom? I know the G5's are good but I'm windows based so they're out of the question.

I'd like to be able to dimension arcs and circles by clicking three points of the arc or circle.

I've been using renderworks fairly regularly now for years. While I love the static renders that it makes, I've been getting requests lately for "fly-throughs" of the designs. For a while I've been able to hold my clients off with virtual panoramas, but I sense change in the wind. I'm basically unimpressed by renderworks' animation capabilities, the process is way too long for the results. So lately I've been perusing other programs like artlantis and cinema4d. I've been unable to find samples of flythroughs generated by these progams though, so it's hard to make a decision. Can someone give me some opinion (and hopefully some examples) of how these programs stack up?