IanH

The Spotlight/renderworks 1st license upgrade from 2009 to 2010 is ?358+VAT+P&P retail Shipping should be from next week.

I believe that the cost of a replacement dongle has now changed and is effectively the cost of a second license. Too many people were 'losing' their dongles and when 'found', passing them on to their friends and colleagues. Faulty dongles are still relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of a new license. Unofficially, dongle less versions of VW are available for the Euro market, but only on request by a certain select few of existing VW practices.

What license option are you running on VW? Some license options need different service packs - ie iirc, student license version needs a different sp than the commercial version.

360ing between versions is risky enough, let alone between applications and vendors.

The user now has the information that she needs.

Which was Donalds requirement - "Vectorks (esp. 3-D and radiosity)"

You have obviously never lost a drive from a RAID set then There is no way that I would ever use raid 0 for holding critical data even with a backup in place. You are doubling your chance of losing data - its better not to have a failure in the first place than rely on recovering from a backup even if its just to avoid the time needed to rebuild a machine and recover from backups, let alone relying on potential deadline critical access to data of dubious integrity. Yes, raid 5 may be an option, but its certainly not green and quiet. I too used raid for many years, but never bothered with it when I upgraded. I could not justify the cost/risk for the benefit - an application taking 20 seconds to load rather than 10 is really no issue when I only do this once per day. The speed improvements are insignificant in real world use unless your machine has an inherent performance issue causing excessive disc i/o or the application is i/o bound which the o/p's requirements of VW 3D and radiosity is his main requirement. If cost is no object, then go raid 5 and still maintain a backup plan in some form. If you want to go raid 0, consider the implications if you get a single hd failure in the raid set and if you go raid 1, realise it is not a backup solution in its own right. I can guarantee, if you have a render that takes 1 hour to perform, its still going to take one 1 hour whether or not you are running raid - as long as you are not memory bound in which case, there is nothing to stop you running raid 0 (hardware or software) on non critical page file but you would better spend your money on maxing out the memory. @petri - im not going to argue as its been nearly 20 years since I last programmed a lisa/mac at low enough level to have to consider the internals and a lot has changed since then but if hardware raid was being used via a dedicated controller I would assume (a dangerous thing to do I know) that the mac os would be blissfully unaware of it - raid via a controller makes a raid set appear as a single drive to the os and has to do this before the os starts to load. That said, Apple may well have unified the raid format for all of their controllers so a failed controller may be able to be swapped out for another one. Software raid is a another thing and the OS will be involved and can control the raid format - so its down to hoping that apple don't change the raid format between os versions. Software raid also has the potential to impact on the performance of the machine, so what you gain in disc io speed, you may lose some to availability of cpu cycles on the machine. However, Donald is upgrading his dell and last time I looked, dell didn't sell Macs so he is probably (he states pc workstation) upgrading to another PC so all the talk of macs is immaterial.

Careful with RAID. Often RAID uses a proprietary controller. If the controller dies (or in the case of NAS, the enclosure), then you may loose the lot unless you can get a replacement controller of same model and/or manufacturer. Personally, if you get a disc bottleneck that requires raid to solve performance issues within the scenarios that you are talking about, then you have a more fundamental issue with the configuration of the system - probably memory. Raid will just be a sticking plaster over something much more important to solve. But, yes, yes, yes, you must have redundancy for data, but it can be a simple additional online or offline drive and a robust (and ideally tested) data backup/disaster recovery plan. I personally use a mix of backup plans using NAS and built in second hard drive on disc plus a mix of file shadowing plus incremental daily backups. Yes. My NAS is mirrored but I also have a spare redundant NAS enclosure.

No PM received.

Computers Unlimited are the UK distributor. If you contact me with your details, who you originally purchased from, the 12.5 serial number and the 6 digits from your dongle, I can contact CU and see what they can do.

Soon...all will be revealed.

+1

Its a matter of selecting the right tool for the job. A final presentation design of mine will consist of a number of elements, all composited in Vectorworks. However, those elements will come from a variety of disciplines, so there will likely be a mix of VW, RW, Piranesi, photos and hand drawn elements. Whilst Piranesi can do flat views, such as plan or front views etc, Piranesi excels at axonometric or perspective drawings. Because of this, and more importantly the point that things like elevations appear in my workflow (as part of the design process rather than a presentation tool), I still use Renderworks for elevations and Vectorworks 2D for my plan rendering. But if I am doing a presentation drawing, its either in pen/watercolour paint/pencil or Piranesi - depending on the detail of the planting needed. If the planting is important, ie species is critical, I still draw the plants, albeit within a 3D perspective assisted by Vectorworks, however, if I am only showing indicative planting, then I use Piranesi and stylise the supplied plants as appropriate. The main reason for choosing Piranesi in this circumstance is because it is better and quicker than using VW/RW, but I am not trying to produce a photo realistic look, but an individual, non computer look to my drawings. If you want a photorealistic look, there are other packages that may be worth taking a look at, which have their own range of vegetation - I did seriously consider Artlantis but could not justify the price as I already had Renderworks. There are some short comings that I find with Piranesi, but these are really small compared with what the package offers as a whole. The major one for some however will be if multiple renders of the similar view are required. As you generally hand texture and apply props by hand, before rendering, there will be some duplication of effort as you may need to do this/tweak to all the different views, although props, such as plants, can be saved and reapplied to a different 3D view and I believe that later versions of Piranesi will do similar with textures. What is important to realise is that Piranesi can work at various stages of the final render process. I typically use it fairly early on, so I export really basic 3D models (making 3D views even quicker to produce), but it can equally work with more complete images where you can simply add props and stylise. If you want a creative individual image, take a serious look at Piranesi, but if you want a computer generated or photo realistic look, it may not be for you. But it is a useful addition to the toolbox.

If you have 2008 and buy 2009 upgrade with free offer to get 2010, then the upgrade is going to cost approx half the upgrade cost then if you decide to upgrade any time in the future. Basically, you get two upgrades for the price of one and its not going to be this 'cheap' ever again.

It probably hasn't been started yet

On a tangent, check out Piranesi. This comes with many more images than Vectorworks provides. I produce my 3D model in Vectorworks+RW then add my plants in Piranesi. I generally use Piranesi for the final composition as it allows me to apply textures by hand and hand render the final scene giving a very personal look.

Depending on how the pdf was sourced, the X and Y may have slightly scaling factors so you need to double check these. My cheap all-in-one printer/scanner definitely produces slightly different sizes in X and Y but I have also seen this from print shop scans too. Do not scale from this drawing etc applies even to pdf's. Its going to be less of an issue with pdf's that contain Vector rather than raster data.

I have to apologies that you feel that I have insulted you. That was not the intention. I simply needed to clarify issues and, with due respect, your explanation on how it all worked did not make sense, ie 30 day period and having to return the old product, plus, it did not fit with the VW pricing structure as it opens up an anomaly where by for a 30 day period, every 23 months, the upgrade path could be halved in cost. I have now clarified this all with the UK distributors and this upgrade offer is available in a number of circumstances, but not all. It would appear to cover all purchases except addons and educational versions. An addon is where you add on a product, such as designer on to a architect package, or adding renderworks on to a standard product. These are not covered. But new versions and upgrades are certainly covered. And there is no need to return any previous version - it is simply a serial number after all, so license permitting, you can have both versions installed at the same time. Please accept my apologies again and appreciate that as a reseller who had not been informed of this offer and knowing how it does not fit with the pricing structure I had to question the details of this offer. It was questioning the motives of NNA rather than your integrity.

Tip: Always save your work before using the paint bucket

Wow. I can see the point with pre 10 versions, ie 8.5, where the cost of upgrade is the same no matter what version you have so it would be much the same as buying 2009 new outright and getting the upgrade to 2010. But, from the NNA perspective, this does not make sense for a single version upgrade. In the UK, the rrp ex vat prices for 2009 Architect and upgrades are: 2009 ?1376 (new outright purchase) 2008 ?335 (upgrade) 12 ?598 (upgrade) 10/11 ?683 (upgrade) Pre 10 ?783 (upgrade) So, within this 30 day window you would have effectively got a ?598 upgrade for ?335, if this same promotion applies to the UK. I need to check on Monday.

Is this wishful thinking or fact? If you buy 2009 then change your mind and upgrade to 2010 instead, the cost of the upgrade to 2010 will be nearly double that of the single 2009 upgrade as its a two version upgrade. You are not buying an upgrade to the latest version, you are buying either a 2008 to 2009 upgrade or a 2008 to 2010 upgrade, the latter being a very slight saving over a 2008 to 2009 upgrade plus the 2009 to 2010 upgrade, both options being nearly twice the price of a 2008 to 2009 upgrade. Changing your mind under the 30day offer may save you money, but probably only about 20 or so bucks over the 2008 to 2010 price rather than getting it at the 2008 to 2009 price. I'm a UK reseller and have not been told about the 'discount' - but then again, it is the UK plus us resellers don't get told anything unless we ask.

Are you sure about 2009 upgrade having free upgrade to 2010? Late purchase copies of 2009 do but upgrades? It certainly does not fit with the pricing structure. A double step upgrade is approx the same as two single step upgrades. It would certainly pi55 off many 2009 users if the double price upgrade was effectively halved and I can't see why NNA would half their upgrade costs at the expense of loyal users.

Chris Trial copies of 2009 are available, but they are a difference license which requires a different build. Last year, the trial version build for 2009 and other versions reliant on the build (I think the educational license is) were delayed by many months. I think I got my copies earlier this year. Hopefully this delay will not happen this time. Probably a bit late now, but if you still want a trial of 2009, PM me and I can hopefully send you out one. I am however in the process of moving house so I'm not 100% sure where I put the remaining discs so you may not get it any sooner than a 2010 one! -Ian

Does it do this when exporting to pdf then printing from the pdf? I've got a similar issue which appears to be a printer driver issue as it display fine when exported to pdf but still prints hatches odd. I have not resolved it yet, but it came around the time I got an update from HP...

Slightly OT, but... I don't know about the pricing structure in the US, but in the UK, the price differential of stepped upgrades (skip a version etc) vs. yearly upgrades is negligible. Last time I looked, the differential between upgrading from 12 straight to 2009 vs. 12 to 2008 to 2009 was about ?20. It then comes down to cost in time to upgrade vs. the benefits that a newer version gives.