Hans Jakob M?ller

Congratualtions folks, it seems as if we've been heard. Only one question: The Prime version of Cinema 4d does not have global illumination. Could we expect more than this, like the advanced rendering capabilties of Cinema 4D Visualize, in RenderWorks 2011? If not, it means that in RW 2010 we had global illumination (radiosity, final gather and HDRI lighting, even if Radiosity hardly works at all) and in RW 2011 we have not. Global illumination is absolutely necessary to create a realistic interior rendering. If we have to buy an additional C4D Visualize lisence to get it, which is maybe 5 times the prize of RenderWorks, we'll have a very expensive solution which is still not integrated in Vectorworks. Exporting to other renderers is nothing new, Artlantis has been there for decades.

I wrote about this topic to the wish list forum months ago but didn't receive a single reply. Maybe it's the wrong forum, so I try again: I think it's about time for a major overhaul of RenderWorks including: ' Faster and more user friendly global illumination ' Ambient occlusion, screen space (SSAO) and model space ' Baking of global illumination, with this you could make high quality realtime walkthroughs directly in VW. ' Realtime/ GPU-rendered global illumination ' Object animation (for people, cars, sky etc.)Why doesn't Nemetschek buy the Animationworks solution from www.ozcad.com.au ' Daylight system with sun and sky lighting ' Sky generator with clouds ' Physically accurate materials, caustics, subsurface scattering etc. ' A lot of this is already there in www.lightworkdesign.com so why is it not integrated in RW. ' Add more yourself.... There are some good reasons for this: Stop customers escaping to standalone redering solutions. There are some great advantages with integrated rendering. ' The trend is towards interactiveness and it's a good trend. With BIM you make canges to the model hundreds of time during the design prosess and you want both to see and communicate the results fast and without delays. Exporting to another applicatin, maybe texturing and mapping over again each time is delay and it's counter-interactive. The time when we completed all design phases in 2D and made some glossy visualizations in the end to sell the finished flats are over. . There is no reason why VectorWorks should have a renderer inferior to Revit (Mental ray), Artlantis, Sketchup (with integrated V-ray) etc. Renderworks is based on Lightwork and LW has realtime global illumination so lets get all the good suff we can get out of LW. Maybe LW can't keep up with giants like Mental ray or V-ray, but an up to date integrated renderer would be an important competitive edge against Revit, Autocad, Archicad and the rest

Could not agree more. The attributes mapping tool has some qualities if you get used to it, some trial and error is required. It has been stripped to the bone and thereby a lot of flexibility has gone. For example a mesh is mapped quite randomly by default. In the previous version you could click on a surface to use that as a mapping plane. Now you can't. There should be some preset mapping choises like "from top" (good for aerial photography) and "from front", "starting from lower left corner" etc. Texture mapping is not the only problem though. I wrote a post to the wish list forum but didn't receive a single reply! "I think it's about time for a major overhaul of RenderWorks including: ' Faster and more user friendly global illumination ' Ambient occlusion, screen space (SSAO) and model space ' Baking of global illumination ' Realtime/ GPU-rendered global illumination ' Object animation (for people, cars, sky etc.) ' Daylight system with sun and sky lighting ' Sky generator with clouds ' Physically accurate materials ' Add more yourself.... There are some good reasons for this: Stop customers escaping to standalone redering solutions. There are some great advantages with integrated rendering. ' The trend is towards interactiveness and it's a good trend. With BIM you make canges to the model hundreds of time during the design prosess and you want both to see and communicate the results fast and without delays. Exporting to another applicatin, maybe texturing and mapping over again each time is delay and it's counter-interactive. The time when we completed all design phases in 2D and made some glossy visualizations in the end to sell the finished flats are over. . There is no reason why VectorWorks should have a renderer inferior to Revit (Mental ray), Artlantis, Sketchup (with integrated V-ray) etc. Renderworks is based on Lightwork and LW has realtime global illumination so lets get all the good suff we can get out of LW. Maybe LW can't keep up with giants like Mental ray or V-ray, but an up to date integrated renderer would be an important competitive edge against Revit, Autocad, Archicad and the rest."

The texturebed tool is interesting. I've played around with it a bit, the class texture maps from the top by default which is great for aerial photographs. But in the end it seems to be yet another example of tools that almost works/ could have worked. I can't find any way to edit the mapping like move, scale or rotate the texture to fit the terrain, so what use is it then?

I posted this under the RenderWorks tab a couple of weeks ago. It seems that this was possible in 2008, but not anymore. Sounds like downgrading to me: "Is there a smart way to map a texture like an aerial photography or a map image to a terrain model. It was quite difficult and very time consuming up to VW 2008. With improvements like Parasolid and attributes mapping tool I would expect it to be both easier and faster. I find it almost impossible, but I'm sure there are some tips'n tricks I've been missing out. In VW2008 you could not texture a DTM directly, but by converting it to a mesh you could map a texture by clicking on a horisontal part of the terrain and then rotating, moving and scaling manually you could achieve an approximate fit. The biggest problem then was: 1) If you did changes to the DTM or the mesh you would have to do all the fitting over again. 2) The terrain would not receive light in Renderworks with mesh smoothing turned on resulting in either a black or a coarse, edgy looking terrain. Are any of theese problems fixed in VW2010? Mapping a texture to a terrain mesh should be quite simple as both the scaling, rotation and placement should be set by the image, from top, north/south and reference to global coordinates (like it actually works when importing 2D bitmaps). If you don't use global coordinates there should be a local coordinate, let's say the lower left corner (or center) of the image linked to the corresponding point of the terrain. If the extent of the image doesn't match the terrain exactly all you'd have to do is move the texture horisontally. What I've seen in VW2010 so far seems quite random and not very intuitive. One thing I've noticed is that mesh smoothin now works on very small meshes (like a tree trunk from a VBvisual plant). As an architect I need a more or less photorealistic representation of the site, a couple of hundred meters of surroundings in all directions to show neighbouring bulidings, roads, vegetation etc."

"Vectorworks 2009 does not use 64 bit addressing and does not benefit from running in a 64 bit environment." What about 2010?

I think it's about time for a major overhaul of RenderWorks including: ' Faster and more user friendly global illumination ' Ambient occlusion, screen space (SSAO) and model space ' Baking of global illumination ' Realtime/ GPU-rendered global illumination ' Object animation (for people, cars, sky etc.) ' Daylight system with sun and sky lighting ' Sky generator with clouds ' Physically accurate materials ' Add more yourself.... There are some good reasons for this: Stop customers escaping to standalone redering solutions. There are some great advantages with integrated rendering. ' The trend is towards interactiveness and it's a good trend. With BIM you make canges to the model hundreds of time during the design prosess and you want both to see and communicate the results fast and without delays. Exporting to another applicatin, maybe texturing and mapping over again each time is delay and it's counter-interactive. The time when we completed all design phases in 2D and made some glossy visualizations in the end to sell the finished flats are over. . There is no reason why VectorWorks should have a renderer inferior to Revit (Mental ray), Artlantis, Sketchup (with integrated V-ray) etc. Renderworks is based on Lightwork and LW has realtime global illumination so lets get all the good suff we can get out of LW. Maybe LW can't keep up with giants like Mental ray or V-ray, but an up to date integrated renderer would be an important competitive edge against Revit, Autocad, Archicad and the rest.

VectorWorks could make realtime walkthroughs if RenderWorks could bake global illumination into the textures of the model. You would only have to render once and OpenGL would do the rest, exept reflections. Something for the wish list?

VectorWorks could make realtime walkthroughs if RenderWorks could bake global illumination into the textures of the model. You would only have to render once and OpenGL would do the rest, exept reflections. Something for the wish list?

Is there a smart way to map a texture like an aerial photography or a map image to a terrain model. It was quite difficult and very time consuming up to VW 2008. With improvements like Parasolid and attributes mapping tool I would expect it to be both easier and faster. I find it almost impossible, but I'm sure there are some tips'n tricks I've been missing out. In VW2008 you could not texture a DTM directly, but by converting it to a mesh you could map a texture by clicking on a horisontal part of the terrain and then rotating, moving and scaling manually you could achieve an approximate fit. The biggest problem then was: 1) If you did changes to the DTM or the mesh you would have to do all the fitting over again. 2) The terrain would not receive light in Renderworks with mesh smoothing turned on resulting in either a black or a coarse, edgy looking terrain. Are any of theese problems fixed in VW2010? Mapping a texture to a terrain mesh should be quite simple as both the scaling, rotation and placement should be set by the image, from top, north/south and reference to global coordinates (like it actually works when importing 2D bitmaps). If you don't use global coordinates there should be a local coordinate, let's say the lower left corner (or center) of the image linked to the corresponding point of the terrain. If the extent of the image doesn't match the terrain exactly all you'd have to do is move the texture horisontally. What I've seen in VW2010 so far seems quite random and not very intuitive. One thing I've noticed is that mesh smoothin now works on very small meshes (like a tree trunk from a VBvisual plant). As an architect I need a more or less photorealistic representation of the site, a couple of hundred meters of surroundings in all directions to show neighbouring bulidings, roads, vegetation etc.

Is there a smart way to map a texture like an aerial photography or a map image to a terrain model. It was quite difficult and very time consuming up to VW 2008. With improvements like Parasolid and attributes mapping tool I would expect it to be both easier and faster. I find it almost impossible, but I'm sure there are some tips'n tricks I've been missing out. In VW2008 you could not texture a DTM directly, but by converting it to a mesh you could map a texture by clicking on a horisontal part of the terrain and then rotating, moving and scaling manually you could achieve an approximate fit. The biggest problem then was: 1) If you did changes to the DTM or the mesh you would have to do all the fitting over again. 2) The terrain would not receive light in Renderworks with mesh smoothing turned on resulting in either a black or a coarse, edgy looking terrain. Are any of theese problems fixed in VW2010? Mapping a texture to a terrain mesh should be quite simple as both the scaling, rotation and placement should be set by the image, from top, north/south and reference to global coordinates (like it actually works when importing 2D bitmaps). If you don't use global coordinates there should be a local coordinate, let's say the lower left corner (or center) of the image linked to the corresponding point of the terrain. If the extent of the image doesn't match the terrain exactly all you'd have to do is move the texture horisontally. What I've seen in VW2010 so far seems quite random and not very intuitive. One thing I've noticed is that mesh smoothin now works on very small meshes (like a tree trunk from a VBvisual plant). As an architect I need a more or less photorealistic representation of the site, a couple of hundred meters of surroundings in all directions to show neighbouring bulidings, roads, vegetation etc.

My graphics card is Quadro FX 1700 with 512 MB video ram. My processor is 2 x quad core Xeon E5410 2.33GHz which should be reasonably up to date. I'll look for newer drivers for the graphics card. Nemetschek recommends the older version of QuickTime that comes with the instalation disk rather than the newest. I have never had any problems with this in earlier versions of VW.

I'm failing to see any improvements to rendering, 3D accuracy or stability in VW2009. A smoothed mesh will still not receive light other than ambient, all highligting must be turned off when working with meshes, else annoying fuzzy, flashing black and orange lines are drawn at all edges, making OpenGL exremely slow and uninteractive. Meshes can not be made larger than in previous versions and large meshes still causes blank renders(all white screen in OpenGL,checkerboard in Renderworks and all black in render bitmap)frequent crashes when rendering and crashes every time when trying to perform a boolean operation between a mesh and a solid. I see no reason to update to VW2009 before this is fixed. It's a bit of a dilemma, because I'v built many large terrain models in previous versions and with satisfied customers. Now it seems as if VW is no longer the right tool for the job. Are there other progams within the Nemetschek system that are better suited for large terrain models?

Are there any improvements to RenderWorks in version 2009? I could not find any in the .PDF brochure. Since there is a new and improved 3D engine I would expect this to open up new possibilities for rendering. At least I would expect faster and more accurate global illumination and some sort of fast or nearly interactive preview. After all it's already there in LightWorks and RenderWorks is based on this. There is no reason to give up RenderWorks yet. I do not fully support the views raised in the previous post from carpalmer. I get reasonable results with many point lights on quite complex models in minutes on a multiprosessor PC. I get a fairly nice Cornell box render with Final Gather in ten seconds and with radiosity in about two minutes. But I still haven't managed to make one decent interior perspective!

I built a simple model about 6x5 meters with four white walls, a white ceiling, a floor with wooden texture, one big window, a table with four simple chairs and a directional light. With the proposed object size and first detail at about 1 m rendering time is acceptable but creates ugly atifacts, especally at the top and bottom of walls. If I reduce object size and first detail to about 300 mm the artifacts are still there, just smaller scale. To get a reasonable result it seems I have too use the smallest possible values for object size which results in rendering times amounting to days. Then it?s very hard to evaluate by trial and error. Is it really worth spending time on? Is there an optimal setting for a room of this size with details the size of window frames, table legs etc. or is there some trick that I`m missing?