jamesmise

When using the Colorblaze instruments by Color Kinetics, the beam shows a single point of origin. In reality, the point of origin on a Colorblaze 72 is about 6 feet wide. The Colorblaze 72 symbol accurately renders one cell, but there are 12 cells in the instrument. With RGB in each cell, you could have up to 36 channels for one Colorblaze 72. I guess I could create a 6-inch Colorblaze and group 12 of them together to accurately render a Colorblaze 72. Any ideas? Jim Spotlight 2012 with Renderworks

Importing Sketchup files results in a wireframe drawing with no textures. I imported a 3d person and although there were 20 layers imported, the only layer that had any information on it was the wireframe. Is this the way it is supposed to work? Jim Spotlight 2012 with Renderworks

Is there a quick and easy way to find out which objects or resources are bogging down a drawing? Right now, I just delete one class, save the file, and see what the resulting file size is. My most recent project suddenly got very slow to navigate and render. I found one render texture that was 20mb of the file and another that was 10mb. Also, 3d objects imported from Sketchup can be memory hogs. Converting to mesh helps. So does purging, after importing. A marble texture included with renderworks is 1mb of my file. It may not sound like much but multiply that by many, many textures and it adds up. Jim Spotlight 2012 with Renderworks Windows

Does anyone know why when i edit textures with the image shader, they render fine in Open GL but the shading does not render with Final Quality Renderworks? I only get the original texture. I don't see any configurable options for Final Quality Renderworks. Jim Spotlight 2012 with Renderworks

I'm just about ready to upgrade to Spotlight. I use a lot of custom made LED panels in our productions. (a light box with LED belts inside and a white backlit film on the front). Will I be able to create a custom instrument in Spotlight that replicates this? I would like to cue these lights in my rendering using the ETC Ion board. So each panel would need a Red, Green, and Blue channel that could be mixed. My panels are various sizes. Lots of 2' x 2' squares. Some long troughs, 6" x 12'. Kansas City Barbecue for any Spotlight expert that could help with this. Thanks, Jim VW 2010 with Renderworks Windows 7

Import the dwg into a separate vectorworks file and save it. Then immediately purge it. This will reduce it by 2/3 but it will still probably be bigger than you would like.

This might be helpful. Create an image prop using your selected image. In a rendering mode, you should see your image. Make sure your fill style is set to solid if you don't see the image. Choose the Render Bitmap tool in the Visualization menu. Draw your "crop" on the image prop. You now have a new bitmap image with the crop you wanted sitting on top of the original image prop. I wasn't able to do this starting with an imported bitmap image. I had to make it into an image prop first.

Yes, keep ungrouping and you will step back through your fillets. However, you will lose any other solid subtractions etc.. that you may have done along the way.

VW 2010 with Renderworks, XP. Dashed Hidden Line rendering is not working. When I try to set the line render options under View-Rendering-Line Render Options, I get a Windows pop up that says "An invalid argument was encountered". Anyone?

The white color has the same values as Vectorworks standard white. 255, 255, 255 But I think you are on the right track. Here is what I did to solve the problem. Any class that had a white pen, I changed the pen to another color. (Make sure the "use at creation" is checked. This changed everything to the new color. Then I changed the default pen back to white, being sure to select white from the Classic Vectorworks Color palette. This seemed to do it. Evidently there are some underlying values associated with a color that we can't change.

It would be nice if each object in a drawing had a file size associated with it in the object info palette. A designer recently gave me a huge file. It took me quite awhile to figure out that the culprit was one small piece of trim that was about 25 MB. (because of the various solid additions etc..) I converted this piece to a generic solid and trimmed the file by 25 MB. Also, some symbols are huge memory hogs. It would also be nice to see a tutorial on managing file size.

Vectorworks 2010 with Renderworks. SP4 When changing the drawing background to black or white under VW Preferences, the white and black drawn lines do not automatically reverse. I've never seen this before. If I'm drawing on black background and try to print, many objects do not print because they are white and the paper is white. If the default drawing color is black while I'm working on a white background, when I change the background to black, the pen doesn't automatically switch to white. Yikes. I submitted this bug.

Well I'm answering my own question. Here is a workaround for the Rotate Plan View if this tool isn't available in your copy of VW. Determine the angle that you want to rotate the plan. Draw a large box around all the objects visible on your plan. Select all the objects, and then select Modify, Rotate, Rotate and enter the angle. You can now draw with normal X and Y references. When finished, select all visible items (which must be inside of the square you drew) and Rotate them opposite way. You must draw the square because the rotation is based on the center of the objects you select. As long as all of the objects are within your square, you can rotate them back to the exact position. To double check that I returned to the correct position, before I started I copied one of the angled lines. I changed the color to red and locked it. So when I rotated my drawing, the red line stayed in the original location. After I'm done I double check that my lines are in the exact same place. You could also select all of the items visible and then use the 2d rotate tool on one of them and drag it to the horizontal position. This method works but you might want to make a copy of the object you are dragging and lock it so you can drag back to it later. As far as the Unified View tool, the best thing I can do is use the Align Layer Views command in the View menu.

In VW 2010 you can choose how thumbnails are shown in the resource browser. You can choose the view of each symbol and the rendering mdoe. So you can browse all of the different chairs you have, for example, and pick the one you like.

Haven't had this problem since updating. But if anyone still has the problem. Activate all classes, Save the document, close it and open it again. Symbols should be back. Of course you want to save your view before activating all classes so you can go back to where you were.

I'm frustrated these tools aren't available in VW 2010 with Renderworks. The greyed out menu entries are like bait trying to get me to buy Architect or Spotlight which I don't need. Does anyone know of other ways of accomplishing these actions? They seem like fundamentals to me! Thanks, Jim

You Tube video showing the process.

You can select the objects on your design layer that will appear in the viewport. The viewport will be created just large enough to encompass those objects. Or you can draw a rectangle on the design layer and use that as your viewport crop. When you are on the Sheet Layer that contains that viewport, you use the viewport dialogue box to change the classes, rendering mode etc.. If I design a desk on the design layer. I make a viewport with the desk in front view. On the sheet layer I copy that viewport and move it to the right. I change the view of that viewport to "left". I copy the original viewport and move it lower on the page. I might change that viewport to top view. (on the viewport dialogue) I might also change the rendering mode to dashed hidden line to show the hidden framing. I copy the original viewport again and place it down and to the right. Then I can change that viewport to an isometric view and select open gl rendering mode. So using the original viewport, I now have 4 viewports, showing front view, side view, top view and rendered isometric view. I believe Archoncad sells a plug-in that will do all this for you in one click. You might also go back to the design layer and zoom in on a detail of the desk and create another viewport. Place this on the same sheet layer and change the scale (in that viewport's dialogue box) to be much larger. (So you are showing a detailed view of some aspect of the desk) Hope this helps.

I guess the dongle is a Mac thing. I run VW2010 on my home and work PCs with no dongle. Some of the complaints are definitely related to individual graphics cards and processors. VW runs noticeably better on my home computer. I upgraded from 12 to 2010 and I'm loving it. The price was a little hard to swallow, but its been worth it. The "you tube" videos and other online tutorials are fantastic. (as well as the VW forum) The free viewer works great for my boss. He can access my file at any time but can't change a thing. Yes, I've noticed a few bugs but I'm sure improvements will be continually made.

Thank you, Thank You, Thank You to all posters on this subject. You just saved me tons of work. I'm using VW 2010 with Renderworks. I lost the 3d portion of all my hybrid symbols. They came up as 2d symbols in the resource browser. I tried everything. I finally turned on all the classes in the drawing, saved my file and closed it. When I reopened it, all my symbols were back. This problem seemed to occur when I was doing some extensive editing on the 3d part of a hybrid symbol. During this time, my file was saved many times. I saved the file in the middle of editing, took it home and opened it to continue editing and that's when I noticed the problem. I would love to give each one of you $10. Please send me your address and credit card number. Don't forget the little 3-digit code. Peace!

Duh. The escape key worked on Windows also. Thanks and sorry for wasting Forum space!

Sometimes, I will start rendering and then realize a mistake. I have to wait several minutes (depending on the complexity of the drawing) for the rendering to complete. Can I interrupt the process? Sometimes I will have a fully rendered view and VW will do an autosave. I don't realize it until the next time I open the drawing and it takes 5 minutes to open. I'm using 12.5 for Windows with Renderworks. Thanks a bunch!

Xcoolexplorer is a freeware program that lets you preview many other types of CAD files. Alas Vectorworks isn't one of them. I'm reluctant to convert all of my 3d .dwg objects to Vectorworks because it is so much easier to browse them using Xcoolexplorer and then import them when needed. Maybe someone will write something similar for .mcd files.

Well Halloween is coming up and I know for sure that Petri isn't going to be the front end of the horse.

You can do it with hybrids. Create your 2D object with the hatch. Duplicate it. Extrude it to Z=? Select the original 2D object and the extruded object and then select "Create Symbol" (under the Modify menu). This creates a hybrid. In top/plan view you see the 2d object. In any 3d view you see the extruded object. Hope this helps!