Kaare Baekgaard

It really pays off to experiment for a few hours with Renderworks texture dialogue. With a little endeavour you can do things, that the program was never supposed to do. I have had success with the following procedure: 1. Make a new texture. 2. Set the 'Reflectivity' to 'Glass Reflextivity'. (this makes the texture transparent without using the 'Transparency' tab) Turn the transmission and refraction somewhat down. 3. Make an image file with a diagonal blueish gradient (or whatever effect you want). 4. Open the 'Transparency' tab and use the import the image as an 'Image Transparency* map. This you are not supposed to do, so the texture preview will look quite psychedelic. But when you render it with Final Quality Renderworks, it will make a very nice fake reflection - together with the 'real' ones to make it look more glasslike. Good luck.

Just delete the cavity in the cavity setup.

Another wish for the offset tool: When I offset a polygon object where one or more vertexes are fillet or spline points, the curves of the resulting object are changed into polygons. I wish they remained curves. If a fillet should become "illegal" in the process, I wish it would simply be changed into a corner vertex point.

If the spline is planar, draw the path in 2D using the polygon tool, convert it into a nurbs curve, rotate and position it, select the path and profile curves and use Extrude Along Path. If the spline is not planar, convert the lines & curves into nurbs curves, rotate + position them in continuation using the 3D selection tool, compose them into a single nurbs curve, select path and profile curves and use Extrude Along Path.

Ha ha - I think I may survive. From a productivity point of view it has always made good sense to stay with VW, although I am constantly struggling with its limitations.

For Propstuff & BaRa: I see your point. BaRa, VW is not just a solution to me - it is a marriage that has lasted since 1990 and version 2.0. I may have spent as much time with the program as with my family. From this perspective it is not unreasonable to ask: "What are your intentions?". And for Richard: Please do take that break - elsewhere.

Like other users, I have have contributed with wish list postings from time to time, hoping that they would be noted by Nemetchek. It would please me if Nemetchek would regularly issue a bulletin in this forum where you would make a statement regarding your ambitions and priorities for the future development of Vectorworks. Not just sales-talk but your ideas about how the fuctionality of the program is going to be upgraded. It would most certainly spark up a debate, but it would also give the many users of the program the joy of expectation.

You should take a look on the AnimationWorks plug-in. If you can live with the rendering quality of Renderworks it is an ideal solution.

For the next version of Vectorworks I would like to have better control over 2D bezier curves as well as for nurbs curves. The control offered in Adobe Illustrator would be ideal for VW, but less could do it: When I transform a 2D curve into a 3D nurbs curve, I get an additional control option - the ability to weight points. Why can I not have this ability in 2D? To a non-programmer it seems to be within the realms of possibility:-)

When I add 3D objects to a photomanipulation, I import the original photo into Vectorworks, place it behind all objects on the same layer with the 3D geometry, and then fiddle with the perspective until it fits the photo. Then I adjust the "crop perspective" marquee to fit exactly to the corners of the imported image file. I then remove the image file and make a rendering with the exact same pixel size as the photo before I combine the two files in Photoshop, and voila - they fit each other like hand and glove. One irritating point is, that I have to zoom way in to make the fit in Vectorworks. So I would appreciate it if the next version of the program has a snap to point ability for the the "crop perspective" marquee.

I do not believe openGL supports antialiasing - but if you make your imagefiles oversize - and then downsample them by an uneven ratio, it kinda works the same way. But if you want nice renderings ? get Renderworks!

I just checked the function in version 8.5.2, and it works the way, I described. I havent kept an installation of version 9.5, but I am pretty sure it still functioned the same way as in version 8.5.

This tool used to have 2 different functions: Used in plan view, I would get a dialogue prompting me to input viewer height etc. But used in a 3d view, I could use two points to define the axis of the next view. I utilized this second feature to manually unfold 3D objects converted to 3D polygons. Now, however, this function has disapeared from the tool: When i connect two points using the set 3D view tool - and using a 3D view - I get the viewer height dialogue, alas. I have no alternative procedure to unfold 3D polygon objects. Is this tool broken - or is it moved somewhere else? If it is broken - does anyone have different procedures to unfold objects? By the way: an automatic unfolding tool should be in the next version of the program.

I have run into the same problem. The strange thing is that it sometimes works fine on non-planar path objects - sometimes it does not.

The letter-spacing (The correct term may be tracking?) could do with a work-over as well: When I print the documents the text is very unevenly spaced.

It would be nice to be able to use the smoothing angle of the document preferences to smooth the representation of polygon- & mesh objects in a final quality renderworks rendering. I sometimes use meshes imported in the dxf-format in illustrations - for instance a car. But I have to give the resulting renderings quite a bit of Photoshop to take away that polygon feeling.

Thanks for clearing that up BaRa. Personally I could live happily ever after with the lack of acuracy of a polygon tesselator (weird term). I suppose it would be no different from the inherent inacuracy of mesh objects, which worked fine with me until recently. But if it could not be converted into true nurbs surfaces, it would be somewhat like a one way street with a dead end.

Check out Cinema 4D ? basicaly I guess it any number of nurbs surfaces knit together, so they can be edited as one object.

Thank you. I understood that :-)

I am trying - but failing - to understand this: What is HDRI - in fairly simple language?

I am very pleased with the new modelling features in version 10.5. Here are a couple of wishes for nurbs in 11: 1. The ability to change a planar nurbs curve into a surface - and the edges of any nurbs surface into curves. I can do both of these today, but it takes several clicks. 2. The ability to chose method of conversion when extracting a nurbs curve from a solid: When I try to extract very simple curves, I get very complex results with lots of anchorpoints - a lot more than is required to describe the shape of the curves. (To prove this extrude a simple planar nurbs curve and extract its egde: the three or four control points have now become dozens!) I would like to be able to chose between methods of extraction or choose the acuracy af the resulting curve, so I can get some control over the complexity of the curve. (Or you could just fix the problem :-) 3. Hypernurbs! 4. Speed! ? Working with nurbs has become frustratingly s l o w!

Thanks. The great thing about "select same line color" - or the similar commands in illustrator is that it takes just two clicks: 1. Select an object. 2. Select the comand. Its a lot faster than the "Custom Selection" dialogue.

I have seen some 3D programs, that can do the first. I would really like to see that in VW.

- like in Illustrator. This command would be particularly nice when you import a complex geometry with lots of detail and layers.

You may consider to use the connect/combine tool. It will connect or combine not only two lines, but also two arcs or a line and an arc. By the way: make sure, that the "snap to grid" is disabled when you manually try to connect two objects.