bclighting

I need to deactivate my VW2013 license on a PC that did not have the power to run it. I built a new machine that should be able to run it but since I activated the software on my Macbook Pro I cannot activate it on my new machine. According to the KB I would have to wait 3 months after uninstalling to be able to reactivate! This is totally unacceptable and I would hope that there is another way to move an installation from an old machine to a new one.

Nevermind, I retract that. I'm an idiot and wasn't looking at the right tab.

Now that I have finally upgraded to 2012 I am going to resurrect this post. It turns out that option has been removed. So now I have to ask the question again, how can I not open a blank drawing in 2012?

Excellent, I have texture! Thinking that fill would override textures is where my problem was. Now I need to figure out how I can create or find new textures.

Ok, I did that but the wall still end up wireframe. Do I need to have a fill color set on the walls? I assumed that it was either/or between fill and textures. Would possibly the video card have anything to do with rendering other than speed? I do not have anything over the stock dell card so obviously my render times even in fast renderworks are painfully slow. I will try to export the walls out to ESP Vision and see if that reads them at all. That is a whole different beast that I am trying to train at the same time.

I have been searching all over the forum for the answer but I feel that this may be such a stupidly basic question that I almost don't want to even ask it. Why can't I get wall textures to show up? I have fixtures, stage surface and curtains all showing up when I run a fast renderworks render but I never get anything with wall textures. The only time I can get the walls to become anything is when I change the fill to some solid color. Basically I have no idea what I am doing. I stumble my way around and can produce 2d plots but I have never had any luck spitting out a rendering. All I want is a brick wall to show up as such, at least to start anyway. This is VW2008 spotlight w/renderworks and Windows XP on an older Dell Optiplex.

I've searched for this topic. Is there a way to not start in a blank drawing when clicking the shortcut?

When I set a 3D fixture rotation to top hang a fixture my unit number is covered. My work around it to copy the symbol and create a rotated 3D version unfortunately this is what I had to do before there was a setting for 3D rotation in the object info. I have done all the usual things, send to top, set classes, etc, to no avail. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

I'll take a look at that. I have lights inside the truss and all over. I'm using '08 and I just added SP3 as well. Removing the shadow casting properties did the trick. Now I just have to play with it to get the focus a little crisper.

My lights are working fine if I run a Fast Renderworks setting but when I try switch to Final Quality and render none of my lights are on. I'm rendering a viewport of the front view. I would keep it on fast renderworks but that makes my truss look jagged and crappy. Any thoughts?

I think I may have fixed it. For future reference I have to select the check box in LW to fill blank fields with "-". After doing that everything fell into the right places. So I'm guessing that this may be the fix. I'd still be interested in hearing if anyone else has run into this as well.

I have searched the forum and found nothing that has helped me yet. The problem: I cannot get anything to properly import into VW after exporting it from LW3. The procedure: I export the fixture data from VW including the UID and import it into LW3 just fine. I check, all UID is present. I export the data from LW3, I check the file in Excel, all UID data is there. I go to import it into VW, Autolink the fields, check the mapping, everything is where it should be ie. external id=UID. Go ahead with the import, not one field has mapped correctly! Every single field is completely wacked and now I have 96 orphans. I even tried to use the demo of LW4, same outcome. The question: So why are the data field mappings not listening to what they are set at? I think I was able to get this to work once upon a time back on VW11 but I have not had any luck since. Is it something I'm doing or is there an update that I have missed? I'm beating my head on the desk at this point so please help this headache.

It there a more elegant way of rotating a truss in 3D now in 2008? Straight trusses are not really a problem to do but curved trusses do not seem to be too easy. I love the way that now it is possible to set the 3d orientation of hybrid fixtures but I cannot find if that was carried over into trussing. I'm still somewhat new to VW overall and stumbling my way through while trying to overcome my AutoCad ways of doing things. Ben