Jagged curves

[jmcewen]

I am having serious troubles with curves appearing faceted.  I have set the curved geometry on shaded to "very high" and I still get facets.    I tried to start a workaround for the element I am working on and drew a simple circle as a layout shape and even the 2d circle is showing faceted-- see attached video.  Any thoughts?  I have even looked at other rendering styles and they are coming out wrong as well.  

 

I opened an old drawing that has curves in it.  Those curves appear to be fine. If I generate new curves they are jagged.  I tried it on 2 different computers with the same result.

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

De-select the circle and see if the facets disappear.

 

[jmcewen]

Still there. 

[Jeff Prince]

It's probably your settings, 2D Conversation Resolution, 3D Conversion Resolution, and Shaded Rendermode Options.  The Shaded render options apply to 3D views, not 2D.

 

 

Edited July 28 by Jeff Prince

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

Not seeing any of this.  Perhaps VW's just needs a restart.

 

[jmcewen]

Thank you both for getting back so quickly.  

 

Something funny is going on. 

 

@Jeff Prince all my settings are matching yours both in VWX preferences and in rendering settings.  Only difference i had was that my 2d conversion and Curved Geometry in rendering settings were very high.  I downgraded to match anyway because i am grasping at straws.

@VIRTUALENVIRONSI have restarted VWX and restarted my computer both multiple times as well as trying on a second computer.  I have started new files.  I have opened old files.

 

Attached is a file with some of what I am dealing with included. I realized a little too late that the title sounds like late-night Cinemax.

 

Perhaps it is just me...  In case it does not show on your computers the same as it shows on mine, here are a few screenshots to show what I am seeing.  I drew a polyline to represent the plan view of a curved framing member that is ultimately meant to be 1"x1" x 1/8" wall aluminum tube.  I then extruded it.  It came out fairly clean as shown.  Then I copied and pasted it and got the lumpy curve on the right-- no additional operations beyond cut and paste.

selected for highlighting and a little more zoomed to show the facets:

 

I made viewports as well hoping it was just how they process on screen for me, but the smooth curve stayed smooth in the viewport and the jagged curve stayed jagged.

 

I can deal with this to a degree. It seems that the snaps work fairly accurately, and trimming to the curve trims where the curve is supposed to be instead of what is showing.  But I cannot deal with this if the drawings I end up submitting show the curves broken like this and have framing members not making contact because they are snapping to a different object from what is being rendered.  I am ending up with more than an 1/8" gap in some places and that will cause some confusion when a welder decides to build to match the drawing.

 

Further, when I try to draw a line on top of one of the faces and the Auto-Plane highlight shows, It highlights in yet a different jagged way from what the on-screen render makes.

 

PROBLEMATIC CURVES.vwx

[jmcewen]

This shows the apparent gaps I have between objects that are touching according to the snaps.

 

Also, I closed and reopened the sample file I attached in the previous post and the clean curve is faceted now as well.

Edited July 28 by jmcewen
typo

[Pat Stanford]

I believe what you are seeing is a difference caused by the Conversion Resolution.  We have fought this a couple of times before, but I can't remember the thread.  If I am remembering properly, when you do an extrude, VW is basically converting to a polygon behind the scene rather than keeping the exact curves. The conversion resolutions are:  Low: 8 Vertices, Medium: 32 Vertices, High: 64 Vertices, and Very High: 256 Vertices.

 

So if you have a very large radius, even at Very High conversion you only have 256 segments around a complete circle, so you will see some faceting on large radius curves and long lengths.

 

But I don't think that is really your problem.  The gaps you are seeing are primarily due to the Conversion Resolution being set to Very High while the Shaded Options Quality Setting is set to High.  So you are looking at a curve with 256 vertices compared to one with 64 and are seeing the gaps.

 

When I set the Shaded Quality to Very High, it basically removed the gaps. At any zoom less than 2000% It is basically impossible to tell if there is a gap or just double lines.

 

HTH

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

I never use poly lines.  I have always found them problematic when going to 3D with them.  Each form of 2D line carries with its own set of rules when extruded.   

 

So, I can't offer much help.

 

What I have always used is the polygon tool and then poly smoothing.  These are closer in relation to NURBS Curves when extruded, but I don't know what your end goal is.

[jmcewen]

15 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

I believe what you are seeing is a difference caused by the Conversion Resolution.  We have fought this a couple of times before, but I can't remember the thread.  If I am remembering properly, when you do an extrude, VW is basically converting to a polygon behind the scene rather than keeping the exact curves. The conversion resolutions are:  Low: 8 Vertices, Medium: 32 Vertices, High: 64 Vertices, and Very High: 256 Vertices.

 

So if you have a very large radius, even at Very High conversion you only have 256 segments around a complete circle, so you will see some faceting on large radius curves and long lengths.

 

But I don't think that is really your problem.  The gaps you are seeing are primarily due to the Conversion Resolution being set to Very High while the Shaded Options Quality Setting is set to High.  So you are looking at a curve with 256 vertices compared to one with 64 and are seeing the gaps.

 

When I set the Shaded Quality to Very High, it basically removed the gaps. At any zoom less than 2000% It is basically impossible to tell if there is a gap or just double lines.

 

HTH

Thank you for quantifying what the resolutions mean.  That actually makes a lot of sense. 

 

Went back and set all of them to Very High.  That seemed to clear some things up as you suggest, Though I am sure I had that combination at some point along the way.

 

For my basic extrudes it seems a little better, but for any shelled items they are  only slightly less jagged than they were before. I wouldn't shell simple framing members typically, but I need volumetric data to get weights for rigging.  

 

I guess I am resigned to having 2 different versions of this model-- one that looks right on screen and on paper and a separate that looks wrong but returns accurate volumetric data.

 

Strangely, I decided I would draw a 256-gon with the polygon tool and compare it with a circle of the same radius.  It appears smoother than the circle does.  I wonder if some how even with my settings turned up I am throttled on the curved geometry settings.  My 256-gon has the expected angle between line connecting the vertices and the center, but it looks like my circle is subdivided at about 1/4 the rate of the of the 256-gon, or about 64 subdivisions instead of the expected 256.  I have been drawing in Vectorworks for a long time and I have not seen circles this rough on Very high settings that had not been edited in some way.

 

Could there be something outside of Vectorworks slowing me down?  Perhaps a GPU setting?

 

[Jeff Prince]

8 minutes ago, jmcewen said:

I guess I am resigned to having 2 different versions of this model-- one that looks right on screen and on paper and a separate that looks wrong but returns accurate volumetric data.

You shouldn’t be seeing differences in calculations due to graphic simplification.  Doesn’t the software base its calcs off of the mathematical definition of the curve?

 

Most CAD applications have the ability to simplify geometry to accelerate screen performance.  This is from the days of really slow computers and .limited graphics.  I believe you could see this in action when the VGM was last updated, it seems to update the graphics on priority and zoom / memory available.  On slow computers you would see a graphically simplified rendition and fast machines would be fully smooth full time.  I’m mentioning all this because you might have a graphic card conflict causing the issue.

[jmcewen]

This may be the longest post ever with all the pics and vids.  Sorry about that, but trouble with curves makes Vectorworks borderline unusable for me.

 

Thank you for your help.  

 

I don't think it should be a matter of lack of power.  I am on an i9-14900 with an rtx4090 with 96gb RAM.

 

So, I dug into my NVidia settings and found that the computer was deciding if it needed the GPU or not.  Perhaps it was trying to work without it.  I don't know... I changed the setting to use my 4090 all the time-- at least for what it can.  I also dug up the old thread about NVidia GPU settings and applied those as closely as possible to the options I have available, but the thread is from 2016 and a good bit of what i see is quite different from what is on the thread (could we get some sort of update on suggested settings for modern cards?) see link immediately below:

 

RESULTS

In short, shelled curves are still screwy but i can deal with that for now. Extrudes made from curved polylines are behaving fairly well now.  BUT My 2d circles are still in 64 segments  and do not neatly align with an extrude  made from an identical circle.  It isn't just a bit off-- it is plainly visible at 77% zoom, less than full size.  Attached is a video of what I am talking about.  I draw a circle and extrude it.  It looks pretty clean.  Then I draw a circle on the top of the resultant cylinder that is the same size as the cylinder by snapping to the center and the circumference of the cylinder, and it does not cover the cylinder.  Things were not like this several months ago.   See video here: 

 

 

 

Here are all my settings I think have any chance of being relevant relevant:

 

 

I highly doubt it is needed but I turned up the Custom Renderworks  options just to leave no stone unturned: