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I have been doing a lot of 3D presentation work recently and I have been spending about 6 HOURS rendering ONE(1) picture that is clear enough to be printed on an A3 sheet (not even an A2). This is unacceptable. If the render is not to my liking, do I have to spend another 6HOURS frown.gif A different approach to rendering in VectorWorks should really be considered. The way textures are applied is fine, just the render process should be "re-thought".

If this is not attended to in the next release, I will have to consider other programs. This would be a shame seeing that this is an excellent time saving 2D/3D draughfting program.

Thanks

Shaun

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Sounds fishy to me. I have been working on a 6.5 Meg file with multiple textures and a DTM. It never takes more than 10 min to render the image as large as an E size sheet. So this makes me wonder by render do you mean print, export, or simply render on screen?(several people in our office use these term to say the same thing) Now we don't print renderings straight out of VW. We typically export them as an Image file and then print them from photoshop. The exporing time can vary from 40 min to several hours depending on the size and complexity of the image, but usually we can get acceptable results out in about an hour.

Also what is your system and hardware?

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Have you found the render bitmap tool? This allows you to draw any size marque around any part of the wire frame you want, and it will render just that area as a bitmap. It is great for checking colours before you go to the full render. It is the only specialized tool in the Renderworks Workspace, which is mis-filed in the software and does not appear in the Workspace folder. I think I found the workspace by using the Mac Menu Find, typing in RenderWorks Workspace. Once I found it, I moved it to the Workspace folder nested in the Vectorworks folder, so that it is now available in the Workspace Menu.

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Neil- The reason that your render works workspace is in the wrong location is that the default location to load RW is wrong. The installer puts it into the plug-ins folder you need to change this to the vectorworks folder and everything will be put in the right place.(the renderworks workspace will be in the workspaces folder etc.)

Shaun-This has taken me a while to figure out but here's what I've come to understand about the Export Image Dialoge Box.

The resolution settings have no effect on file size or export time. The size of the image is measured by pixles so if you change your dpi from 72 dpi (dots per inch) to 300 dpi all you've done is changed the physical size (in inches) not the file size ( in pixles). If it is taking too long to export, try reducing the number of pixles. The two numbers are constrained so changing one changes the other. What this appears to do is reduce the number of calculations VW has to do. Once the image is exported you can use any image manipulation program (Adobe Photoshop) to change size of the image to what you want and print from there. I hope this helps and I can sympathize with you. It has taken us some time and frustration to get satisfactory results but VW and RW do work and they work well for the money.

Also look at your system. You need a fast chip and lots of ram to export anything complex in a short period of time.

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Firstly, I am using a P3 450 with 128megs Ram.

Secondly, I have tried the bitmap tool. That is "no real improvement" for what it does.

Thirdly, if one does reduce the pixel per inch, that defeats the purpose of getting resolutions for BIG sheets. I have done an image that took 6 hours that was a bit hazy when printed on an A3.

I have seen other programs render and they don't render this slow and also go through so many "Calculations"(Estimates, Geometry an Render itself.)

Lastly, price should not be an excuse.

Thanks for all the suggestion. Anymore welcome.

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Hi Shaun, Stop whingeing and go buy Artlantis! Its a great way to render VW models. It's really smooth transfering models from VW and the interface of Artlantis is great. After using Microstation with its built in rendering I became convinced that an all-in-one approach was not the best - so I never even bothered looking at VW/QD3D or VW/Renderworks. In my experience of rendering VW/Artlantis is the best combination. (I assume its available for PC)

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I recently rendered a fairly complex image, with all of the trimmings, large enough and at a high enough resolution to be printed on a 3' X 4' sheet of paper for the Diehl Graphsoft booth. It took me 40 minutes from start to finish to have my image in PhotoShop ready to print. This was made possibly with the Render Bitmap tool.

The highest resolution I could get out of it was 150dpi, for the full image. This ended up being an 8? wide 300 dpi image, however, that was not good enough. So I set the Render Bitmap tool to 300 dpi, and rendered the image in 4 slices. I saved the images in separate VectorWorks files. After all were rendered, I copied, and pasted in place in a single file, and had my rendering. I needed to create an image to be placed in Illustrator, so I ended up copying the slices into Photoshop and piecing them together there.

This created an image 16? wide at 300dpi, which was more then enough for me. Renderworks took 8 minutes to render each slice. I know this sounds like a hack, but if I had more memory, a single image created with the Render Bitmap tool would have been elemental. We are working on improving the speed of both the rendering and the exporting for the next version. I have a G3 400 with 256mb.

If you would like to see the image?

http://www.diehlgraphsoft.com/gallery/renderworks/roberto_candusso4.html

------------------

-- Michael Pacylowski --

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You could try rendering it to screen and then take a screenshot of it. Then paste it into Photoshop, and cut out everything you don't need.

Also, export image uses quicktime. What version of quicktime do you have installed?

Mark Fiorucci

Diehl Graphsoft, Inc.

[This message has been edited by markf (edited 04-07-2000).]

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