VW Memory hog on Mac?

[angelo]

I see there has been discussion of VW being a memory hog in the PC platform. Has anybody had problems with VW 8.0.1 & 8.5.2 taking an enormous amount of memory, even more than it was allocated, on a Mac? We are using a PowerMac G3/266Mhz w/ Mac OS 9.0.4. Do polylines such as site contours dramatically affect memory usage and overall performance? What other things might be causing any memory issues?

[Guest]

quote:

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Originally posted by angelo:

Has anybody had problems with VW 8.0.1 & 8.5.2 taking an enormous amount of memory, even more than it was allocated, on a Mac?

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In VectorWorks 8, rendering can use a lot of memory outside that which has been allocated to VectorWorks. My understanding is that this is no longer the case in VectorWorks 9: in VW9, rendering is done in the VectorWorks application's memory.

[Donald Wardlaw]

I don't use VW/RW for rendering, I use formz. However, rendering, regardless of the software you use requires a lot of memory. Typically the size of the image you can render, i.e. the number of pixels you can generate, is proportional to the amount of ram you have. I have found that to get decent sized images I need at least 500 mb of ram on a machine. The more the merrier. Ram has never been cheaper. Genuine Fractals, the photoshop plug in is also a reasonably useful tool for scaling up images if the available ram does not allow a large enough image to be rendered.

Best,

Donald

[ajs]

So, then Mr. Wardlaw-

Does this mean that you export VW to formZ? If so, may I ask what you like about that approach, and how you do it?

-ajs

[angelo]

Thank you all for your replies and discussion. However, we typically render with formZ instead of Vectorworks. I was wondering whether 2-D drawings had ever sucked memory dry and what people did about that. Thanks for your input.

[Donald Wardlaw]

<<Does this mean that you export VW to formZ? If so, may I ask what you like about that approach, and how you do it?>>

I prefer to model and render in formz. I prefer VW for 2D, even though formz has a drafting component. I export plan drawings from VW via either dxf or dwg. It is problem free. Once the plan info is in formz, I use it as a guage on which to build the model. Often I take rendered images from formz and import them back into VW, using VW as a form of page layout software. Thus I might have a plan and some 3d images on a sheet with my standard border and title information. This makes for really large files though, one VW file I did recently hit 220 megs.

Best,

Donald