Renderworks overhaul

[Hans Jakob M?ller]

I think it's about time for a major overhaul of RenderWorks including:

' Faster and more user friendly global illumination

' Ambient occlusion, screen space (SSAO) and model space

' Baking of global illumination

' Realtime/ GPU-rendered global illumination

' Object animation (for people, cars, sky etc.)

' Daylight system with sun and sky lighting

' Sky generator with clouds

' Physically accurate materials

' Add more yourself....

There are some good reasons for this:

Stop customers escaping to standalone redering solutions.

There are some great advantages with integrated rendering.

' The trend is towards interactiveness and it's a good trend. With BIM you make canges to the model hundreds of time during the design prosess and you want both to see and communicate the results fast and without delays. Exporting to another applicatin, maybe texturing and mapping over again each time is delay and it's counter-interactive. The time when we completed all design phases in 2D and made some glossy visualizations in the end to sell the finished flats are over.

. There is no reason why VectorWorks should have a renderer inferior to Revit (Mental ray), Artlantis, Sketchup (with integrated V-ray) etc. Renderworks is based on Lightwork and LW has realtime global illumination so lets get all the good suff we can get out of LW. Maybe LW can't keep up with giants like Mental ray or V-ray, but an up to date integrated renderer would be an important competitive edge against Revit, Autocad, Archicad and the rest.