Vectorworks Cloud Services: save cache of viewports when rendering

[Christiaan]

It would be nice if VCS could render the viewports and save cache in our VW files (as well as creating PDFs)

Edited October 25, 2022 by Christiaan

[Kevin McAllister]

Yes, its not clear to me why VW Cloud doesn't turn on Save Cache Viewports if its not on and then re-save the file with the rendered viewports.

KM

[grant_PD]

I thought that was what it was supposed to do. I recently submitted my file to cloud services so it could process my sections for me. Every viewport came back in wireframe. What's the point of cloud services if it doesn't render? I don't get it.

Here's from the website:

Vectorworks Cloud Services uses cloud technology to automate and decouple inefficient workflows, shifting calculations needed to generate sections, elevations, renderings, and Building Information Modeling (BIM) data from the desktop to the cloud.

[Bryan G.]

But apparently only in a PDF, to have it render the vwx file would be great.

[Kevin McAllister]

VW Cloud Render also seems to have really low quality settings. The curved geometry is unusable. Here is a comparison of what I get on my own machine and what VW Cloud Services sent back to me.

KM

[Christiaan]

Doesn't leave much to be desired does it.

[Kevin McAllister]

Bumping this rather than starting a new wish. Cloud Services should re-save a file with the rendered viewports. Could we please have an option to save the rendered file so the user has access to the rendered viewports in VW form? Then it would be possible to fix mistakes or deal with failed rendering of individual viewports rather than starting again.

 

Kevin

 

Edited March 16, 2017 by Kevin McAllister

[Stéphane]

Bumping this. I don't have the feeling it is fixed in VW2021 but I might be wrong... Would be indeed very nice if VW could render the VPs on the cloud during the night for instance. What would be also nice is being able to choose which layouts to be rendered and exported to PDF. 

[Christiaan]

Bumping this 10 year old request.

 

@inikolova

Edited October 25, 2022 by Christiaan

[Kevin McAllister]

49 minutes ago, Christiaan said:

Bumping this 10 year old request.

 

@inikolova

 

Yes!!!

[Andy Broomell]

Yep. I never use Cloud Services to process files because the fact that it doesn't update the viewports in the file makes it completely pointless for me.

[mjm]

2 minutes ago, Andy Broomell said:

makes it completely pointless for me.

ditto

[Christiaan]

Remember to upvote

 

[inikolova]

@Christiaan Thanks for reviving this thread! 

Saving the .vwx file with the rendered viewports back to your account is a quite simple task. However, think about what happens when you send a file for rendering on the cloud, and you continue to work on your local copy and make changes. By the time the cloud finishes rendering your viewports, you made some changes to the file, but the file you get from the Cloud with the updated viewports doesn't have your latest changes. Is that desirable? I think not. Saving a copy of of a .vwx file every time you do cloud rendering can be a dangerous setting, if not used properly, which is waiting for the cloud to do the rendering and then continuing work with the copy of the file you received when the rendering is finished. To me, waiting for your rendering to complete before you can continue working defeats the whole point of cloud rendering. I think the best way to implement your request would be with streaming, allowing the cloud to send updates directly to the .vwx file that you are working on, but we don't have this yet.  

[mjm]

1 hour ago, inikolova said:

@Christiaan Thanks for reviving this thread! 

Saving the .vwx file with the rendered viewports back to your account is a quite simple task. However, think about what happens when you send a file for rendering on the cloud, and you continue to work on your local copy and make changes. By the time the cloud finishes rendering your viewports, you made some changes to the file, but the file you get from the Cloud with the updated viewports doesn't have your latest changes. Is that desirable? I think not. Saving a copy of of a .vwx file every time you do cloud rendering can be a dangerous setting, if not used properly, which is waiting for the cloud to do the rendering and then continuing work with the copy of the file you received when the rendering is finished. To me, waiting for your rendering to complete before you can continue working defeats the whole point of cloud rendering. I think the best way to implement your request would be with streaming, allowing the cloud to send updates directly to the .vwx file that you are working on, but we don't have this yet.  

Thanks for jumping in here@inikolova. I'm gonna suggest where my hopes were in the cloud render regard.

Much of the work I do is for multi-work evenings, often 3 different works, generally with little or no overlap.

• Piece #1 Sheet Layer/s ready for cloud render & sendto Cloud…
• work on Piece #2, till SLs are ready to Cloud render & sendto Cloud…
• work on Piece #3, till SLs are ready to Cloud render & sendto Cloud…
• Grab Piece #1 Cloud Render, markup for changes, etc.

I have to say that previewing renders with low DPI only gets one so far, at some point proofing becomes the task, where the fully rendered item is required. And using any render type other than Redshift to build and edit the actual render when Redshift is the final output goal is completely self-defeating.

[inikolova]

@mjm, thanks! I see your point. It makes sense when you have more than one projects going on in parallel and you don't sit idle waiting for the cloud processing to complete. 

Can you elaborate on why having the .vwx file with the updated viewport is more valuable to you than having a PDF with the rendered viewport?

 

[mjm]

3 hours ago, inikolova said:

@mjm, thanks! I see your point. It makes sense when you have more than one projects going on in parallel and you don't sit idle waiting for the cloud processing to complete. 

Can you elaborate on why having the .vwx file with the updated viewport is more valuable to you than having a PDF with the rendered viewport?

 

@inikolova 

It's high season for me now and I have projects through February passing across my VWX screen every day, with varying needs, but many of them multi viewport SL renders. 
Waiting for a render to render stops all other VWX forward progress, so the hope is to be able get past the scratch render stage on the desk machine and move the 'for comment' or final renders to the cloud, freeing the desk-based machine to work on the next project or the next act on the same project. Does that make sense? Asking fr a friend.

Edited October 26, 2022 by mjm

[inikolova]

@mjm, the Cloud is able to produce final renderings in a form of panoramas, images and PDFs. It sounds like you think it can't.

My question was more about whether having a copy of the .vwx file with "Saved viewport cache" is more valuable to you in some way compared to getting the final rendered viewports in an image or PDF file

[Andy Broomell]

7 hours ago, inikolova said:

I think the best way to implement your request would be with streaming, allowing the cloud to send updates directly to the .vwx file that you are working on, but we don't have this yet.

 

Yes that would be an ideal future, where you could even select an individual viewport and have it render on the cloud. That way you wouldn't have to worry about file management since there's still just the one working file.

 

At least for me, I need up-to-date viewports in my working file so I can accurately analyze the rendered view, add callouts, annotate the sheet, adjust Image Effects, etc. There are many steps after a viewport is updated. Plus there might be multiple viewports on a sheet.

 

When I come to the point of exporting a sheet as a PDF for distribution, I want to first double check that everything is correct so I need to see everything on the screen. I don't want to see a bunch of out-of-date viewports that I hope and assume look correct once I get them back from the cloud as a PDF.

 

Also if I share the Vectorworks file with someone else I want it to have cached viewports.

 

The problem with the current cloud rendering paradigm is that my viewports literally never get updated (unless I do it locally of course). So ideally we could offload the "processing" of heavy viewports to the cloud but have the result appear back in our file. And it would render whatever existed in the file at the moment you hit render. If you continue working, obviously those changes wouldn't show up in the rendered result, just like how it currently works with rendering locally.

 

 

Edited October 26, 2022 by Andy Broomell

[inikolova]

Hi @Andy Broomell, thanks for the clarification! You are saying it doesn't work for you because you don't get the rendered viewports back to your file. I misunderstood that rendering viewports never worked in the way they are designed to do so. Thanks for explaining your workflow in detail. I will discuss this with the team to see what we can do in the short term, until we are able to offer "the ideal" solution.

[mjm]

1 hour ago, Andy Broomell said:

The problem with the current cloud rendering paradigm is that my viewports literally never get updated (unless I do it locally of course). So ideally we could offload the "processing" of heavy viewports to the cloud but have the result appear back in our file. And it would render whatever existed in the file at the moment you hit render. If you continue working, obviously those changes wouldn't show up in the rendered result, just like how it currently works with rendering locally.

 

 

Perfect.

Edited October 26, 2022 by mjm

[Christiaan]

Exactly what Andy said @inikolova. Thanks Andy.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Christiaan

[mjm]

Another thought on this, after rendering locally a redshift viewport. The render took 29:08. Not too bad for the relative complexity of the scene what with 75+ fixtures turned on with a fog background for the haze. No other apps were open, I even closed safari! OK so; ready to get back to it and then I checked Activity Monitor after the render finished (I never run VWX anymore without this also running); VWX still holding onto 21+GB of memory. So now in order *safely continue to work I need to restart the app. Then reopen the file, etc.

 

 

*the battle cry of the crashing Vectorworker: "Restart!" or even "Reboot!".

[Kevin McAllister]

On 10/25/2022 at 5:53 PM, inikolova said:

My question was more about whether having a copy of the .vwx file with "Saved viewport cache" is more valuable to you in some way compared to getting the final rendered viewports in an image or PDF file

 

For the cloud to be valuable for rendering viewports, it is essential to get the VWX file back with them rendered. Otherwise I may as well just render the file overnight on my own machine (that could be a feature request - render queue for multiple files). As the others have mentioned, there are other steps after rendering and before publishing. Often rendering all the viewports comes after a revision and I'm propagating a model change through to all of the viewports. Once the viewports are rendered, I still need to update dimensions etc..

 

The only instance I could see the cloud being the last step to publishing was if there was a way to universal up viewport image quality or switch viewports to a higher render setting (Eg. working in a draft mode / publishing in a final mode) for cloud publishing.

 

Right now I just render each viewport as needed to check and edit annotations, which means I wait for rendering but in small chunks. At the end I have a fully rendered, ready to publish file.

 

Kevin

 

[Kevin McAllister]

PS. I think one of the realities here is that many of our real world workflows are different from the official Vectorworks workflow. We often omit steps (eg. architectural phases are compressed into a single day for entertainment) because of time or budget constraint.

 

KM

[Andy Broomell]

Both of Kevin's comments are 100% spot on.