exterior elevations

[Archiphreak]

Ok, I've been fooling around with this too long. I have 4 elevation viewports set up and on sheets. They are rendered hidden line to give the appropriate 2D appearance of an elevation.

So, how do I get VW to display the exterior finish on the elevation? I.e. if I have a stud wall with horizontal siding, how do I get the siding to show up? If I have brick veneer, how do I get the brick to show up? If I have a roof with shingles, how do I get the shingles to show up?

I'd like to have elevations that are properly detailed. Do I need to annotate hatches on the sheets? Or is there some other trick?

Help! :-\

Jeremiah

[Dieter @ DWorks]

If you don't have Renderworks, then you can do:

1. Annotate with hatches

2. Create planar objects in 3D space with hatches (like sketchup)

[Archiphreak]

Ugh. Totally not what I wanted to hear. :-\

If I have renderworks (which I don't) how would I go about it?

Thanks for the quick replies!

Cheers.

Jeremiah

[CipesDesign]

Jeremiah, The method I use is to model everything in 3d using textures for siding, roofing, etc. Then create a VP which has Final Quality RW's as the Background and Hidden Line as the Foreground (often using Sketch Hidden Line Results). I have attached a current example. A couple comments about this: you can also create accurate shadows by inserting a Heliodon (Sun) Object; If you're old school trained the result will bother you at first as it's almost too realistic, however I think you can get used to it, it's a much more accurate illustration; you need to be somewhat careful of the colors you choose for exterior textures, too dark and it prints like a black blob, too light and it loses detail. Also, I generally Print to PDF then re-save using GrayScale to get rid of the colors entirely for printing and submission. Play around and post back with questions and comments.

PS: you and D posted while I was typing. Renderworks is worthwhile ;-)

[Archiphreak]

Peter, thank you!

Though, it seems that without Renderworks I'm incredibly limited in what I can do. When I go into Organization and try to assign a texture to a class (i.e. exterior wall finish) I have no option to do so. I can assign a fill and a pen style, but that's it.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Jeremiah

[CipesDesign]

Buy Renderworks if possible... Or just annotate and use hatches...

[Archiphreak]

Thanks, Peter. I'm not entirely sure why my boss did not get Renderworks with the package. Most likely to save a little money...but I think we're going to need it.

Thanks again!

Cheers.

Jeremiah

[Dieter @ DWorks]

Renderworks is really worth it's price! I know its extra, but you can get so much out of it.

[Joe-SA]

There have been some complaints about the interface but we typically do the 3D hatch. Once you get the interface down it goes pretty quickly. Adjusting origin might be the biggest hassle.

We choose this method even with renderworks at our disposal.

Might have to give Peter's method a shot, however, because it does take a while to get to exterior elevations that are presentation to client quality when you are relying on the model to generate exterior trim, crown mouldings, etc.

Joe

[Christiaan]

No solution is ideal unfortunately. Renderworks takes time to render and doesn't provide crisp lines. 3D hatching of extracted 3D surfaces is a nightmare on anything but the simplest of jobs. Hatching in Annotations means you have to do it for every single view you create, incl. any 3D views. VW basically sucks when it comes to producing 2D output of a 3D model.

How complex and large is your building?

[Archiphreak]

Christian, the house I'm currently working on is a 4,200 square foot single story split level home on a steeply sloped site with multiple terraces, a pool and retaining wall planters. It's probably the best and worst project to start out with in Vectorworks BIM, but here we are.

I haven't run into the 3D hatch tool/command yet. I'll look that one up and see what's what. I have another project that is a simple detached garage with home office above that may be perfect for that type of tool.

We have another 4k sf house coming up that will be a classical design, so working out these kinds of kinks now is really crucial.

Thanks for all your help, guys!

Cheers.

Jeremiah

[Christiaan]

We ran into all sorts of bugs with the 3D surface extract method. I don't know that they've been fully resolved. I think maybe they have; we got to the end of a project just as they were resolving one of the last bugs we reported. If you're working on a single storey building I'd be tempted to use this method. Otherwise I'd go with Renderworks. I wouldn't recommend the Annotations method... I get a rash just thinking about having to manually do it for every view and then update every view every time something is changed.

[Stan Rostas]

Theoretically you can do this without Renderworks, you will have to use OpenGL with Edges and Textures On, edges on. That is of course if VW does not crash upon the render.

[Christiaan]

No you need RW for textures.

[Stan Rostas]

Do not have a box without it so did not know that is the case, guess you get textures with OpenGL when you have renderworks which seems to be odd at best.

Thanks for clarifying Christiaan.

[Christiaan]

Yeah it's pretty daft if you ask me too.

[atari2600]

Peter,

Where did you get that tree object in the foreground? Is that one of the provided ones?

Matt

[CipesDesign]

Yes, it one of the XFrog Photorealistic tress (Image Props) that ships with Landmark, Designer, etc. See attached.

[Christiaan]

Jeremiah, The method I use is to model everything in 3d using textures for siding, roofing, etc. Then create a VP which has Final Quality RW's as the Background and Hidden Line as the Foreground (often using Sketch Hidden Line Results). I have attached a current example. A couple comments about this: you can also create accurate shadows by inserting a Heliodon (Sun) Object; If you're old school trained the result will bother you at first as it's almost too realistic, however I think you can get used to it, it's a much more accurate illustration; you need to be somewhat careful of the colors you choose for exterior textures, too dark and it prints like a black blob, too light and it loses detail. Also, I generally Print to PDF then re-save using GrayScale to get rid of the colors entirely for printing and submission. Play around and post back with questions and comments.

PS: you and D posted while I was typing. Renderworks is worthwhile ;-)

Nice elevations Peter. What render and light settings are you using to get those nice strong shadows?

Edit: actually just tried saving a PDF as greyscale myself and that appears to strengthen the contrast a little.

[CipesDesign]

Hi Christiaan, Here are the settings I used. For the most part they are default settings, although I almost always turn up the light to 50% or more (the default is 35%).

[Christiaan]

Interesting that you're using ambient light and still getting strong shadows. In fact you're turning up. That's one thing I find obliterates shadows.

[Archiphreak]

Stan, I checked that out thinking it would be my saving grace. Unfortunately the only way to turn on Textures and Edges in OpenGL is to have Renderworks.

Thanks for the comments though!

J.

[Tom G.]

Here's another method:

1.Render your model front view with colors, textures on, in Open GL. Then export image to your desktop (jpg or other).

2. Ignoring the jpg for the moment, create a Viewport of the front view, re-render in Hidden Line.

3. Import jpg. and place it over your Viewport's Hidden Line image. It'll be one-to-one so should scale exactly.

4. Select the jpg and set the opacity slider (Attributes palette) way down.

In this way you get very subtle shading/texturing behind your linework which may be better for your planset than a more brightly lit rendering ala foreground/background render combinations. (There is no Viewport opacity slider on the OIP so you won't have options of softening the image below the Hidden Line linework.)

If you are after this look, the extra work of creating, then importing the jpg is really rather small.

Lastly, buy Renderworks.

Tom

[Tom G.]

Here's an example.........

Edited April 5, 2013 by Tom G.

[Christiaan]

Thanks Tom, that's really nice, I'm going to use that technique! We need this built in.

How are you controlling your line thicknesses? Are they the attributes for your whole file or are you adding lines to the Annotations layer or using Class overrides?