Render Time!

[SonnyLuong]

This could be a one of a kind and the most beneficial request for Vectorworks Community to Nemetscheck.

Is anyone out there have fun with rendering... "A LARGE" file? I am not! Is there a way that anyone know of to render off the Vectorworks program faster? I was told that Revit files can be rendered through the "cloud" extremely fast! If this is the case, and if we have no alternative for it; I might have to switch back to Revit. The new Vectorworks 2013 has non-blocking rendering where you can actually doing something else with the application while it is rendering, however, it make the application and the machine extremely weak. Last night, I have spent a whole night with the best MacBook Pro on the market to render two images. It is terrible! What if we have a dozen of images to render and they are needed over night? Anyone out there can help?

[VincentCuclair]

First of all you need to find out what is making the file large......secondly you need to find out what is making the render slow. Once you know this there are several ways to make rendering faster.

Complex geometry makes renders slow. e.g. I had a 3D toilet with complex geometry imported from Sketchup once, which slowed down my Elevation renders hugely, all I needed to do in that case was hide the toilets.....they are obviously not needed in elevations.....

Many people use render settings at maximum values slowing the render down greatly however they rarely need that kind of quality.....e.g. if the final image is going to be A3 in size, a render at 150->200 dpi with CRW quality at low->medium will do just fine......doing the same render at maximum quality with 600 dpi will take 10->20x longer however the quality difference on A3 size is barely noticeable 1-3% better in my opinion.

Edited May 8, 2013 by Vincent C

[SonnyLuong]

Thanks for the inputs, I find it very helpful. As modern architects of the New World, it's hard not to have complex forms in our design. Yes, I do take away all things I do not want to show on the render. Here is what I've heard. You can register with Autodesk when using Revit, and render a 40 megapixel image with up to a 4 gig. file in the cloud for 10 minutes. Can you imagine that? 10 minutes, You know how much more productive we can be?

[Tom G.]

Does anyone have direct experience with Vwks Cloud rendering? How does it work for you? I'd love to see an NA video by a working professional showing us the reasons why he or she gets good to great returns on their use of the Vectorworks Cloud Services.

Sonny: Check it out and report back!

Tom

[Dieter @ DWorks]

Complex geometry makes renders slow. e.g. I had a 3D toilet with complex geometry imported from Sketchup once, which slowed down my Elevation renders hugely, all I needed to do in that case was hide the toilets.....they are obviously not needed in elevations.....

Many people use render settings at maximum values slowing the render down greatly however they rarely need that kind of quality.....e.g. if the final image is going to be A3 in size, a render at 150->200 dpi with CRW quality at low->medium will do just fine......doing the same render at maximum quality with 600 dpi will take 10->20x longer however the quality difference on A3 size is barely noticeable 1-3% better in my opinion.

If you can't hide complex objects, then use simpler versions of these objects. Most of the time, it's not needed to have a high res nurbs surface and you can just have some generic 3D object instead. This is the reason why I make all my library objects myself, because the one that comes with VW are too detailed.

Another thing are textures. Make sure these aren't too heavy.

You just have to try several combinations of the above tips to find a render method that's fast enough with a quality that's ok for you.

[Tom G.]

On the home rendering front, make sure you are rendering off of a Viewport, not a Design Layer. I assume you are rendering an exterior view. You might try using the pre-sets that come with the rendering option of Renderworks Style>Realistic Exteriors Final rather than employing your own settings which may be overdone (such as Blur set high, other options set to Very High instead of High).

Set your Viewport dpi to 150 to 250. I prefer 300 dpi but I'm generally happy with my rendering times.

Tom

[Christian Fekete]

I am with you, literally. I spent all last night on a few renderings. Here is my experience with vectorworks cloud rendering service and then a couple of questions.

1/ Cloud service is ok. I had a couple of miss with the same file and an ok earlier.

I think it has to do with the type of rendering and the setup of your file. In my case I had maybe 20-25 viewports to render and the VW cloud was not able to do it. Again I think it was more my setup but who knows?

2/Viewport rendering issues:

- There is a background rendering and a foreground rendering. The foreground render will move from viewport to viewport rather quickly, the background rendering will continue to process while you can get back to work.

3/My question is rather annoyingly simple but got me into a real funk last night, here it is:

The background render has all kind of rendering options, one being the hidden line option. It is also much slower than the foreground rendering which does not have all the render options. It does NOT have the NONE option though and requires therefore the use of a render mode which is generally quite slow.

On the other hand the foreground rendering has a NONE option.

I needed to render in regular black and white line work for architecture drawings but could not use only the foreground render because the background render must have a selection also. WHY? it takes so long to render!

In general I think that VW is way to slow for any kind of real life architecture rendering work. Unless maybe you reduce your files to one room at a time like in all the examples that you can see online. I tried to render a kitchen with tables and chairs, cabinets walls and windows as part of the whole house design file and I have to force quit, it takes way to long. I don't think it;s practicle to break down the drawing each and everytime you need a rendering, it will take as much time than to let the process finish in the full set. What do you do when you need rendering of each and every room? Is this not feasible?

Every video online leads to believe that this should be possible. Am I the only one to believe this?

I would really appreciate some suggestion on this. I would hope that VW would actually explain this point.

Good luck to you

CF

[SonnyLuong]

I'll find out.

[SonnyLuong]

Well, it is slow... It has to be slow. In the truest sense, we architects are power and memory abusers. The technology today is really not up to par for what we are doing as designers. What it is, is every pixel and every color illumination and angle has to be calculate and assign a value (I used to be in engineering). For example, if you have 300dpi and 24 x 36 size image - you'll have 77,760,000 pixels to assign value to, but it goes in 3-dimensions when rendering, so every dot has different illuminations to give our image an illusion of depth. But I will expect that the toughest machine in the business with everything maxed out can handle the job more adequately. It's not!

Get back to your question. Yes, You can render every room. Just make sure you only render what in view, which means, do not let a full wall with textures somewhere in the design demands the rendering. When you don't see it, turn it off. Give it a unique class i.e. non-render-wall and turn it off. A better way is to render with the bitmap tool, so only what in view and what you have cropped will render. The culprit of it is, I like to manipulate my images in Photoshop, so I never print out from VW. So for me, it is like double rendering because every darn time an image is exported, it re-renders! Wholly ****! That's why the thought of cloud rendering comes in. 40 Megapixels image with 4 GB file size renders in 10 minutes is a miracle! You get the images back, go to Shop to embellish them, and bam! U r done. Time is money, right?

[Kevin McAllister]

Just to note, whether something is "foreground" or "background" is a bit misleading. VW is basically just layering rendered versions of a viewport like tracing paper. There is no difference in the render time based on "foreground" or "background". VW just has to render twice if both are selected.

The bigger issue is what resources VW uses for each render mode. Hidden Line is rendered by VW itself so it only uses a single core, regardless of your processor, and is only 32 bit so it can't maximize RAM. Its drawing lines not pixels. There has been a lot of discussion about having to render basic line drawings in other reads. You are not alone. Turning generate intersecting lines off in the viewports render settings can help, as can turning off things that aren't seen.

Rendering using Renderworks modes will be far faster if you have a good machine. Renderworks takes advantage of all your processor cores, is 64 bit and can maximize RAM use (it's Cinema 4D underneath). Resolution of your sheet layer can make a difference here as can lighting and other factors.

OpenGL mode uses the graphics card. If you have a good card, it will render faster.

Using symbols and other efficiencies will also affect render times. Check your " conversion resolution" on the 3D tab of the VW preferences. High or Very High can slow things on slower machines. And make sure "Save Viewport Cache" is on in the documents preferences so you don't have to rye render each time you open a file.

Kevin