Kizza Posted June 9, 2014 Share Posted June 9, 2014 In front view, hidden line render, nudging is not possible. (only in wireframe) Why? or has this been added to 2014? I also wish for global render setting i.e. everything in hidden line instead of wireframe (rarely do I work in wireframe) Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 9, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 9, 2014 Looks like Nudge only works in Wireframe, Sketch Wireframe and OpenGL. The reasoning behind it was that the other modes would be too slow to be useful during active modelling. Submitting request to have Hidden Line added to that list. I know there are a number of requests for that second item, I will add this thread to them. Quote Link to comment
0 Kizza Posted June 9, 2014 Author Share Posted June 9, 2014 Thx. Is the limitation due to not being 64 bit, or something thats currently omitted from the VGM? Or is it because hidden line rendering in VW is raster based? (although open GL is raster based and nudging works in that mode) Nudging in hidden line doesn't seem to be a problem in Revit or Archicad. Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 9, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 9, 2014 To be honest I think the speed issue is no longer a major concern even in 2013 and 2014. Most likely it is a holdover from when the render was even slower. I think in Vectorworks 2012 or Vectorworks 2013 Hidden Line renders became multithreaded (able to use more than one CPU core at once) on Windows, then in the following release was upgraded to multithreaded processing on Mac as well. It shouldn't be a performance limitation issue for engineering to allow nudging in Hidden Line as it stands in 2014 as far as I know, just a matter of making the change. Quote Link to comment
0 AndiACD Posted June 9, 2014 Share Posted June 9, 2014 Jim, on one thread there was mention of speed limits due to VW's restrictions on the maximum RAM it could make use of, being 2GB. Has this been resolved yet? Can we now make use of the RAM most of us have invested in? Wouldn't bucket loads of RAM help improve situations such as these Hidden Line Nudge related foibles? Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 10, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 10, 2014 You will soon be able to use cargo-container-ships-full of RAM. However no, additional RAM doesn't (directly) speed up Hidden Line according to all of my benchmarks. As long as there is enough RAM to keep all your CPU cores busy (usually about 512MB of RAM per core at minimum) during a rendering, then memory wont slow down render times. So with an 8-core CPU going from 2GB of memory to 4GB would speed up Hidden Line, but going from 4GB to 8GB, or 4GB to 16GB would not. Memory primarily comes into play when you're rendering a huge flat rendering, or creating a high quality/long animation and each frame has to be buffered in memory before being written to the video file. Hidden Line speed is completely dependent on how fast your CPU cores are, how many cores you have, and how complex the model itself is. Hidden Line is technically already what people want from 64bit, which is multithreaded. Meaning it can already use all of your cores at once. The part of 64bit that WILL help Hidden Line render speed, is that the geometry calculation done before the rendering actually takes place will speed up. You can see the bottleneck if you start a hidden line render that takes more than a minute or two, check your performance monitor / Activity Monitor and watch your CPU cores and RAM. When you first start the render, you will see one core flick between 50 and 100%. (Thats the old 32bit single-core slowness portion rearing its ugly head.) After a few moments of that, all the cores will light up to between 80% to 100%, which is full, healthy 64bit multithreaded goodness and means your machine is working as fast as it possibly can and you are pushing the limits of hardware. If you watch a complicated Hidden Line render though, you'll see CPU use doesn't stay at 100% all the time once it gets there, it dips back to 50% all cores or just one core, which is the slow portion of the rendering process that will soon be replaced. Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 10, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 10, 2014 Also, (As if my last post wasn't wordy enough!) I am currently testing out performance enhancements users can expect to see if they upgrade from a spinning platter hard drive (HDD)to a solid state drive (SSD). I have seen good initial results in the Renderworks modes specifically, I will make sure to do some intensive testing on Hidden Line renders and sections as well to see if they also benefit. Quote Link to comment
0 bcd Posted June 10, 2014 Share Posted June 10, 2014 = mac mini with fusion drive Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 10, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 10, 2014 A Fusion drive is a combo of an SSD and an HDD that attempts to give you the best of both worlds, the storage size of a spinning platter and the speed of NAND flash storage. (For anyone interested in the specifics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive ) I don't have one of those to test specifically at the moment, but I have seen them tested and in action and I would fully expect that its speed improvement over an HDD would be comparable to upgrading to a pure SSD. Quote Link to comment
0 AndiACD Posted June 10, 2014 Share Posted June 10, 2014 (edited) Jim, your patience is limitless, Thanx for taking the trouble to explain and the forecast on improvements on their way. i had already noticed the improvement on core use, just wondered what other bits had had a "Wash and Brush up" since i hadn't heard recently. Saw the SSD's hit some time ago. Big improvement. Edited June 10, 2014 by AndiACD Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 10, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 10, 2014 (edited) Jim, your patience is limitless, Thanx for taking the trouble to explain No problem. One doesn't last long in Tech Support without it I am just happy our users are curious about the details. Edited June 10, 2014 by JimW Quote Link to comment
0 Kizza Posted June 10, 2014 Author Share Posted June 10, 2014 Thanks JimW, Useful insight on how hidden line geometry is generated but still doesn't explain the omission of Live Hidden Line Rendering in VW. Can I speculate the reason is because Hidden Line Rendering is yet to be ported to the VGM? Quote Link to comment
0 Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted June 10, 2014 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted June 10, 2014 Actually, you should be able to use live Hidden Line rendering in Vectorworks 2014 right now, I think it was added right after 2013. SECTIONS being in live Hidden Line is a different matter, but regular 3D should work right now out of the box. Quote Link to comment
0 Kizza Posted June 10, 2014 Author Share Posted June 10, 2014 Can HL be set as the default render mode in VW 2014? As I previously mentioned, rarely do I work in wireframe. Quote Link to comment
Question
Kizza
In front view, hidden line render, nudging is not possible. (only in wireframe)
Why?
or has this been added to 2014?
I also wish for global render setting i.e. everything in hidden line instead of wireframe (rarely do I work in wireframe)
Link to comment
13 answers to this question
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