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Vectorworks 2015 , 64bit and other technical questions


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
Jim,

Is Renderworks rendering faster?

Bruce, I suspect much of this is tied to which version of CineRender is being used by VW. VW may have improved the code that passes things to the renderer though.

VW seems to have moved to CineRender 14 with VW2014. It was using CineRender 12 before that. VW also doesn't unlock all of the CineRender features. Maxon has added a lot of new features which VW doesn't leverage yet (Physical Renderer, better Global Illumination and most recently the Reflectance Channel in R16). CineRender is very efficient and built for a competitive industry so it moves forward on a much faster development cycle.

Looks like it is still on CineRender 14 in Vectorworks 2014 and 2015.

Confirmed that the parts of CineRender we use are adapted individually, so just because we update a version number doesn't mean we immediately have all the base features the engine has available as Kevin stated. They may be rolled in on a separate schedule from Maxon's original release schedule.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

i) Will it make full use of high resolution (retina) displays?

ii) Will it support multiple monitors and/or multiple simultaneous model views?

iii) On OS X, does the move to 64bit mean that VW 2015 is now a Cocoa app?

i) Cant discuss yet, unfortunately.

ii) Multi monitor support has been cleaned up, specifically on OS X, but I haven't tested it out much personally, I have a handful of different machines with different OSes on my desktop for troubleshooting but they each all use one display each primarily. Multiple simultaneous views onscreen is still a wishlist item as far as I can see.

iii)The large majority of it, (if not all of it) is now written in Cocoa yes. For a few years we have been half Carbon and half Cocoa, with a sprinkling of VS- (Vectorscript) based tools still remaining. A lot of the backend work to move to 64bit on Mac was converting older components of the application to Cocoa, especially the palette system.

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Thank you for all the information on VW 2015.

I have a few more questions regarding the impending update:

ii) Will it support multiple monitors and/or multiple simultaneous model views?

The second part of this question would be of more interest, although it would be less hardware related. We have viewports to provide simultaneous model views, but they always lag behind in the work process. Any chance they'll get a performance upgrade, as in removing the "Update" button?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I would suspect it would be a "real" implementation in the drawing area if they did add it, not a modification of viewports. The speed I am seeing now could make multiple views it a real possibility soon, but I'm guessing Top/Plan still needs to be fully moved into the Vectorworks Graphic Module before they will look into displaying multiple views at once.

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I would suspect it would be a "real" implementation in the drawing area if they did add it, not a modification of viewports. The speed I am seeing now could make multiple views it a real possibility soon, but I'm guessing Top/Plan still needs to be fully moved into the Vectorworks Graphic Module before they will look into displaying multiple views at once.

Thx for the info. It's things like this we need to know to understand why wishlist items are taking time to implement, as it's mostly due to other things needed first.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
I have a project that I could start today or wait another 2 weeks to start it in VW 2015. Some concern if I start it in VW 2014 are;

1. Will stories setup be compatible and editable?

2. Will wall and slab styles be compatible, due to the introduction of "materials"?

Thanks,

Not within the realm of technical/64bit stuff I am able to discuss, apologies.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

It seems so at least as far as text is concerned. Text will scale as much as it can to obey the DPI text scaling options, but if they are set to extreme values I do not know what will occur. 100%, 125% and 150% currently seem just fine on my 1920x1200 monitor, (In case anyone reading isn't aware, in 2014 the text would expand out of the boundaries of the UI at even minor DPI scaling increases and become illegible) and I have seen it correctly displayed on a 4K monitor as well.

I do not know about the icons, I haven't seen that checked yet in testing on an ultraHD display.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
With comments such as " nearly all of VW is ported to 64 bit" and "Vw is almost rewritten in cocoa", I do hope these are not half baked features for which VW is known for.

I can't take any more "half baked" features.

What part specifically are you curious about?

Not half baked, just huge. Kind of like a large building remodelling, has to be done floor by floor and we cant just throw away the ground floor all at once.

(To keep that analogy, it has been suggested that the whole building be flattened and built from scratch and while that would be the most direct way to fix it, we can keep running for the multiple years it would take to do that while releasing nothing.)

Edited by JimW
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Object was sent to me directly.

At the moment, it looks like the answer is no. This particular example doesn't seem to be hitting the memory limit in 2014, so the much higher limit that 64bit provides doesn't come into play and/or help at all.

Regardless, this is WAY too slow to be useable but the guts of the array don't appear to be anything out of the ordinary or constructed improperly at first glance at least. Submitting it now as an example for Surface Array issues.

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on one earlier comment you said Quicktime is no longer needed. If using an iMac and if one is trying to export an animation, what type of file is exported ? What software on someone else's computer would be needed to run it ? If using windows, does it export in Windows Media Player?

PS: I agree with other comments on how your participation and input has made this forum a much better and more responsive place to find answers.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

To clarify, QuickTime is no longer needed on the Windows side. QuickTime on OS X is an embedded component of the OS and is much more capable than its 32bit Windows cousin, as well as being 64bit.

The movie format is the same, still .MOV for modern versions, but the component that exports them (named the "Vectorworks Movie Writer SDK" if you were curious) no longer has so many compression options within that .MOV format. However, this choice was made on the large majority of users favoring the H.264 compression standard.

For older versions of Windows that don't natively support .MOV, we use .AVI.

OLD:

2014 Mac+Win

Format: .mov (QuickTime)

Compression: Animation, DV-PAL, DV/DVCPRO-NTSC, DVCPRO-PAL, H.264, JPEG2000, MPEG4 Video, None, Photo-JPEG, PNG, Video

NEW:

2015 Mac

Format: .mov (MPEG4)

Compression: H.264

2015 Win 7/8

Format: .mov (MPEG4)

Compression: H.264

2015 Win XP/Vista

Format: .avi (Audio Video Interleave)

Compression: MJPEG (Motion JPEG)

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Sorry, forgot part of your question:

To view the exported movies, on the receiving end QuickTime will still play them, but you can also use VLC (My personal choice) or most other media player apps. MOV and AVI in these compression modes are fairly standard nowadays.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
Does this mean no more - "This operation couldn't be completed due to a lack of Memory" errors on renderings and saves??

As far as I have seen and understand it, YES!

I have not been able to get that error to pop up so far in my testing. (Before you ask, no we didn't just change the error message text to say something else. ;) ) Instead, it should now plow through and complete the operation.

However, if you happen to have that reproducible error in a particular file, send it my way and I can ensure this is the case.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

As a followup:

When it hits your actual memory maximum now, I THINK (I'll confirm with Engineering) what is occurring is that is starts writing the overflow to disk temporarily, so you may still get that error, but only when it has filled your maximum available memory as well as your entire hard drive. Which really... shouldn't happen.

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