Vectorworks 2015 , 64bit and other technical questions

[PVA - Admin]

Awesome thanks.

If you are having a meeting and it does end up working the way you described it. Can you ask them if there is still some sort of conversion/compression applied if we import our images as PNG's to begin with. In other words, If I spend time tweaking the quality and size of my PNG is it just a waste of time because it will just get recompressed anyway.

Sorry for the delay, wanted to get an answer straight from the rendering manager:

JPEGs used as the source for a texture should remain JPEG and extract as JPEG. All other image formats will be converted to PNG during the texture creation (actually, converted when any image is imported at all, even if it isn't being used to make a texture) and will extract as PNG after the fact.

There is always some conversion, but there should not be a reduction in quality that you can see in a rendering, it does not attempt to compress them significantly for instance.

[PVA - Admin]

I am more looking at it from the other side. I am willing to give up a little quality to gain speed. So if I spend all this time tweaking my image to get it to 128kb only to have vectorworks change it to 1MB I just wasted a lot of time and accomplish nothing.

So what I am gathering from all of this and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that 1) there is no way for the user to optimize or control their graphics. 2) We should be importing the highest quality image because vectorworks will do its thing no matter what we throw in there.

1) Not in the granular way you are attempting to do, no. While uploading a lossy compressed image will always be worse than a high quality one, trying to get size down in the initial image file through various compression/color changes will not normally be worth the effort.

2) Yes. However this is subject to diminishing returns. Trying to load something like RAW into a texture will result in a huge resource with no visible difference.

Theres no quick scientific answer to what exactly should be done, as it all depends what the final product will be and what size/types of renderings you're working with. For instance if the final render is openGL, then you wouldn't notice much difference in anything BUT size of the final file no matter what you did.

Normally, quality should be tested in-file in the environment you're going to be rendering in, then quality can be reduced or increased to taste to balance file size and appearance.