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Teaser Tuesday - Rendered Panoramas - Vectorworks 2018


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

5 hours isn't too bad, remember you're effectively doing 6 (up, down, left, right, front, back) high quality renders all at once.

 

Cloud hardware is about on par with that machine perhaps a bit slower. I've suggested to the cloud team that they intriduce an option to elect for better hardware even if it came with a nominal fee, since that's really the only way to speed things up without dropping quality. (Well, without springing for a shiny new iMac Pro with 12 cores, hehe.)

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On 8/9/2017 at 7:08 PM, JimW said:

5 hours isn't too bad, remember you're effectively doing 6 (up, down, left, right, front, back) high quality renders all at once.

 

Cloud hardware is about on par with that machine perhaps a bit slower. I've suggested to the cloud team that they intriduce an option to elect for better hardware even if it came with a nominal fee, since that's really the only way to speed things up without dropping quality. (Well, without springing for a shiny new iMac Pro with 12 cores, hehe.)

 

Have you taken a look at Box Rendering devices. They have desktop or rack formats up to 3.7 GHz, 44 cores!  

http://www.boxx.com/products/rendering-and-simulation

 

 I've been eyeing either a new desktop or mobile workstation. 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
1 hour ago, Clint Alderman said:

Have you taken a look at Box Rendering devices. They have desktop or rack formats up to 3.7 GHz, 44 cores!  

http://www.boxx.com/products/rendering-and-simulation


If by taking a look, you mean have I stared at them longingly at them while drooling slightly? Yes, yes I have. If someone planned to do rendering as a huge portion of their work, these would be well worth the money.

 

The cost is harder to justify if you just do some rendering on occasion but want it to be faster, which is where the cloud solutions could come in, but nothing beats native hardware like the above for constant rendering work, true.

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On 8/10/2017 at 0:32 AM, twk said:

That'd be great, if as service select customers, we could choose more powerful machines to do the heavy lifting during rendering.

It would be great if we could get a snapshot of how the rendering is progressing - at user defined intervals with the option to stop it before it's completed if desired.

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Fantastic new feature greatly improving the flow of usable information from the designer/architect to the client and/or other collaborators on a project.

 

Teaser Tuesdays is a great feature itself -- far better to *show* new features in action, rather than just dumping a text-only list of bullet-pointed features that aren't seen until product release. Way to keep us all interested & keep our faith up for paying annual Service Select costs. (I mean that earnestly, no snark.)

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If you view it with the Google Cardboard viewer (or Gear VR or whatever), are the views just a 2D projection, or are they in 3D? 3D is what really sold me on Google Cardboard, as seeing the depth at the same time as it tracking your head is what gives the true immersive experience.

 

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58 minutes ago, mat8iou said:

If you view it with the Google Cardboard viewer (or Gear VR or whatever), are the views just a 2D projection, or are they in 3D? 3D is what really sold me on Google Cardboard, as seeing the depth at the same time as it tracking your head is what gives the true immersive experience.

 

I would imagine you'd need to render two 360's around 50-70mm apart, and send one to one eye, and one to the other. (Split image for cardboard setups)

 

I was playing with this a number of years ago, and it's tricky to get completely right, but it is doable. You get into all sorts of little intricacies though, whether the cameras converge on a point, or always run parallel. And then when looking at 360 style images, you get into Polar merging and so on, where the camera separations reduce gradually as you look towards the up and down directions...

To set it up "long-hand" would take a lot of studies and experimentation to get it right, but you'll learn a so much... Let's hope they introduce a 1-button solution.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
1 hour ago, mat8iou said:

If you view it with the Google Cardboard viewer (or Gear VR or whatever), are the views just a 2D projection, or are they in 3D? 3D is what really sold me on Google Cardboard, as seeing the depth at the same time as it tracking your head is what gives the true immersive experience.

 


2D projection. In order for objects to appear in 3D you have to be able to move laterally in the scene (Rendered panoramic images are just stills) and as mentioned above, had a separate view rendered for each eye. Placing a viewer in a 3D VR environment requires the actual geometry from the model, not just a flat render of it.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
3 minutes ago, RussU said:

it can be done with two spherical "flat" renders, which are rendered laterally apart, but it becomes very tricky to configure


I meant that bit for letting the user move around and get the head tracking mat8iou mentioned, where you can alter the perspective just by moving around.

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On 19-8-2017 at 0:27 PM, Kevin Allen said:

no. It's a flat image with greater depth and can by used by VWX to add/augment light in scene . I don't know what VWX needs to make Panorama background. I thought those were procedural not image based?

I just found that the google street view app lets you save an image as a background that is probably very useful as background in VW or Artlantis!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

As long as the image is in lat-long format (twice as wide as it is tall) VW can import it for use as a RW background.

 

For now the new rendered panoramas are monoscopic, making them stereo is on our radar for the future.  And yes stereo could be added as a single very specially set up rendering and a little bit of special code.

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi. I've been super excited about this feature but can't seem to receive the cloud link. I'm an active VSS subscriber using VW18 Designer. I process and save in the cloud, check the send link but never receive one. Also the jpg renders aren't using the custom render settings I have applied. Am I missing something in the workflow ? 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
2 hours ago, echobing said:

Hi. I've been super excited about this feature but can't seem to receive the cloud link. I'm an active VSS subscriber using VW18 Designer. I process and save in the cloud, check the send link but never receive one. Also the jpg renders aren't using the custom render settings I have applied. Am I missing something in the workflow ? 

 

Hello,

Thanks for trying this new feature of Vectorworks 2018. There are a few cases that we were aware of, which can cause the shareable link dialog to not appear. We will be looking into fixing them soon. In the meantime, if you don't receive the shareable link in Vectorworks, you can go to https://cloud.vectorworks.net, click on the panorama image and click on the Share link icon in the top right corner, or from the file's context menu. You may or may not have the link already created, but either way you can copy the link from there. Regarding the .jpg not having the custom render setting you selected: We first upload a preview image set to OpenGL rendering to the cloud, so you can get a quick preview of the panorama, and also to be able to get the link in Vectorworks at the time of the job submission. This preview image is replaced by the final panorama image when the rendering job is completed on the cloud. If, for some reason the rendering fails, then you will be left only with the preview image. Currently we see panorama renderings fail more often that we would expect, so we are looking into fixing this with a high priority. If you would like us to take a look and determine the exact reason why you are seeing these two problems, please email me your VSS username at inikolova@vectorworks.net and I would be happy to assist you further.

Regards,

Iskra Nikolova

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  • 2 weeks later...

Great feature indeed. I have been testing it for a while always saving to the HDD. Have started to understand how slow it can be when compared to the usual Final Quality renders that we do. It would be great if the green progress bar gave more feedback information (e.g. estimated time left for completion). Even better would be the possibility of setting the panoramas as batch rendering jobs. Still wondering how to lighten up the rendering load as much as possible. Hope that this tool gets polished quickly. Great for presentations! Thanks to everybody involved.

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On 2017/9/14 at 11:54 PM, inikolova said:

 

Quote; [...] This preview image is replaced by the final panorama image when the rendering job is completed on the cloud. If, for some reason the rendering fails, then you will be left only with the preview image.[...]

 This explains why when saving the panorama to the HDD very quickly there is a fast rendered jpg there, all the time. I was wondering why I could see that file while at the same time a final quality panorama rendering was going on. So far it has very demanding to tweak the settings properly to avoid lengthy times (below 2 hours). Maybe this will justify a system above 4 cores to make it really usable.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 2017/10/4 at 10:07 AM, jpoq said:

 This explains why when saving the panorama to the HDD very quickly there is a fast rendered jpg there, all the time. I was wondering why I could see that file while at the same time a final quality panorama rendering was going on. So far it has very demanding to tweak the settings properly to avoid lengthy times (below 2 hours). Maybe this will justify a system above 4 cores to make it really usable.

Update: Now trying panoramas with a 16 cores@4ghz machine. Now it is viable to render the panoramas between 1 and 2 hours. It would be great if the panorama views could be saved as batch render jobs. This is maybe the best way to show spaces to clients.

 

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