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Hidden Line Rendering 20 min vs 3 Seconds


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a bit off topic but i just got an notification that onshape added 6 new improvements.

they provided short 1.5min videos on what they were and it was all updated 

i just tried what they suggested and it was there ...

no downloading a SP

no me asking it others have also upgraded to the latest SP

 

seamless & bit sized upgrades 

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
On 11/5/2017 at 12:16 PM, Kevin McAllister said:

VW has put a lot of eggs in the vector output for PDFs aspect of Hidden Line. Ironically this is something that is often not needed and can cause immensely bloated PDF files. Lately I've found myself exporting PNG images of my sheets and combining those into a PDF drawing set in Acrobat. They are essentially the "flattened" PDFs many of us have wished for. They are nice, clean drawings at 300dpi where the fonts won't vary and there's a high level of compression on the white areas of the sheet.

Is this not the same as the 'Export PDF' options to 'Rasterize'? 

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This is going to sound so novice - but when I look at hidden line - it really seems that VW builds it backward - starting with items farthest way and rendering toward the camera to get the final result.  It would seem for hidden line that going the other way would make more sense - start with the items closest to the viewer and move backward - only then rendering the items that are not hidden.  So if I have a camera facing a wall - and render it in hidden line - it should not matter what is behind the wall - 100mm small interwoven mesh globs - or nothing - should not matter - once VW renders the wall - it need not look behind as no matter what - it will not be seen.  

 

I know its complicated - but VW has to be spending time calculating things it does not need - there is got to be a way for VW to better understand what is going to be in the shot and what is not.

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17 hours ago, Kevin McAllister said:

Perhaps, but the PDF created from PNG exports is 3.4mb whereas the rasterized PDF from Vectorworks is 23.5mb. Both are the same resolution and there's no visible difference on screen.

Kevin

 

Do you have PDF editing software? If yes then try the reduce file size option in the menu, it can make quite a difference if there are e.g. images that extent beyond the page boundary. They'll be exported in full size to the PDF and using the reduce file size option will crop the image to the page boundary and significantly reduce the file size. It may also reduce the resolution as sometimes images do come into the PDF at 600DPI whereas 200 DPI could be sufficient for your purposes.

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I am following this thread with avidity, as it consolidates so many of the VWX issues in one place, primarily VW's focus on 'shiny new', rather than 'simply better'. 

Another software vendor recently: 

What’s more, Lightroom Classic is getting a major speed boost. Adobe admitted earlier this year that Lightroom has performance issues, and now it’s launching a major update to fix that.

“While the palette of Lightroom features grew, our performance detracted from these gains,”Adobe says. “So we took stock of where you were feeling the most performance anxieties, and dedicated this launch primarily to addressing these issues.”

Lightroom Classic is being updated with improved speed in major areas, including launch time, preview generation, import selection, switching between Library and Develop, navigating between photos in Develop, responsive brushing, and more.

 

DO note this fresh focus has taken Adobe most of the past decade to get around to…

Edited by mjm
added portion of petapixel's Adobe LR CC review
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1 hour ago, mjm said:

DO note this fresh focus has taken Adobe most of the past decade to get around to…

And there are still lots of complaints about LR Classic being slow, so apparently the improvement is not as advertised.

 

Aside from Adobe, I downloaded the vwx file of the candy cotton sheet that @digitalcarbon provided, exported it to dwg, opened in BC, created generated top/front/isometric view which took a few minutes to autogenerate and then switched all three created viewports to hidden line rendering in one go. The rendering took three seconds approx. because at 5 seconds I realized the rendering had already finished finished when I noticed the command bar was ready for new input. Switching to another render mode was equally fast.

 

As @Tom Klabermentioned, the rendering seems to be starting from the wrong direction, i.e. it has to calculate way more than it needs to. Otoh doing it that way in theory ensures you do not have to re-render upon view change. So it depends a bit on what be more beneficial, fast with re-render upon view change, or slower without having to re-render upon view change. Though the latter is more relevant for design layers and not so much for viewports on sheet layers. That being said, even BC does this way faster than VW, so there is definitely room for improvement.

 

Unfortunately it seems it is not just the rendering that is affected, but also moving objects became much slower in certain situations.

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I'm using BC mostly for the 2D stuff that needs to be in DWG format and for which VW is not compatible enough with its DWG export to meet client document requirements (at least not without much reworking).

For 3D modeling I use VW, which I unfortunately cannot share publicly as it is client confidential.

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  • 2 months later...
20 hours ago, Ethan R. said:

so i'm able to get into the section edit as shown ..

Is there a way to just keep this as the actual render setting when I exit the view?

 

This white model is really all that I want.

The sections are really stalling my system :(

 

Real answer no, but you can fake it.  For some reason the render mode for section edit in place is reserved for just there - and is not accessible as a render style or setting anywhere else.  Jim has tried to explain to me why - but I am still confused.

 

The workaround is to use open gl with the ambient light turned all the way up and edges on.  This is ok - but does not have surface hatches - so is somewhat of a poor substitute.  

 

The work around work around is to create an elevation - so you can see the whole model - but its still not a workable view - you can not go into plan from that view - but you would be able to edit exterior objects in a limited capacity. 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
2 hours ago, Tom Klaber said:

For some reason the render mode for section edit in place is reserved for just there - and is not accessible as a render style or setting anywhere else.  Jim has tried to explain to me why - but I am still confused.


If it makes you feel better, I don't quite understand it either. I think it may be temporarily strange until the tech that was developed for the live section views can be implimented outside that one editing mode, which we do plan to do.

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1 minute ago, JimW said:


If it makes you feel better, I don't quite understand it either. I think it may be temporarily strange until the tech that was developed for the live section views can be implimented outside that one editing mode, which we do plan to do.

 

It really is a nice looking style.  I would probably work in that rendering mode over OpenGL if the performance was the same.  If we get some shadows on that - I do not know any architect who would not drool over that. 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
On 1/30/2018 at 5:10 PM, JimW said:
On 1/30/2018 at 2:23 PM, Tom Klaber said:

For some reason the render mode for section edit in place is reserved for just there - and is not accessible as a render style or setting anywhere else.  Jim has tried to explain to me why - but I am still confused.


If it makes you feel better, I don't quite understand it either. I think it may be temporarily strange until the tech that was developed for the live section views can be implimented outside that one editing mode, which we do plan to do.

 

Think of it this way...we can do the fake mode directly in the VGM specifically for the cases we wanted (edit section), or we can spend a lot of time making an official new render mode that shows up in all menus everywhere, viewports, save/restore view, gets stored with the file, reverse translation to older files, on and on.  We talked about making it a new mode but simply didn't have the time for all the extra work.

 

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