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Vision SP3 Crashes


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hello, Vision will crash out to save your GPU if it's being overtaxed. This is usually caused by a GPU that is under minimum requirements, or a scene with complex geometry.

  1. What GPU is in the machine that's crashing? Desktop or Laptop? PC or Mac?
  2. How big in MB is the Vectorworks file you're exporting from?
  3. Are you using manufacturer truss symbols or truss tool? What about soft goods?

Those questions can help me narrow it down a bit. Also, for any technical questions, feel free to email us at tech@vectorworks.net for a faster reply.

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1. Mac Pro Late 2013 on 10.13.3 with 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 Processor, 32GB RAM, AMD FirePro D500 3GB Graphics Card.

2. 44.1MB File (originally from 2014)

3. This has the VW Truss Tool but hasn't been updated to the Truss Symbol that comes with Braceworks.  Has 11 Soft Good items but it's mostly dress kits for screens and a backdrop on a truss.  

 

When I first started this file I was using a Mac mini for Vision which was horrible because of the video card. I constantly had a to complex geometry error.  So I stripped the export file of most of the unnecessary items and upgraded machines.  From doing that in 2016 I didn't have any issues until now. But I have also just added a few more lights to the room.  I'm now updating the focus points for a few of the non-moving lights. 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Ahhh, well that would do it.Vision crashes out intentionally to save your GPU from overheating, unfortunately the D500's that apple puts into the Mac Pro's are just renamed and tweaked W7000's from 2012. Super shifty, I know. Here is more info on that subject: https://architosh.com/2013/10/the-mac-pro-so-whats-a-d300-d500-and-d700-anyway-we-have-answers/

 

Being that it's basically a w7000, that puts is on par with a GTX 570 (if not slightly below) which is under our minimum requirements, see the FAQs pulled from espvision.com here: https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/articles.html/articles/faqs/vision-faq-r7

 

Now on to solutions, because you can still definitely run Vision: I see a lot of fairly large entertainment files coming in at around 20MB, I'm not sure why your file is so large but it definitely has something to do with the crashes.

 

Soft goods can be really taxing on GPUs as they get converted to a mesh so they interact with light properly (this is also why a final quality render takes a bit of time with lights in the scene). 11 of them is hefty for anything but higher end graphics cards. Vision converts everything to a mesh so light actually interacts with it, when it's in Vectorworks, it's just drawn with a Vector calculation (I assume that's where the name came from years ago) which is much less taxing. 

 

My advice - create a new class or layer (depending on how your file is set up) and draw some extrudes in place of your soft goods, then make your actual soft goods invisible. I then put a curtain texture on my extrudes of some sort, sometimes just a dark grey fill color depending on the use of the softgood. That usually works well for me when my GPU starts to get strained.

 

As long as your truss is simple and square profile you should be good, round and smooth = harder working GPU

 

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