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Teaser Tuesday - Vectorworks Graphic Module for Sheet Layers - Vectorworks 2019


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This is awesome!  Might there be other benefits associated with the switch of the sheet layers to the Vectorworks VGM? 😏  Specifically, would this enable viewports to be updated in a multithread fashion, or perhaps continuously?

Edited by cberg
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2 hours ago, Jim Wilson said:

They intend to draw all selection/preselection highlighting and tool graphics with the VGM, and explore the possibility of splitting drawing and geometry calculation tasks to take full advantage of multi-threaded machines.

 

This for me sounds even more exciting.

But this means VW 2020, right ?

Edited by zoomer
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Keep the questions coming! Going to try something a little different this time: I'm gathering together all the questions we get from this post and other social media lines and see if we can get the lead engineer of this feature to answer the questions live in our stream on Thursday. If not, you still get the consolation prize of yours truly 😉

I'll post all the answers here right after the stream and then answer any subsequent questions after the fact the same as we were doing before.

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12 minutes ago, cberg said:

Do you need to be on Facebook to see the live stream?


Nope! You can view it without needing an account, you just can't ask a question in the live chat. Feel free to ask your question here and we will address it in the video. (No signing away your firstborn to Mark Z required 😉 ) I just posted the last one in the previous teaser thread, please let me know if it gives you any trouble viewing it.

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First of all, thank you. Very excited to try this out on in real world tests to see if VW is significantly less CPU-constrained for those tasks.

 

The name of the game has been to find the fastest single-core clock speed available, so could you elaborate on multi-core improvements in 2019? For example, what tasks will take advantage of multiple cores that didn't before? And in what views that we couldn't before: DL, SL, 2D, 3D, DLVP, SLVP...

 

Would be really helpful to see a table that shows how different processes use/require CPU, GPU, RAM (particularly from year to year).

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21 minutes ago, Patrick Fritsch said:

Wondering if this will help when the "hunting" of surfaces when using the Push/Pull tool?

 

My guess is no. I think that's more related to this -

 

4 hours ago, Jim Wilson said:

We see a few more future performance improvements in the future of VGM, which Vectorworks engineering is already working towards in future updates. They intend to draw all selection/preselection highlighting and tool graphics with the VGM, and explore the possibility of splitting drawing and geometry calculation tasks to take full advantage of multi-threaded machines.

 

I think it also means that the offset pre-selection highlighting bug that occurs with perspective/camera sheet layer viewports isn't fixed either 😕

 

I think this is a great step forward though. Does this acceleration extend to working in the annotations space of sheet layer viewports? I'm assuming it does, but annotations are sort of a weird hybrid space so that assumption may be incorrect.

 

@Jim Wilson have you considered using the notification bell system in VW2018 for posting these teasers? You might get more questions/viewers for the Q&A livestream that way....

 

Kevin

 

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46 minutes ago, Kevin McAllister said:

@Jim Wilson have you considered using the notification bell system in VW2018 for posting these teasers? You might get more questions/viewers for the Q&A livestream that way....


I have! but we decided since the livestreaming is new we'd hold off for the first few. For instance, in this next one we plan to use a common game streaming utility to show the presenters, the demo video itself for anyone who hadnt seen it, and the Vectorworks UI live interchangeably. We'll keep ratcheting things up to see what works and what helps/hinders.

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15 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:

We debated having this as a separate teaser, but these two items really do go hand in hand. The below demonstrates On Demand Tessellation, which is a very large step in moving Vectorworks to being completely multithreaded. ODT basically splits up tasks to be handed off to the VGM into multiple CPU threads, meaning you don't just have to wait for that one single core to do everything before you can get working again. Its now going to draw objects using multiple cores.

 

 

This looks awesome! Two questions come to mind -

 

  1. Do Auto Hybrid objects take advantage of this? Exiting an Auto Hybrid is one of the slowest VW operations I know of.
  2. Do operations previews (for example the preview when you're rotating an object) take advantage of this? Currently the previews often default back to a bounding box and I assumed it was because there wasn't enough redraw power.

Kevin

 

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23 hours ago, Mark Aceto said:

The name of the game has been to find the fastest single-core clock speed available, so could you elaborate on multi-core improvements in 2019? For example, what tasks will take advantage of multiple cores that didn't before? And in what views that we couldn't before: DL, SL, 2D, 3D, DLVP, SLVP

 

 

You can see more multi-core usages almost anywhere, including those listed above, especially transiting from one view to another, entering/exiting editing modes, turning on hidden layers, changing view render mode, turning on multi-view, and now switching between sheet layers. 

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4 minutes ago, Simon Allan said:

Hi Jim,

 

In your first video, in the second half, you mention the lighting plot being fairly complex. Can you give some more details please on how many lighting instruments and other objects/viewports etc are in that particular drawing please?

 

Thanks.

 

The sheet layer itself has 6 viewports from multiple sources, but the main one is the plot itself as expected.

'

125 Lighting Devices

58 referenced hybrid symbols (many containing hanging positions or lighting devices in addition to the above)

58 2D only symbols

28 Groups (primarily with text and 2d geometry inside)

34 assorted polylines with something like 3800 vertices total (estimated)

Not the heaviest file I've ever encountered, but one where the delay was nearly all in the screen redraw, not related to any specific object or geometric slowness.

 

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1 hour ago, Jim Wilson said:

125 Lighting Devices

58 referenced hybrid symbols (many containing hanging positions or lighting devices in addition to the above)

58 2D only symbols

28 Groups (primarily with text and 2d geometry inside)

34 assorted polylines with something like 3800 vertices total (estimated)

I’m interested how you know these figures. Do you have an in-house report function that users don’t have yet? 

 

It it would be great to have that kind of function so that, for example, when a drawing is becoming sluggish one can understand what might be the cause.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Kevin McAllister said:

 

This looks awesome! Two questions come to mind -

 

  1. Do Auto Hybrid objects take advantage of this? Exiting an Auto Hybrid is one of the slowest VW operations I know of.
  2. Do operations previews (for example the preview when you're rotating an object) take advantage of this? Currently the previews often default back to a bounding box and I assumed it was because there wasn't enough redraw power.

Kevin

 

Hey @Kevin McAllister,

 

To answer your questions:

 

1. I do not believe Auto Hybrid objects do not take advantage of VGM ODT Threads. This is because a lot of the time is used by old drawing functions that are not VGM functions. We already have a report about this and we are considering on whether on fixing this in the future.
2. I haven't used the operations previews that you are speaking of, but if it doesn't use VGM or if generates a stale preview, it is probably not taking advantage of the ODT threads.

 

Everything else involving dynamic drawing (loading objects in wireframe, OpenGL, Hidden Line, and top plan design/sheet layers) should be using the new ODT threads.

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18 minutes ago, markdd said:

I’m interested how you know these figures. Do you have an in-house report function that users don’t have yet? 

 

It it would be great to have that kind of function so that, for example, when a drawing is becoming sluggish one can understand what might be the cause.


Sorry to disappoint, but I just opened up the file and used Select Similar on a few key element types to get a general count.

Apologies, I know of no automated inventory, unless the engineers have been holding out on me?

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@AndrewG Thanks for the info!

 

16 minutes ago, AndrewG said:

1. .....We already have a report about this and we are considering on whether on fixing this in the future.

This made me laugh out loud. I'm assuming this means NV is undecided as to replacing the Auto Hybrid with something new or improving the current implementation. Complex Auto Hybrids aren't very useable at the moment.

 

16 minutes ago, AndrewG said:

2. I haven't used the operations previews that you are speaking of, but if it doesn't use VGM or if generates a stale preview, it is probably not taking advantage of the ODT threads.

 

I guess I wasn't clear enough in my description. By operations preview I was talking about the preview that VW generates when you use a tool like Mirror or Rotate. Here are some examples where VW gives me bounding box preview with a hybrid symbol in Top/Plan but gives me a complex preview in Top view.

 

Rotating -

 

153496484_ScreenShot2018-08-15at12_40_56PM.thumb.png.a7bc8878ff6be3f674e03bf3149063e9.png356682894_ScreenShot2018-08-15at12_41_57PM.thumb.png.f1522fd297d046142d5e4e2bbf1ad4f8.png

 

Mirroring -

 

2142308308_ScreenShot2018-08-15at12_43_09PM.thumb.png.a69b0bdcd34d5b413df76243abc1d5f4.png126968760_ScreenShot2018-08-15at12_42_46PM.thumb.png.1702da8adb2f4112a61c595763f81a19.png

 

Kevin

 

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