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


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Those are commonly called "Tool Graphics" internally, and no they aren't on the VGM yet. That and Selection Highlighting are the next two big ones.

Auto Hybrid, as @AndrewG stated, isn't really affected as much as you might hope. It DOES speed up the redraw phase of them updating, but their main delay is geometry calculation, so while they would benefit a little bit, i doubt itll be as huge an improvement as the scenarios I demoed were.

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38 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:

Those are commonly called "Tool Graphics" internally, and no they aren't on the VGM yet. That and Selection Highlighting are the next two big ones.

Ah, "tool graphics". Always good to learn new terminology 😁

 

38 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:

Auto Hybrid, as @AndrewG stated, isn't really affected as much as you might hope. It DOES speed up the redraw phase of them updating, but their main delay is geometry calculation, so while they would benefit a little bit, i doubt itll be as huge an improvement as the scenarios I demoed were.

Thanks for the clarification. Its never been very clear to me whether this was a geometry operation or a rendering operation.

 

KM

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7 hours 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 does NOT mean that the actual geometry calculations like add/subtract solids or duplication are multicore yet, those are still in the pipe, but a lot of the perceived slowness in previous versions, as you can see from the demo, were delays in simple redrawing of existing geometry.

We will be taking questions both about ODT and VGM Sheet Layers in tomorrows livestream, but again feel free to ask any additional questions here as well, both will be checked!

So in a nutshell - Vectorworks won't get in the way of my train of thought anywhere near as often as current. 

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

The livestream will start at 2PM EST, about 2 hours-ish from the time of this post, please feel free to add any more questions here now, or in the live chat during the stream if you come up with any others!

After the stream, i'll be back here to list off all the answers we ended up giving live. Questions can be related to anything we've teased so far, so VGM Sheet Layers, On Demand Tessellation, and Class and Layer Filtering or anything you feel is directly related to these features or their intention. Seeya there!

 

Semi related note:


We've been thinking that if this and the rest of the teasers go well and get a good turnout, this would be a good format to keep sharing portions of development, to address common tech issues, or to provide additional training. Something monthly or bimonthly most likely. What do you all think of that? Anything you'd like to see? Sort of a Vectorworks user-centric news program, less about marketing and more info for the daily driver in Vectorworks.

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49 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:

We've been thinking that if this and the rest of the teasers go well and get a good turnout, this would be a good format to keep sharing portions of development, to address common tech issues, or to provide additional training. Something monthly or bimonthly most likely. What do you all think of that? Anything you'd like to see? Sort of a Vectorworks user-centric news program, less about marketing and more info for the daily driver in Vectorworks.

^ This is a cool idea!

 

KM

 

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@Jim Wilson this Q&A was awesome. Thanks to you both for answering my questions. I really like that we get to meet some of the other faces behind VW. The open format is very refreshing!

 

I thought of one more question that's probably related to this weeks teaser. Sometimes when I update Sheet Layer Renderworks viewports there's a thing that happens where instead of getting just the image "buckets" as things render, the whole viewport continuously redraws over and over. Usually its a viewport that also has a Hidden Line foreground element. Will these improvements help that scenario?

 

Thanks again,

 

Kevin

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
18 minutes ago, Kevin McAllister said:

. Sometimes when I update Sheet Layer Renderworks viewports there's a thing that happens where instead of getting just the image "buckets" as things render, the whole viewport continuously redraws over and over. Usually its a viewport that also has a Hidden Line foreground element. Will these improvements help that scenario?


My first quess would be no, however to clarify; you don't mean the "Fullscreen Preview" option in a render style, do you? That will start a low res version of the image that slowly resolves into a fully render scene rather than the bucket system that renders full quality from the center outward.

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6 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:


My first quess would be no, however to clarify; you don't mean the "Fullscreen Preview" option in a render style, do you? That will start a low res version of the image that slowly resolves into a fully render scene rather than the bucket system that renders full quality from the center outward.

I haven't used the "Fullscreen Preview" option so its not that. It may be my outdated graphics hardware but I've had it happen on occasion with the last few versions, maybe as far back as 2016. I've often wondered why it happens. It looks like VW is redrawing the hidden line overlay with every bucket.

 

Kevin

 

 

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1 hour ago, digitalcarbon said:

YES please do... this is a major headache...updating VPs its a job in of itself...

 

Especially if you're next to a few Unreal workstations, and their "renders" are screenshots taken in real time.

 

Very excited about all these improvements. I even have hope for the godforsaken stair tool... 

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1 hour ago, Mark Aceto said:

 

Especially if you're next to a few Unreal workstations, and their "renders" are screenshots taken in real time.

 

Very excited about all these improvements. I even have hope for the godforsaken stair tool...  

 LET'S ALL NOT GET CARRIED AWAY NOW.............

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Has anything been done to cut down on unnecessary redraws?  I am glad that redraws will be faster, but VW takes every opportunity in the world to redraw - it is its favorite thing.  I have 4 heavy viewports - changing a single setting on one viewport - not even a view shift - suddenly this triggers every viewport on the page to redraw.  It's nuts.    

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Sort of. There are a lot of instances, like that, where the redraw just shouldn't be triggered at all. Those you specifically mentioned were filed as bugs so I'll hunt them down and give them a kick to make sure they were or if possible can be, corrected before 2019. There are more situations that redraw too much for no reason, or dont redraw when they should, and those are most object specific so we'll track those down and clean them up as we see them.

The OTHER half is that a lot of the time, larger redraws than necessary were triggered because the older system for drawing the sheet layers (I think it was called Core Geometry? Not sure, its name didn't come up much in meetings as we mostly talked about the newer tech. In any case that was the old single core way we drew things with the CPU.) wasn't able to cache as much, or cache things properly. The VGM is much more capable of holding onto its cache until it needs to be refreshed, depending on the amount of VRAM your system has.

Further to that, the WAY VGM redraws, allows you to work and edit things even while it's redrawing, so even if Vectorworks is redrawing something unnecessarily, you no longer have to wait until thats done in order to get back to work, it just updates in the background as far as the user is concerned, so even noticing the erroneous redraws might be much less likely.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
38 minutes ago, Tom Klaber said:

Has anything been done to cut down on unnecessary redraws?  I am glad that redraws will be faster, but VW takes every opportunity in the world to redraw - it is its favorite thing.  I have 4 heavy viewports - changing a single setting on one viewport - not even a view shift - suddenly this triggers every viewport on the page to redraw.  It's nuts.    


Can you send me that file to test in the 2019 beta please? The bug i filed was marked "Wont Fix" because the system for redrawing was being replaced this year and the issue may or may not exist in the VGM, which as much as I dislike "Won't Fix" items, that makes perfect sense. If I have your file I can submit it as a new bug against the new system if need be, or I'll be back with some good news.

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