Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 15, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 15, 2018 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. 1 Quote Link to comment
Kevin McAllister Posted August 15, 2018 Share Posted August 15, 2018 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 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 15, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 15, 2018 By the way! @Chih-Pin is the mastermind behind On Demand Tessellation, I just deliver the good news, he makes it from scratch 😉 3 Quote Link to comment
Matt Overton Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 16, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 16, 2018 12 hours ago, Matt Overton said: So in a nutshell - Vectorworks won't get in the way of my train of thought anywhere near as often as current. That's the idea! 1 Quote Link to comment
Markvl Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 Thank you, thank you, thank you. The regeneration delays has always been a sore spot for me since I started using VW. This is a great upgrade. Quote Link to comment
Andrew Davies Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 I suspect this is one of those features that you get used to very quickly - then when you have to go back to using 2018 and earlier again - wonder how you ever coped! I was thinking of returning my eGPU as it didn't make too much of a difference - but sounds like it is worth hanging onto now Thanks again @Jim Wilson great work! Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 16, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 16, 2018 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. 4 Quote Link to comment
Kevin McAllister Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 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 Quote Link to comment
markdd Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 1 hour ago, Jim Wilson said: less about marketing and more info for the daily driver in Vectorworks. The less marketing the better! 4 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post PVA - Admin Posted August 16, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post Share Posted August 16, 2018 @Andy Broomell Does this apply to all viewports or only ones that are in Top/Plan or Hidden Line? For example, what about a 3D view in wireframe? Yes. Anything displayed on a Sheet Layer, including annotations and other elements that aren't viewports. @zoomer Will this enhance 2D DLVPs too ? Technically yes, but not because of 2019. DLVPs were drawn by the VGM in prior versions. However, On Demand Tessellation will improve the speed of 2D DLVP redraw. @Mark Aceto 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? As of this year, the improvement is to displaying ANYTHING on the Sheet Layer. ODT separately means that now the overall rating of the CPU can be used to judge it, So your Cinebench score will be a much better indicator of performance than just the single core clock speed. Is there a limit to the number of cores that can be used?Technically yes, but this is limited by how many cores your operating system can use, not by Vectorworks. So if you have 88 cores (I think this is the limit on Windows 10), it will use 88 cores. @Patrick Fritsch Wondering if this will help when the "hunting" of surfaces when using the Push/Pull tool? Not directly related to these features no, but we are tracking that issue and suspect we can fix it separately from these improvements. Scott Barnes: Jim, can you please let us know what hardware specs you are using when showing these demos? Lenovo Y720 - 1080p display with a GTX 1060 GPU with an Intel Core i7 7700HQ 2.8Ghz @Kevin McAllister Do Auto Hybrid objects take advantage of this? Exiting an Auto Hybrid is one of the slowest VW operations I know of. No. Unfortunately the core of the slowness in Auto Hybrid objects is related to sectioning and geometry calculations. However, this is in our pipeline, bringing geometry and sectioning operations to multiple cores. 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. These are called Tool Graphics internally, and they are not adding to the VGM by this task or in 2019, but they are marked to be integrated into the VGM as well in later versions. @cberg 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? These features do not specifically address viewport updating or sectioning operations, but in the future we plan to not only make those operations multi threaded as well, but perhaps even remove the concept of Updating viewports entirely. 6 Quote Link to comment
Kevin McAllister Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 @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 1 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 16, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 16, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment
Kevin McAllister Posted August 16, 2018 Share Posted August 16, 2018 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 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 16, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 16, 2018 Well, in that case if it IS in fact the redraw of those lines, then yes it would indeed be sped up by this enhancement. Quote Link to comment
Mark Aceto Posted August 17, 2018 Share Posted August 17, 2018 (edited) On 8/16/2018 at 7:59 AM, Andrew Davies said: I was thinking of returning my eGPU as it didn't make too much of a difference - but sounds like it is worth hanging onto now @Andrew Davies what eGPU are you using with what computer spec's? Edited August 17, 2018 by Mark Aceto Quote Link to comment
Andrew Davies Posted August 20, 2018 Share Posted August 20, 2018 Hi I’ve got the Blackmagic eGPU (the one sold exclusively by Apple) on my 2016 MacBook Pro 1 Quote Link to comment
digitalcarbon Posted August 20, 2018 Share Posted August 20, 2018 (edited) On 8/16/2018 at 3:10 PM, Jim Wilson said: remove the concept of Updating viewports entirely. YES please do... this is a major headache...updating VPs its a job in of itself... Edited August 20, 2018 by digitalcarbon 3 Quote Link to comment
Mark Aceto Posted August 20, 2018 Share Posted August 20, 2018 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... Quote Link to comment
bc Posted August 20, 2018 Share Posted August 20, 2018 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............. 1 Quote Link to comment
Tom Klaber Posted August 23, 2018 Share Posted August 23, 2018 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. 2 Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 23, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 23, 2018 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. 3 Quote Link to comment
Tom Klaber Posted August 23, 2018 Share Posted August 23, 2018 Thanks, @Jim Wilson That last paragraph made my day. Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee PVA - Admin Posted August 23, 2018 Author Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted August 23, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment
line-weight Posted August 29, 2018 Share Posted August 29, 2018 On 8/16/2018 at 8:10 PM, Jim Wilson said: @Patrick Fritsch Wondering if this will help when the "hunting" of surfaces when using the Push/Pull tool? Not directly related to these features no, but we are tracking that issue and suspect we can fix it separately from these improvements. Is this being dealt with, with a sense of urgency? It needs to be. (Please) Quote Link to comment
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