Swift Action Needed: Rendering integration so VW companies can stay Competitive

[Steve Jepson]

 

 .

 

 

Edited April 9, 2019 by Steve Jepson

[Amorphous - Julian]

Very pleased to see this development, but as a Mac-based office we are yet to understand how we can benefit from this.

 

Are there other Mac-based Vectorworks office out there who have developed a workflow for Lumion? If so, we are most interested to hear about that process. 

[NikF]

Hello Amorphous,

Lumion works with Mac and Bootcamp as well. The only thing you should consider is a proper graphic card.

I work with an iMac and a Windows Laptop. Recognizing the last years VW and Apple vs. VW and Windows I will invest most likely more and more in windows based hardware. The same is valid for other programs. Yes Apple computers have still a nice design, but thats it... (one iMac for the office looks good ;-))

If you compare the the performance data in relation to the price you get for 2/3 of the price a windows machine with 50% more power.

[JRA-Vectorworks-CAD]

This is a very interesting thread, and one I have been watching for a while so thought I would contribute my thoughts.

 

I have been using Twinmotion with Vectorworks for a while now and generally it works really well with the .C4D export. The Renderworks textures come through and although may need some adjustments and can be improved in Twinmotion. Then you can add trees, people, cars and furniture etc. If the Vectorworks model needs to be changed then simply modify it and re-export the .C4D export from VW. Then you can re-locate the new geometry in Twinmotion and all the Twinmotion work stays with added props, cameras and video sequences etc. Sure a Live Sync with Twinmotion like the one that just come out for Lumion would be amazing and I really hope its not too long before Mac users can have this workflow available too. Lumion and Twinmotion are very similar in many ways, and each has some unique features, but Twinmotion is cross platform, and the preview on a decent GPU is really awesome, and the renders take minutes not hours!

 

Anyway, I made a new video this weekend on Vectorworks Site Modelling and Twinmotion if you are interested. Please remember if you don't like the funky tunes you can turn the volume down! Twinmotion work starts at about 3:20. There is lots more VW/Twinmotion videos on the channel including a recent one made with Twinmotion themselves.:-

 

 

Edited April 14, 2019 by JRA-Vectorworks-CAD

[Mark Aceto]

Maxon Acquires Redshift Rendering Technologies

 

Well that's an interesting development in the Nemetschek universe.

Edited April 18, 2019 by Mark Aceto

[Art V]

It took a little bit of searching as one of my other CAD programs uses RedSDK for its rendering but that is from Redway3D and not Redshift. I briefly hoped that if Maxon acquired the render engine used by the other CAD program that it might also provide a way to improve exchange from those DWG files into VW if/when the Redshift tech stuff trickles down to VW in the future. 

 

I know the 3D object generation on the DWG side is handled by the ACIS kernel but it has to be translated in some way like it happens between VW and C4D. I don't know how the translation is exactly done but if they share the same render engine then translating through that render engine into objects that both can handle equally might improve 3D object transfers. Or I might be way off with this assumption.

 

Otoh, if Redshift tech does trickle down to VW eventually it may improver render speeds (and quality?) quite a bit.

[Hans-Olav]

@JRA-Vectorworks-CAD 

Have you seen the news today? 

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-twinmotion-join-forces-easy-high-quality-real-time-visualization?fbclid=IwAR1skY1uYB6tGKwRPoVLGaa4jKTWYqmO182QMSq-vn3abScmna3oX890Mp8

[Markvl]

Now that is a fantastic offer.  I will definitely latch onto that and use it to wow the boss.  Thanks for sharing @Hans-Olav

[EAlexander]

Gonna check this out when I have a bit more free time.  I did download the trial of Lumion and it did fine with simple scenes, but my more advanced scenes crashed it without fail right out of the gate.  Curious to see what Twinmotion can do - Unreal is on my list, so this is a good bridge.

[Hans-Olav]

I have been using Twinmotion for a while. ( bought it at full prize (-: ) 

 

Its really intuitive and gets good result after just a few hour work. To get really good renderings and a certain mood you need to fiddle with the lighting settings. Still its quite nice straight out of the box and the fast rendering makes it easy to experiment 

[JRA-Vectorworks-CAD]

@Hans-Olav Totally agree with Hans that you can get great renders and in particular animations with ease. I am also sure that the quality of the rendering engine using full Unreal Engine technology will only be getting better moving forward (probably in the next paid version) while the simple interface, and ease of use is retained. Vectorworks really need to be working with Twinmotion closely as a huge number of Vectorworks users have always been Mac users and don't want to switch to PC, and now we can all have an amazing free, realtime rendering solution.

 

There are lots of Vectorworks &Twinmotion video on my channel (Innovative Vectorworks BIM) if people are interested. 

 

 

[EAlexander]

Took this for a spin this morning - pretty fun stuff.  More experimenting to be done.

[Boh]

On 5/16/2019 at 6:00 AM, Hans-Olav said:

I have been using Twinmotion for a while. ( bought it at full prize (-: ) 

You might be eligible for a refund or getting the next release free. 

[Chris Busch]

On 3/4/2019 at 10:35 AM, Our Spaces said:

Vectorworks/Rhino w/Cinema 4D for the Money Shots can quickly achieve anything those others can. If you have your working pipeline established, that system can take a ton of hours to create but it can kick out Photo Real Renderings quick once its down. 

Hi Our Spaces,

 

Do you have any tips or resource recommendations for setting up an efficient VW -> C4D pipeline?  I'm just getting started seting mine up as a longtime VW/Renderworks user for exhibition design.  Thanks!

[grant_PD]

I would build a pipeline by creating a test file of layers and classes and seeing how it translates over to C4D.  You may find that your organization of VW needs to be tweaked to create an efficient workflow.  I also find that naming objects becomes very useful, as C4D makes heavy use of the object manager, giving you a running list of everything in your file.  While it can be daunting to have 300 "extrude" objects in a list, if they are named in a way that is meaningful to you, you can search very quickly through the list instead of poking about in your model. 

 

 

[JRA-Vectorworks-CAD]

@grant_PD I created a 3D template with all my Vectorworks 3D Textures and associated classes. This help when modelling in VW using Rendering. Then when I export, I can easily Map new textures in .C4D or now days I use Twinmotion for speed and real time rendering. Now Twinmotion is free theres no reason not to try it! Check out my website youtube channel to see what it can do.

 

[Chris Busch]

10 hours ago, grant_PD said:

I would build a pipeline by creating a test file of layers and classes and seeing how it translates over to C4D.  You may find that your organization of VW needs to be tweaked to create an efficient workflow.  I also find that naming objects becomes very useful, as C4D makes heavy use of the object manager, giving you a running list of everything in your file.  While it can be daunting to have 300 "extrude" objects in a list, if they are named in a way that is meaningful to you, you can search very quickly through the list instead of poking about in your model. 

 

 

 

10 hours ago, JRA-Vectorworks-CAD said:

I created a 3D template with all my Vectorworks 3D Textures

 

Great, thanks to you both!

[NikF]

would be nice if you could share it?

Thx!

[JRA-Vectorworks-CAD]

@NikF @NikF Sure, drop me an email at: Jonathan.reeves@jr-architecture.co.uk

[Mark Aceto]

Saw this Parallels update that specifically calls out Lumion:

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/08/13/parallels-desktop-15-catalina-sidecar-support/

 

Looks like the new version supports up to 128GB VRAM and 32 CPU's (cores?).

 

This could be my gateway to the dark side (or the best of both worlds).

[Amorphous - Julian]

On 8/26/2019 at 10:46 PM, Mark Aceto said:

Saw this Parallels update that specifically calls out Lumion:

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/08/13/parallels-desktop-15-catalina-sidecar-support/

 

Looks like the new version supports up to 128GB VRAM and 32 CPU's (cores?).

 

This could be my gateway to the dark side (or the best of both worlds).

 

Hey @Mark Aceto after seeing your post, we went to download a Parallels trial, and a Lumion Trial. 
 

All seems well until...

When you install the 'Livesync' plugin for VW, it needs to find a VW 2019 SP3 installation on C:\\Program Files

So we can't install the livesync. 

Without the livesync on Mac version of VW, Lumion on Parallels desktop isn't much help for us Mac VW users. *sad face* 

[line-weight]

Are any of these 3rd party rendering things any good for creating sectional views?

 

There are lots of things I like about RW - the single file (potentially), and all the things you can do using multiple viewports, class overrides and so on. I also feel that the quality of the renders out of RW can be pretty good - if you put quite a lot of time in.

 

The slowness of working in RW is one of its main downfalls, but another is the fact that it really can't do rendered sectional views properly. Either I end up using design layer viewports which are truly horrible - unstable and unwieldy - or I end up making a 'manual' section where I literally cut away a part of the model, which is time consuming, and loses the 'single up to date file' concept. And either way, it can't cut things that are supposed to be solid, so they look solid (everything is hollow with paper thin faces). So I end up constructing section planes manually (something I really shouldn't have to do).

 

So does anyone have a successful workflow for rendered, 3d cutaway sectional views?

 

Is it worth me trying out Twinmotion, etc?

Edited August 28, 2019 by line-weight

[Hans-Olav]

@line-weight 

Twinmotion is for perspective presentation and animation. You can do sections with good quality in Renderworks. 

Here are two examples and my settings

 

[JRA-Vectorworks-CAD]

@Hans-Olav Lovely work Hans!

[Mark Aceto]

13 hours ago, Amorphous - Julian said:

 

Hey @Mark Aceto after seeing your post, we went to download a Parallels trial, and a Lumion Trial. 
 

All seems well until...

When you install the 'Livesync' plugin for VW, it needs to find a VW 2019 SP3 installation on C:\\Program Files

So we can't install the livesync. 

Without the livesync on Mac version of VW, Lumion on Parallels desktop isn't much help for us Mac VW users. *sad face* 

 

There might be a workaround to that but according to this:

 

https://support.lumion.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003476733-Can-you-install-Lumion-on-a-Mac-

 

"Parallels and WMWare Fusion for OSX are not supported and will cause crashes, glitches and license lock-ups."

 

They have less than zero interest in supporting Mac on any level.

 

Twinmotion for the win!

 

Edited August 29, 2019 by Mark Aceto