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I've been using C4D & Arnold to generate interior renders with reasonable success and I thought I'd try exteriors. To get things like the roof and wall displacement mapping to work in Arnold the surfaces need to be sub-divided and this is where things go wrong for me!

 

The export from VW generates a small number of large triangles and quads so when I subdivide I get some weird shapes forming! Is there anything I can do with the export to improve this? (I did try C4Ds untriangulate but that didnt do anything)

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I normally use the dissolve or melt option to try and get a single polygon - but its generally a mess of triangles by vectorworks, anything curved or circular is worse!

 

I gave up on arnold because it was too complicated for my needs,   How do you find it? Do you have any images you could post?

 

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Thanks @fabrica  / @EAlexander ... I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out the right command to use!

 

18 hours ago, EAlexander said:

Same. I melt the triangles together and then manually slice the geo to the level of subdivision I need for the task at hand. You have no control over the VW export. 

 

I used the polygon pen to slice up the newly single polygon - is that the best way?

 

18 hours ago, fabrica said:

I normally use the dissolve or melt option to try and get a single polygon - but its generally a mess of triangles by vectorworks, anything curved or circular is worse!

 

I gave up on arnold because it was too complicated for my needs,   How do you find it? Do you have any images you could post?

 

 

I've only been trialling C4D & Arnold for a week or so as I was never happy with my interior renders in VW, and have actually found it easier to get the results I'm looking for. I export from VW and replace the materials with Arnold ones, add a bit of scene dressing and then play with the lighting. Here are a couple of images from my first "real" scene.

 

Living.thumb.jpg.9641dc6fcde07f39d26783dfe1dcb643.jpgDining.thumb.jpg.4e317b6d184ca9cd198b62815892c637.jpg

 

I appreciate your're not using Arnold but do you have any general tips on VW > C4D workflow, particularly for exteriors? (Especially for the things likely to trip me up like melting the polygons!)

 

 

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Not 100% sure but I think C4D Export uses the polygon resolution from

the settings in your Render Style that you apply in export dialog.

 

 

There have been situations where I had to export 2 parts of files just for resolution.

A more coarse version for less important things like furniture (chair legs) and

a more fine version to make larger arched geometry like rounded Wall look round.

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I don't think you will find a solution easily.  Vectorworks is a solid modelling program, and C4D (and other programs of it's nature) are polygonal modellers.  This means that while you enjoy the "solidness" of extrusions in VW (you can cut a hole in an object and it will form a skin around the hole) it has no idea how to divide up an object into a mesh of polygons.  So the triangulation is what you get when it does the conversion.  

 

You could try adding in the displacement in VW and see if it exports the displacement when you send to C4D, but I doubt it has the level of control you are looking for.  

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

The displacement control in C4D is just a recursion level based off of whatever triangle size is given initially.  I wish the control was more about "subdivide to this size no matter the input triangle size".  For displacement that would help.  Instead of displacement the newer parallax mapping is helpful and doesn't have any downsides at all, if you are OK with the silhouette not looking displaced (which might be the case).

 

VW subdivides a bit higher when a displacement texture is applied, for this reason (otherwise there wouldn't be enough detail for the recursion method)

 

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