VW Cloud Publish Not rendering lighting

[Matthew Byrne]

Hi VW Brain....

 

I am having an issue with Cloud publishing.

 

I have a simple drawing that has about 6 lights (Plug-in ETC and ARRI fixtures). Tried publishing a single sheet render to the cloud and the final product comes back too dark with no lighting.

Tried rendering on my local machine (iMac 2019 VW 2020) with the exact same settings etc, and everything was fine.

Same occurred when I tried to export (via Cloud) an orbital animation of the same scene.

 

The PDF attached is the Cloud version of the export and the Jpg is what I was able to do wiht the local machine.

 

I might be missing something obvious, but the cloud version is not working.

 

Anyone encountered this before?

 

Concept TLMOP format.pdf

[inikolova]

Hi @Matthew Byrne,

 

Upon opening the file in Vectorworks, does a full lit scene render as expected? We have a currently unresolved bug about Vectorworks that the lights will not render unless all of them are turned off, then on again, in the Visualization palette on a Design Layer (doing so on the Viewport itself has no effect). When processing on the cloud, since no manual turning on/off of lights is performed, this results in no lights being rendered.

 

Please let me know if you believe this is not what is happening in your case and we can work together to investigate the issue further.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova

[Matthew Byrne]

Good Morning Iskra,

I am currently testing this. I have manually turned off all lighting on the design layer, turned back on, saved and re-submitted to cloud publish. I have also posted the end result here for reference. It did not render the lighting.

 

I am having an additional issue with another cloud process.

 

I have a 8 Sheet cloud publish from another file that is running "Successfully", (processed on Cloud and Stored in Dropbox). When it is completed, it exports the TXT file listing all exports as successful, however, none of the PDF files appear in the Dropbox folder.

I have attached the TXT file for reference.

 

Again, there is no issue when publishing on my local machine, aside form clogging mu machine for processing....

 

Publish Log.txt Concept TLMOP format.pdf

[Matthew Byrne]

I Also tried running it through a Panoramic Export. It seems to be eliminating any Plug in objects as the 2 Video Camera Objects that were in front of the TV's seem to ahve not rendered as well.

 

Link to Panoramic:

https://cloud.vectorworks.net/links/11eac2f3be2f9ee4952e12e40e768bf3/

 

[inikolova]

Hi @Matthew Byrne,

 

I may need to get your file in order to investigate the Panorama issue. It sounds like something I may not be able to easily replicate with my test files. If you are willing to share your file with me at inikolova@vectorworks.net, that would help me a lot with the investigation of the issue. 

 

Regarding the Publish issue, I will test with my test files to see if I can reproduce. I will do this tomorrow

 

Regarding the rendering without lights, we have a fix that we will release with the next planned deployment, in about 2 weeks or so.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova

 

[inikolova]

On 7/11/2020 at 9:07 AM, Matthew Byrne said:

I have a 8 Sheet cloud publish from another file that is running "Successfully", (processed on Cloud and Stored in Dropbox). When it is completed, it exports the TXT file listing all exports as successful, however, none of the PDF files appear in the Dropbox folder.

I have attached the TXT file for reference.

 @Matthew Byrne, 

I found out that there is an issue with the Publish job when the option to Export PDF as separate files is turned on.

This issue will also be fixed with our next planned deployment. In the meantime, you can try turning off this option in order to get the results in your Dropbox folder. If you necessarily need a separate file for each sheet, you can submit an individual job for each of your sheets. I know this can be a bit tedious, but I hope you won't have to use this for a long time.

 

I am continuing to investigate the remaining issues that you reported and will let you know my findings as they become available.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova

[Matthew Byrne]

Hi Iskla,

This did solve the issue where the PDF files now show up in the dropbox folder, however, the issue where plugs in objects (lights) do not show up is persisting.

 

There is one view that shows a few light objects on the upstage for the player stage in the attached PDF. It seems that those are displaying within the final render, but plug in objects (par cans) are not rendering.

 

 

RM12to15 BASE.pdf

[inikolova]

On 7/11/2020 at 9:10 AM, Matthew Byrne said:

I Also tried running it through a Panoramic Export. It seems to be eliminating any Plug in objects as the 2 Video Camera Objects that were in front of the TV's seem to ahve not rendered as well.

I narrowed it down to being an issue with Vectorworks, so I submitted an issue to our rendering team and they are currently looking into it.

 

We have a fix for the lights in the upcoming version. I will let you know when it gets released. I am not familiar in depth as to which lights the issue was related to, but my guess is that not all types of light objects were affected. There is no workaround for this at the moment, but we are doing our best to release the fixes as soon as possible. I apologize for the inconvenience.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova

 

 

[inikolova]

@Matthew Byrne,

 

We are currently in a process of updating our production cloud servers to contain the fix about the Export PDFs as separate files setting and other rendering fixes, including the one with the lights not being rendered. If you try tomorrow, I would expect things to work much better for you, The issue with the camera object not being included in the rendered panorama will be released in September, along with the Vectorworks 2021 release.

 

Please let me know if there is anything else that I can help you with. And thank you for using Vectorworks Cloud Services.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova

 

[Sebastian Vidales]

En 16/7/2020 a las 15:30, inikolova dijo:

@Matthew Byrne,

 

We are currently in a process of updating our production cloud servers to contain the fix about the Export PDFs as separate files setting and other rendering fixes, including the one with the lights not being rendered. If you try tomorrow, I would expect things to work much better for you, The issue with the camera object not being included in the rendered panorama will be released in September, along with the Vectorworks 2021 release.

 

Please let me know if there is anything else that I can help you with. And thank you for using Vectorworks Cloud Services.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova

 

 I ran into the same issue, when trying to render through cloud publishing using VW cloud services option, none of the lights rendered.  While troubleshooting I tried cloud publishing a single sheet layer  through Dropbox Integration, and it worked! Only in a couple of minutes I had my PDF with lights rendered.  Then I tried for a second time, and the status circle appeared to be complete but the syncing to dropbox took more than 8 hours.  Im currently trying it again and same issue happens, the cloud services app shoes the complete circle on the status column and the on the bottom left corner it shows the  syncing  is in process.

 

Edited July 22, 2020 by SebasVidales

[Sebastian Vidales]

And it keeps on going.....

 

[inikolova]

Hi @SebasVidales,

I tested the light issue again today and it seems to be working for me when I have the file stored on Vectorworks Cloud Services. My guess is that your job may have been processed by a server that hasn't received the updates yet. I am verifying with our engineer to make sure all servers have been updated with the fix. 

 

Regarding the status update... For Cloud Publish jobs, the progress is based on the number of items being published, not the time that remains for the publishing to be completed. For example, if your publish job contains ten sheets, when the cloud renders the fifth sheet, the status bar will display about halfway done. Since this does not account for the number and complexity of the viewports on each sheet layer, you may see the status slow down as it starts to render a more complex viewport or a sheet layer with many viewports. The name of the item currently being rendered also displays. Since you only have one sheet layer, the progress can be either not yet started, half done while rendering the sheet layer and fully done when the rendering is finished. You would not be able to see detailed progress of the actual rendering, this is expected. I agree with you that it is strange that the progress reported as 100% done while it is still doing the rendering. While rendering a publish, consisting of a single sheet, it would be better to display half way done. I filed a bug report to our engineers. This is an issue only with the progress reporting, not with the actual server processing.

 

Regarding your job that has run for 7 hours, it sounds possible, depending on your render and DPI settings. If you don't mind sharing your file with me at inikolova@vectorworks.net, I can investigate this in more depth.

 

Best regards,

Iskra Nikolova 

[Guest Ben Atwood]

HI @SebasVidales

 

Looking into your issue, I found that one of our servers was not running the latest code, which I fixed yesterday.  That should include a fix for the issue with lights not rendering.

 

Some of your jobs were processed on this server, but not all of them.  Did this problem show in all your renderings in the past few days, or just some of them?

[Sebastian Vidales]

Hi @Ben Atwood

Thanks for your reply. Actually it happened on just some of them.