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Rendering directly on the design layer


scottmoore

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What is it going to take to fix the RenderWorks issue of rendering on the design layer?!?!  There is no reasonable workaround for this that doesn’t become extremely time inhibitive. We should be able to model something, add a texture, add some lighting and immediately render to see if we like the look of the modeling, the texture, the reflectivity, the lighting. The fact that we constantly have textures return blank, or changes not represented is ridiculous. Render bitmap tool?  No thanks. Sheet layer viewports? That is for final output, not in-process renders. This never used to be an issue. Seemed to show up in perhaps ‘17 or ‘18?  This needs to be fixed.  So bloody frustrating! 
 

(please don’t tell me that “rendering on the design layer is not a good practice”. That is, frankly, preposterous.)

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11 hours ago, CipesDesign said:

FWIW I use Open GL with Textures and Shadows for this type of quick look rendering. Works fine - no complaints. 

I do that as well, however, It’s not really possible to check detailed lighting, reflections, bump shaders, that sort of thing in OpenGL which is the primary issue. 

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On 10/31/2020 at 6:16 AM, scottmoore said:

we constantly have textures return blank, or changes not represented


Hi @scottmoore

 

It is noteworthy that this behaviour affects some users and not others, so it is possible conditions specific to your file/s, installation or computer could be responsible or at least a factor. Responding to my comment in this similar thread about this might help progress 

 

While not a timely solution, things are looking up for rendering performance in the Design Layer: As mentioned by Vectorworks CEO in the Europe Q&A session held during the recent Vectorworks Design Day, RedShift (a 'real time' renderer like Lumion, TwinMotion, Enscape etc) will be built into Vectorworks 2022. 

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I agree with scottmoore. But - Rendering now works better in a view port than directly on the design layer. It's nice that the view port remembers all your image settings. You can save multiple viewports with different settings.

Note - I have not seen any differences in rendering design layer vs view port.  Also I have not had any textures disappear and all my design files include custom textures some dating back several versions of Vectorworks. We have had to relearn old habits.

 

PS. I would love a 'real time' render the image previews eat up a lot of time when making custom image maps.

Edited by rjtiedeman
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16 hours ago, bcd said:

For now - a Floating Multi Pane View of a low res Sheet Layer Viewport off to the side is probably your best bet.

Allowing you to work in OGL in the Design Layer unencumbered.

True, but it is far more time consuming than simply rendering on the design layer. I’ll give that a shot. 

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Perhaps to clarify why I think this is important:

 

if I am developing a new texture (that may include reflectivity, bump shaders, transparencies, or luminosity, NONE of which can be seen in OpenGL) I want to look at that texture in use immediately so I can make changes as needed. Often it requires several passes to get a texture the way I want it.  To do so, I center up the item on my monitor and use a keyboard shortcut to render. The rendering starts from the center out. Often times it only takes a few seconds to see what I need to see and then I just go back to wireframe and adjust as needed. Likewise, the same process is used for investigating lighting, gobo textures, shutter cuts and any number of items that require a quick reference so as not to have to waste time later. This should be easily accomplished directly on the design layer. 
 

I have generally found that design layer renders (which I believe are 72dpi) look pretty great. Sheet layer viewports of similar quality typically require 150dpi or higher to look comparable and take longer because of it. I don’t really understand why that is. 
 

For what it is worth, I used to do all my output rendering from screenshots of the design layer before I figured out sheet layers. There was never a problem until fairly recently. 

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7 hours ago, scottmoore said:

I have generally found that design layer renders (which I believe are 72dpi) look pretty great. Sheet layer viewports of similar quality typically require 150dpi or higher to look comparable and take longer because of it. I don’t really understand why that is. 

 

Rendering while in design layers is to whatever the resolution of your monitor is.  So  every pixel in the render corresponds to a pixel on the screen (ie: optimized for screen display).  Most monitors back in the 90s had a resolution of 72 DPI and that number seems to stick in our minds (if you've been around as long as I have 😉 ) but they've gotten much higher since.  A 15" Macbook Pro with retina is about 220 DPI.  So you would have to set your sheet layer DPI to 220 and zoom to 100% to get close to the same quality.

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Matt, thank you for that insight. That might then get us back to the RW camera dpi setting vs the sheet layer dpi setting vs the rendered output dpi setting conversation. 🙂  It still baffles me a bit but I just stick with the sheet layer dpi. 
 

Regardless, being able to accurately render on the design layer should be a standard part of the design process. Anything else, including render bitmaps (terrible) is a massive distraction from the process itself. 

 

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1 hour ago, Matt Panzer said:

@scottmoore,

 

Do you have a file (and steps) that can reproduce these issues?

This tends to come up randomly in most of my drawings on both my laptop and desktop. Next time I find one that has a consistent issue I’ll forward it on.
 

For me, it’s just that textures disappear when using RenderWorks. On my design process I keep both custom RW and Final Quality RW (I know....) on hot keys to quickly render and see what textures or geometry appear. It seems that once a texture disappears (and I believe it is always an image texture) that it then continually has an issue. I’ve investigated the file sizes of the images in question and that does not seem to be it. 

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35 minutes ago, scottmoore said:

This tends to come up randomly in most of my drawings on both my laptop and desktop. Next time I find one that has a consistent issue I’ll forward it on.
 

For me, it’s just that textures disappear when using RenderWorks. On my design process I keep both custom RW and Final Quality RW (I know....) on hot keys to quickly render and see what textures or geometry appear. It seems that once a texture disappears (and I believe it is always an image texture) that it then continually has an issue. I’ve investigated the file sizes of the images in question and that does not seem to be it. 

 

Thanks for the info!

Please do let us know if you get a good reproducible case.

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