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long rendering times


erock5000

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I have been working on a 3D model of an interior space, with only the adjacent exterior walls in the drawing. I'm not sure of the total number of objects offhand that are in the drawing, but the entire file is just over 100MB. The problem I'm having is that when when trying to render within VW (I'm not to the point in the project to do final renderings yet), it's been taking as long as 10-15 minutes to render a simple hidden line rendering, when it actually completes the rendering process. About half the time I get the error message blush.gifne or more operations aborted do to lack of memory". Hardware/software specs are:

VW 9.0.1

Mac G4/450

384 MB RAM (256 allocated to VW)

AGP graphics card/ Open GL

I've just ordered another 512MB RAM card hoping that it will help. Has anyone else experienced this?

Thanks,

Eric Chiarelli

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

One thing you need to remember is that VectorWork's hidden line rendering is not "simple." Unlike an OpenGL or RenderWorks image, it is mathematically precise, computing exact intersections between lines. This allows you to zoom in nigh-infinitely on the hidden line render, but also means that the time it takes to render a scene is "non-linear" with respect to the number of polygons in that scene. In VW 8 and before, it was in fact proportional to the square of the number of objects in the scene. Have 100 polygons? It takes not 10 times as long as doing 10 polygons, but 100 times as long. I added code to pre-sort the polygons in VW9, and this decreased the factor somewhat, but it's still not linear, and can't be.

One recommendation, if you don't need facet lines and have curved objects, is to use the facet line removal option. At present this is only available via VectorScript. Create a VectorScript with the single line:

SetPrefReal(72, RealDialog('Enter new smoothing angle in degrees',Num2Str(1, GetPrefReal(72))));

and you'll get rid of lots of facet lines, which should both improve performance and reduce memory usage.

I've submitted a plug-in menu command with the above line to http://www.vectordepot.com. If you get that plug-in and put it in your plug-ins folder, you can then add the menu command to your render menu and it'll be available whenever you need it.

------------------

Andrew Bell

andrewb@nemetschek.net

I am not an official spokesperson for NNA

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

quote:

Originally posted by erock5000:

Thanks Andrew, I'll give that a shot.


Note that OpenGL has support for hidden-line rendering, although it creates a raster (bitmap) image rather than actually creating lines. So "convert to lines" wouldn't work with it, nor would add-ons like Doodle! that try to give the lines a hand-drawn effect. But it could be useful for visualization. If this would be of interest, post a note to the wishlist board expressing your interest.

------------------

Andrew Bell

andrewb@nemetschek.net

I am not an official spokesperson for NNA

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