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About gym1339

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  1. Dave, Propstuff, I have spent the last several days trying to come up with a system for test rendering lighting rigs in Vectorworks. I was intrigued by Dave's comment that he could usually generate a decent quality solution in 10 minutes and the whole render in 1/2 hour by adjusting the radiosity settings and mainly by controlling which objects participate. Maybe you could elaborate on this, are you turning off classes of objects not in the render view? What are some of the values of the sliders and switches you are setting to save hours of solution time? My experimentation has led me to a few other questions maybe someone can help me with: How do you get white walls? What texture did you use Propstuff in your renderings? My walls always look grey at best. The black artifacts produced by the junctions of surfaces; can someone explain what is happening? I have created molding in the room from an extrude along path, and there are distracting black smudges along the trim. The objects I created to hang on the walls also produce the black artifacts. Is there a good method of ?attaching? objects to walls to avoid this? Does a point light have a beam spread? I used a few to fill in some dark areas of my rendering. Do these lights merely occupy a point in space and have the same diameter of illumination? Is there a way to widen the coverage of these lights? With directional lights, do they only affect the exterior of a building? In other words, the directional light seems to affect the interior of a room, only through the windows. Any suggestions on how to fill in the darker areas of a rendering? I have read that low- level wide spotlights can be used to achieve this. I haven?t had any luck with this technique. Any ideas? What are some ways to pair natural light through windows with interior electric light to achieve satisfactory radiosity solutions? Thanks for all your help,
  2. Okay, now I come to another issue, how does one best present these renderings? Let's say you've set up your scene, the lighting and radiosity settings, and you let your machine render. An hour and a half latter you create a viewport to save what you got. The candy cane stripe appears, you update the viewport, and it has to re-render! I understand why this has to happen, but its still a drag and I should have planned a little better for this process. Then I went back to my design layer, and another re-render. The sheet layer was set to 72 DPI and the viewport view detail didn?t look that great. I changed the DPI to 300 and re-rendered, which took a long time. So you?ve spent all this time setting up a viable solution, it looks great on screen, what?s the best way to preserve the integrity of the image when you transfer it to another format? What are some good formats to use when showing renderings? I export .jpg ?s and .pdf?s many times so I can easily disseminate information. What do some other people do? Any thoughts would be much appreciated. After all, a lot of time has been spent getting your renderings to a certain level of artistry; don?t you want to present them in the best light? No pun, intended. Thanks,
  3. Dave, Propstuff, Thanks for your insight, really very helpful. I think I'm finally starting to grasp how I can set up some successful lighting rigs in VW. Dave, correct me if I'm wrong: You set all lights to their "real world" brightness values, i.e. the sun at 20000lux. You use auto Exposure set to on, this ensures that all lights will have an absolute brightness value relative to one another. So to change intensities between lights, do you change only their brightness values and not their dimmer values? So if you wanted a light of 1000 lux set to 50%, would you keep the dimmer value at 100% and change the brightness value to 500lux? Propstuff seems like you bring all the brightness values down, to say 1000 lux. You then adjust dimmer values relative to one another. Auto Exposure is set to off, and this allows each light to output without any forced exposure. I assume that by bringing the brightness values down, this gives you more headroom to adjust dimmer values to over 100%? We have been discussing radiosity, when do you guys use custom renderworks options for a rendering, if ever? I have taken your suggestions Propstuff by turning off some custom radiosty settings. Anything else I can do to speed up the test render process? Thanks both of you for sharing some of your approaches to lighting. Dave I'll send you the file as soon as it finishes rendering!
  4. Nicholas, Thanks for your insight that "there are no easy answers to setting up lighting." I'm not looking for any. I am merely trying to understand how different lights react with different settings in different rendering modes. I'd like to approach my renderings with a more systematic approach then merely cranking up dimmer values or adding more lights. In fact, I wasn't aware that the auto-adjust exposure was on by default in final radiosity mode. According to the documentation, with auto-adjust on, the overall brightness will never exceed a certain level. Therefore, could your approach to changing the existing levels to 200%-1000% be counter productive if the overall brightness of a scene will never surpass a certain level? I don't know, maybe you have some insight. Obviously Dave has a firm grasp on rendering techniques, and if he says my dimmer values should be at 100% and my renderings are over exposed, I want to know why. Not to say, this is the only, "easy" way of setting up a lighting rig. It is merely an approach that I can learn from and use what works for me, and at the very least, understand the program better. So if you have any tried and true suggestions, I'm all ears. Thanks,
  5. I have unchecked the "Auto-adjust exposure" box in custom radiosity settings. I have turned off the ambient layer light and have set the dimmers to 100%. Now when I render, my scene is over exposed (very very over exposed). I made the area lights a pale blue color. Any other settings I am overlooking? Also, my ceiling has a grid texture and does not render in radiosity modes, but does render in final quality render mode, why? Thanks again,
  6. Thanks Dave, Maybe you could explain some terminology: Auto exposure, what is it and how can I use, or not use it? How does VW define "Lux" vs "Lumens" in the brightness unit box? My area lights are set to dimmer 75% dist fall:sharp and render geometry:off show direction:on. Are these good to start with? What do you use with your light blue setting? The directional light, how do you use it. I noticed if you are using a pale yellow, is this to represent ambient "electric light" because of its warmer color? As opposed to sunlight with its cooler color? What are some of its settings? All of my emitter white balance settings are set to 5500K. How does this relate to lighting fixtures if I go in an manually change a light to a differnet color temp. Do the layer and viewport settings influence this? I will probably send you the file, but I want to tweak as much as I can to understand what I'm doing. Thanks so much,
  7. I have been working on a "simple" design project for a schoolroom with four exterior windows and some fluorescent fixtures. The client has designed some graphics to adorn the drab walls and "bring the creative energies of the room to life." Okay, so she is very particular about the color of these objects. I have spent hours manipulating these textures in Photoshop and have mapped them to the objects that will hang on the walls. My initial renderings were done in Final Quality Rendering mode with the default lighting. She was "okay" with these results, but she wanted a more impressive presentation. So I added some directional lights, spotlights, and ambient light to render a portion of the scene. It looked pretty fantastic, but I only rendered a small portion of the room. Is it common practice to create an extensive lighting rig filled with lights to render a scene in Final Quality Render works? I have already used to 12 lights to render about 1/8 of the room. The file size is also huge, I must be doing something wrong. So I went to a different solution. I used Final Radiosity and created four area lights to simulate the sun entering the four windows. I added a directional light for the sun itself and rendered away. The softness of the light looks fantastic, but the color has shifted dramatically on the objects. This just won't do. Any ideas as to why the objects' color of red would turn to a fluorescent orange? I tried moving the area lights, changing the lighting layers ambient values and even tried to alter the texture to a matte finish and tweaked the ambient and diffuse settings. I set the area lights to 20,000 Lux and a color temp of 5500K. I have placed these just inside and just outside the windows with different results, what is convention? Any thoughts on Rendering modes, lighting techniques, radiosity settings, texture setiings, etc. would be greatly appreciated. So much for a ?simple? project. Thanks in advance,
  8. I thought of this and turned "docking palettes off" but it still confines my file to the VW workspace window. I was just able to do what Alan described, but this is different than working on the Mac. By dragging the workspace window across two monitors, this allows you to open two files and resize each, manually, to fit on the screens. This is certainly better than nothing, but not really ideal. I like the way on the Mac you can have two discret file windows open and maximize each for each screen. Of course you still only have the workspace on 1 monitor, but with key shortcuts, this really doesn't matter.
  9. Gideon, Alan, and friends, I have my graphics card configured exactly like you said: dualview, not cloned. I tried "unmaximizing" my VW window and even the files' individual windows, I did all this from the beginning, even before the post! It is as if I cannot tear the file window away from the workspace window. The file window is confined to the VW workspace window and I cannot drag it outside of this area. I can drag tool palletes indipendent of the main window, but not individual file windows. I can drag VW to either monitor, but like I said, I cannot drag the individual file window form the worksapce window. I have an Nvidia Geforce 7950 GX2 Graphics card running 1 Apple Cinema display and 1 Apple Cinema HD monitor. I have been through the Nvida control panel and my dispaly panel in windows, I have looked in my VW preferences for some way of enabling the file window to drag outside the main workspace window, but it just won't work. Thanks for all your help,
  10. So at the end of the day, I am SOL when it comes to using VW on my PC and displaying two files on two monitors? I haven't been able to open two instances of VW on my PC. What a drag....
  11. I'm on a PC for this project. I have been able to drag files from a Mac laptop onto an external screen no problem, having two files open on each of the screens. I guess there is a difference between how the Mac and PC version of VW handles this? Please explain. Thanks for your help.
  12. I'm working on two versions of a file, and I would like to have one open on each of my two monitors. When I try to drag one version of the file over to the other monitor, I can't. The file is constrained to the VW workspace. Anyway around this?
  13. Is there anyway to "turn off" the way VW displays fillets and rounded objects? For exapmle, I have created a multiple extrude with a 1" base and a 2" top. In Front view, VW displays this with the outline of the object, and a series of lines in the midddle of the fill. I would just like to see the outline of the object in my front elevation, hidden line view. Can I do this? Also, I don't always want to see the outline of inner fillet edge on objects, anyway to "turn this off?" Thanks in advance,
  14. Thanks to all who responded to my inquires about rendering plasmas and screens. Having said that, although an all in one plug-in would solve all my problems and make life easier, not one question of mine was answered. I am trying to use Vectorworks to its full potential, and have found the manuals a bit lacking. Is this why there are so many extra support CD's, tutorials and the like, all at an extra cost? I know that programs take years to master, but at the end of the day is it about how many additional plug-ins one has? I thought that Vectorworks/wRenderworks was a complete solution to 2D working drawings with the added funtionality of a complete rendering package. If this is the case, then why are there so many discussions about starting in Vectorworks and ending in another rendering suite? As more and more of my clients expect 3D "lifelike" renderings as part of the sales pitch of the design, what is a reasonable workflow in Vectorworks? Start there and export to Maya, Solidworks, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4d, or whatever else you have the time and money to learn? Don't mean to sound agrovated, only looking for solutions to working in Vectorworks and knowing what its limits are. Still, if you have time to answer any of my querries about plasma and video screens, open GL, lighitng sources, and the like, thanks!
  15. Well this Pug-In certainly sounds like an easy fix to all my questions, and I will probably end up purchasing it. Having said that, I am still intererested in having some or all of my aforementioned questions answered. My designs have always been 2D with the occasional section or iso wireframe. Recently I have been working in 3D and trying to understand how Vectorworks treats the 3D environment. Although the last two days have been frustrating, mapping textures to my screens, it has been invaluable to my understanding of Vectorworks. So if anyone has any comments on my questions, it would be much appreciated. Thanks C. Andrew Dunning, I'm sure I'll be in touch.....





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