[Bryan Richards]

ah haaa!! jackpot! thanks.

[Bryan Richards]

Hi, thanks for the reply Adam,

Ive played with each option in Preferences > DXF Import > , yes it is now importing 2d lines (which are polylines as far as im aware) with a few polygons but again inconsistent with what is being imported. I get, no matter what dxf I drafg into Cinema, a series of dense squiggly lines, some clover shaped, some a series of straight lines on a slight curve and most very random.

Unfortunately EPS is not an option as we do not have Illustrator installed in the office, so any more ideas??

The goal is to get my PDF or DWG into Cinema for me to trace off

Kind Regards
Bryan Richards

[Bryan Richards]

The magnet tool allows you to do this in a various number of interesting ways

Structure > Magnet

For the best rounding equilibrium try the Dome mode however there are a few alternatives to choose from.. Set your strength Radius and Width to suit the scale of object and result and your away. Obviously your text must be in editable mode

Tip.
Real time update will let you see what your current settings are doing.

Bry

[Bryan Richards]

Baking the object is the way to do it.. Its all automatic and is very beneficial for animated AI render speeds. The initial Bake will take ages but dont panic as the renders then fly.. The application of the new material replaces itself and hides the old material. Its not deleted.

The only issues ive not mastered with Bake are materials with transparency like glass. But i cant see how bake would ever work with this.

[Bryan Richards]

couldnt not find the wires tutorial on that site however i have seen a similar one where you can make realistic wires on a circuit board.

Not quite what im after.. im after something to recognise certain thresholds in an image and decide whether to place a connector, component, transformer, etc..i could do it by hand but becasue i want to make 10 or so, an automated version would be very good

[Bryan Richards]

Youve given me some new direction here, appreciated.

Progress report:

volumetric lighting taken out.
composite tags added to the glass and all previous GL options edited on the tag and Banji

differences. Image is looking a tiny bit richer in colour. Only have the top half so far. rendering what was thought to be quicker on the prepass turned out to be a lot slower. 5hrs down the line we are about 45% the way through. Ill let it play and shall post

Even though my handin is tomorrow im determined to perfect this at a later date :0]

cheers Bry

[Bryan Richards]

Best solution i found was
1. use the Graphisoft cutting plane tool.
2. define a new cutting section material
3. Save you current C4d model as not to loose any of your modelling which was not done in Archicad
4. Merge files importing materials only – this will automatically cut away the bit u do not need. Your full model is safe dont forget
5. Define a contrasting cutting plane material in C4d (bright red)
6. Render away.. it gives you a very readable rendered section.

[Bryan Richards]

Some new stuff for me there 🙂
what do compositing tags actually do? and u mention to tag them to anything receiving shadows with higher settings. Not too sure on which settings your refering to there.

Ive noticed a drastic increase in rendering times here. Set this up along with a few other renders to sleep on not realising it was going to be so fast. shall have to stay up now. will post all these slightly different lighting renders for u all to see when im done.

second to this improving performance i changed a glass wall (quick archicad curtain wall construction) to a Cinema Plane. The archicad wall imports 6 separate planes which when materialised to glass creates a lot more internal radiosity calculations. The single plane sorted that!

thanks for the help again. watch this space for the link coming soon

🙂

[Bryan Richards]

its confirmed that the rendering was taking a very long time and it hadnt crashed. 1 pixel line on the preview was well over an hour. this is too long for me.

[Bryan Richards]

i said i was going to post some images to a standard i couldnt improve because im lacking the knowledge of lighting. However ive been rendering all day to find a different problem.

settings

res @ 800×600
anti analising @ geometry
transparency @ with refraction
refection/shadows @ all

radiosity enabled.. strength+accuracy @ 70%
prepass size at 1/4 (currently stuck at about 75% the way through (will refer to this point later))
Diffuse depth @ 3
Stoch samples @ 200
res 3-70
solution saved
and ideentical noise dist @ true

the rest are set to true, if not mentioned they are flase or value left at default

Auto light
Textures
Cancel if text error
blurry effects
Volumetric lighting

Here is something which is too dark http://www.365.cx/bryan (if its not there then try again in a sec.. currently putting it on) . I want to know how to light up the inside but create a very bright out side area as if the Sun was very intense pushing streaks of light through onto the tiles, and lighting the inside up to a manageable realistic level.

This image I used the above settings with only one spot light @200% brightness shining down at approx 45 degree and guessed with the volumetric part of the spot light creating a convex volumetric cone (design view) which finished in the middle of the corridor which u can see,,,,, not sure what this does exactly, not sure if the whole room should be inside the spot light volume, or not?
Right, the next thing I have done to try and improve the situation was to shine another spot light @ 100% brightness from behind the camera and down the camera (horizontal plane) as to brighten up the inside.

This has killed the rendering times!
Im not sure if the render has stopped (maybe ran out of memory and exponentially slowing) or if it really is taking over two hours to draw 1 line of pixels. (my render is at 75% of its prepass and does not seam to want to continue. Do I wait, or has it died? It seams the extra light has created big problems

Comp spec

AMD XP64 +3800
1Gig Duel channel Ram
ATI XT850XTPE (think its T, could be X something else)
ATI chipset MB
that