topic LightWorks Bug? in Visualization

LightWorks Bug?

matthewjj — Thu, 11 May 2023 10:20:21 GMT

Is anyone having trouble with photorenderings in AC12 with LightWorks engine?

We had a strange case come up in our office yesterday. Sky Object and Sun Object were placed and set to their default settings. No Marquee was being used. The building was pretty small and not terribly high in detail. Photorendering settings were set to Best, 72 dpi, 1080 x 640 and all internal light sources were off; sun, camera, ambient. Lamps were set to use lamp light settings. The machine was a dual 2.6 Core 2 xeon, mac pro with 2 gb ram.

After thinking for about 3 minutes Archicad would open an alert window with an 'Insufficient Memory' message. We turned all the settings down to the lowest possible settings and turned off all other apps but the same message would come up each time before a single line would render.

Strangly, the lightworks rendering engine worked fine after we deleted the sky object and sun object from the file.

Any ideas?

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:37:09 GMT

The sun object is long obsolete since the realistic sun came along. It is easy to drive the sun and sky object into a ditch with over-resolved shadows and lots of tiny things in the rendering.

Time to get a book about this.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

matthewjj — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:35:50 GMT

In our office copy of your book "Lightworks in Archicad" it details the need for up to even 2 suns. When did this become un-necessary? Has there been an update to your book?

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:39:51 GMT

did you register your purchase as instructed on page 3?

We also DID publish an update on Archicad TALK because it was significant for all users and notatall touted by GS.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

matthewjj — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:54:04 GMT

I'm not sure if our Librarian registered it or not. Is there any way we could get a link to the update or emailed a PDF? We tend to use C4D and VRay here at the office for 'real' renderings but often we architects like being able to make quick renderings on our own using the lightworks engine. At any rate, this is great news if we no longer have to mess around with placing sun objects and sky objects to get a decent rendering. I never felt like lightworks had been properly integrated into archicad because of that.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

ares997 — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:03:19 GMT

I noticed in our office that one of our users was having difficulty with the sketch render option, it would process. It almost seems in there is a legacy issue with older files and the rendering engines.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

matthewjj — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:21:56 GMT

BTW Dwight, I thought you would like to know your book 'LightWorks in Archicad' is on my Recommended Reads for the course I teach at ASU. It is definitely not for the weak at heart but I learned a lot from it. Thank you for your work.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:45:17 GMT

Try Here

Re: LightWorks Bug?

matthewjj — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:39:44 GMT

I WOULD LIKE TO NOMINATE DWIGHT AS COOLEST ARCHICAD GURU OF THE YEAR!!! What a killer update to your book! And thanks GS for making these changes to the LightWorks integration (I'm sure Dwight or his great book had something to do with it).

You made my day Dwight. Thanks!

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:27:53 GMT

I wish.
While Graphisoft has implemented only a fraction of the LightWorks rendering features licensed from LightWorks Design, progress is not due to my whining.

They don't really care about rendering. Judging from book sales and attendance at my seminars, only a tiny fraction of Archicad users render with Archicad. Or at all. And for good reason. The rendering engine is like a fish: the crappie.

In part, it is about billing: if you have the moxie to assemble buildings, you aren't inclined to pay attention to the infuriatingly slow assembling of plants and other entourage into a believable scene. Then light it and tweak materials. Until it is right.

For instance, in assembling material for my Artlantis book, I've "gone downtown" to do some rendering [and see my baby] and it is infuriating! For instance, I'm trying to do light green spandrel glass with that white rubbery back-coating - the green is so pale and the glass is so shiny it either exposes as glary white or too green. Ten tries later, after adjusting the material and the lighting it still isn't right. Photoshop to the rescue since there's a deadline after all.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:42:01 GMT

Dwight,

I agree with you that it does come down to $$. If we (as a Design Team) need to have a drop dead, high quality rendering.. we source this out. Sometimes we go traditional (real artist, water color). Sometimes 3D photorealistic.

We use the 3D in ArchiCAD to facilitate design and relate the "massing" to the clients. If we need to go another level, Artlantis Studio (or some variant). The 3D shadowing ability in elevations and axo's is great for our construction documents and for us, that is more important than producing renderings which we are rarely paid for (these usually happen early in the project anyway).

+pablo

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Anonymous — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:55:34 GMT

Dwight,

I noticed that in your latest update to your book you are using different colours for the Sunlight and Ambient in the Sun Settings. You previously suggested a light yellow and light blue respectively for these settings however in your internal scene with pool, stair, etc you have used white for sunlight and green for Ambient.

Is this a polar shift in thinking or are you adjusting for each scene and for each location, such as in this scene?

Thanks in advance and thanks for the updates to your book. I find your info easy and humorous to follow and you are a master tweaker of materials!

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:39:07 GMT

There seems to be some confusion.

Neither of my updates address changing sun and ambient colors from the original suggestions.

And i would NEVER use Pocatello as a location. It being the seat of Bannock County, and all. Not that, being back in the woods like that, they wouldn't have very white sun.

Yes, you would adjust color for each scene depending on the context - particularly the background photo.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

R Muller — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:51:24 GMT

Is the "undersun" (the sun object from -90º to lighten soffits) now obsolete with AC12?

I have a project I migrated from AC11, and all of a sudden I have this glaring light all over the tops of everything in my LightWorks interior renderings. I finally turned off the "undersun" and the glare went away. Obviously, it was being rendered at +90º, rather than -90º.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:03:28 GMT

You still need an undersun, since it still addresses the persistent "black soffit disease".

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Rob — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:23:40 GMT

Dwight, since you are the lightworks man I have a question.
We are constantly getting the Insufficient Memory message thingy under AC12.
Yes, the model is large,
yes, we are using crappy WindowsXP 32-bit that can use max of 3GB
No, we do not use sun/sky objects

The image size is 4096x4096@72DPI which is not an extreme in my opinion and LW quality settings are not even pumped up to the max...

Is it just bad luck that Win can't use more memory or are we missing something important here?

Thanks.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Dwight — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:35:53 GMT

Yo - Snorkel Boy:

4Kx4K is extremely large for a Lightworks rendering.

The international convention for a LightWorks in Archicad rendering that size is "Ginormous."

AppleMac can't help you here since it is Archicad having the RAM limit.

You simply have too many polygons in your model.

If not using sun objects, then perhaps you are using the RAM gobbler Realistic [sic] Sun??

Call me Otter Boy - fins but no snorkel.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Djordje — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:27:07 GMT

Rob wrote:
Dwight, since you are the lightworks man I have a question.
We are constantly getting the Insufficient Memory message thingy under AC12.
Yes, the model is large,
yes, we are using crappy WindowsXP 32-bit that can use max of 3GB
No, we do not use sun/sky objects

The image size is 4096x4096@72DPI which is not an extreme in my opinion and LW quality settings are not even pumped up to the max...

Is it just bad luck that Win can't use more memory or are we missing something important here?

Thanks.

You are missing Artlantis.

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Thomas Holm — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:59:53 GMT

Djordje wrote:
You are missing Artlantis.

Let's all chime in: artlantis, Artlantis, ARTLANTIS!

Re: LightWorks Bug?

Thomas Holm — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:45:26 GMT

Just to add to the balance:

Abvent has a track record of excellent applications, but they can be quite excentric in their GUI, their documentation may be incomplete or nonexistent, sometimes long-standing bugs take forever to get fixed, their user support has been lousy and upgrades tend to cost more than you expected. I've used their apps since 1985, starting with MacSpace (may it R.I.P).

Still, as I said, their apps are sometimes excellent. Artlantis 2 is one of those.