LightWorks Bug?

[matthewjj]

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?

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

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!

[Dwight]

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.

[R Muller]

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.

[Dwight]

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

[Rob]

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.

[Dwight]

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.

[Djordje]

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.

[Thomas Holm]

Djordje wrote:
You are missing Artlantis.

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

[Thomas Holm]

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.