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?

[Dwight]

do one with the undersun ONLY.

BTW: all that graininess is because your realistic sun is under-resolved.

[R Muller]

I turned off "sun" and "ambient" in the photorendering settings, leaving on only "lamps". All the lamps are off, except for the undersun.

All that graininess is because I am doing fast renderings to check the lighting with antialiasing = OFF, so my textures come out grainy.

[Dwight]

You'll get even faster preliminary renderings using the SUN SUN instead of the realistic sun.

[R Muller]

Won't switching to the SUN SUN from realistic sun alter the lighting quality enough so that I won't get a good indication of the effect of changing other lamp settings?

A possible workaround to not being able to use the "undersun" is to set up special soffit materials with emission qualities. This can work on my exteriors, but I don't think it will work on the interior vaulted ceilings, where I need to add general lights or some such thing.

Here is another issue: I am trying to show the transparency of a curtain wall in a historic building, but the window lights I placed behind the curtain wall don't shine through it, so there is no continuity of light on the ceiling through the glass.

I nominate the enclosed image for the "worst rendering ever done" award. I had not figured out I had to turn off the "undersun", so it is on, and the ceiling is black. I was also having problems with running out of memory, so I set the window lights to low quality.