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]

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.

[matthewjj]

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?

[Dwight]

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.

[matthewjj]

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.

[ares997]

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.

[matthewjj]

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.

[Dwight]

Try Here

[matthewjj]

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!

[Dwight]

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.