Alternatives to D5 Render - Poor Customer Service
-
I'm biased, but Rayscaper? Curious to hear from an experienced user what the gaps are to get people like you hooked.
IIRC, you were also experimenting with AI rendering. What are the gaps there for not making it a complete replacement for D5 render?
-
Blender is a big learning curve which of course would include modeling. I do use it with D5 Render with Blenderkit assets.
It's a different topic or issue but the future of Sketchup at this time is starting to become unknown. Especially with Trimble running the show. It's really an easy and fast 3D modeling software for architecture. I have thought about if and when the time come to start using Rhino.
I like the similarities between D5 and Twinmotion. Or at least what I've seen. I'm trying really hard to cope with these ever increasing crashes with D5. I know the people at their forum are nice and trying the best they can but it seems like they don't have a dedicated customer support system in place.
AI is fun and work to create some quick renders to garner the interest of clients. It's kind of boring though and a lot of text input. Then it comes up with something completely random.
Frankly, I wish I planned better and didn't have to do anything and be firmly in retirement living in Vietnam or Sweden.
Oh, and while I was typing this I had D5 Render open and it crashed all on its own.
-
How I really feel...
-
I believe I know how you feel. Personally speaking, I find change these days difficult to cope with.
One of the reasons I struggle post Twilight render. I reckon age has a lot to do with this, being just the right side of 70.
However, thoughts of inadequacy etc must be resisted much like the negative impacts the average day produces. Giving up is never an answer and never will be, your renders and words of encouragement are something I am not letting go of regardless, keep on keeping on and carpe diem. It makes something and as long as that is not yeast extract and garlic flavoured custard, we are doing OK.
Sod tomorrow, TODAY is a new day, grab it firmly. -
Almost a month since I brought these crashes up to D5 support and still no answers. There's an obvious memory leak with this program. People should not have to adjust or degrade their operating system to run D5. It's the other way around. D5 Render should operate without users having to adjust any part of their OS, CPU, GPU or BIOS setting to use their software. It's not 1992.
-
I narrowed it out to Turbo Mode being enabled in my BIOS. Apparently anything over the rating on my CPU will crash D5. It's the only program that's causing this. This actually happened about 3 years ago. I had to figure this all out myself. D5 should be designed to run without making these kinds of adjustments. Like all software.
-
To be fair with the sheer amount of different systems and hardware out there it must be a nightmare keeping things compatible on PC.
That said getting vital info like you discovered I would consider to be valuable for D5 to trap for.
But if you are a rare outlier with some bespoke system it may not be worth the effort to firefight.
At least you found a solution.
-
Have you considered Rayscaper?
-
Rich, there's a long thread of crash reports at the D5 community page. One person thanked me for bringing up the Turbo Mode bug. I just tested it with Turbo Mode on and MCE set to disabled but with temp limits. It D5 didn't crash and it took 10 minutes longer to render 6 scenes. Go figure. I didn't repeat the test. I could I suppose. Three years ago D5 had the same Turbo Mode crash bug too.
Mike. Not sure yet about changing over. I've gotten so used to this D5 workflow. For now.
-
I get that, used to Twilight and Maxwell, before that other renders including some beta items.
Rayscaper is about in the middle for ease of use but more towards Twilight, it is MUCH faster than Maxwell and you have a very practiced user right here, not me, to give a hint or ten.
Worth a try imho. -
@Mike-Amos Mike, yep. I am curious about Rayscraper. I've seen some really great results.
Sometimes I think about getting Thea alongside D5. It's more work for creating a render. There are times when I think D5 is a little cartoonish. It has a lot of positives. Perhaps when I was starting out using D5.
I used Twilight on a few projects at first right after using Kerkythea for a while. That was my main first rendering engine. I think there was this other Metropolis Light Transport plugin for Sketchup to experiment with.
I neglected learning rendering even though I putzed around a lot with Kerkythea. It was with Thea render when I really started to sink my teeth into rendering.
Advertisement