It's everyone's dream of a garden, wild, full of flowers. Beautiful!

Anssi

The Intel motherboard graphics chips don't work well with SU, especially on PC-s. The MAC driver should be slightky better, so you could also try turning off only the "Use fast Feedback" option but leaving the Hardware acceleration on. If it happened to work, it would be faster than turning off Hardware Acceleration altogether.

Anssi

If you happened to select "Use High-Accuracy HLR" from the Print Quality settings, shadows and textures won't print, as the setting outputs only raw vector data to the printer. The result is similar to using the PDF or EPS options when exporting a 2D image. The other print quality settings should print shadows normally.

Anssi

I create a model, and paint the front side of a face with a transparent material with a texture. Then I rotate the texture by 90 degrees. I look at the reverse side of the face. The texture is rotated there too.

Now I use the alt key to sample my rotated texture, and paint it on the front side of a second face. The back side of the face shows the texture as unrotated!
textureproblem.skp

Anssi

I don't know if anyone can confirm this, but there seems to be a limit in how small an image can be for the transparency to work. The nifty trick of using a totally transparent PNG to create an invisible face that still casts shadows did not work with a very small image (1, 4, 16 pixels).

Also, it might be fixed in some of the latest maintenance releases, but PNG files used to lose the transparency if exported from a SU model.

Anssi

@unknownuser said:

Are the "units of measure" for each native file the same?

Good question Modelhead. There is a bug in SU:s DWG export function, that ignores any metric units settings. As at least ACAD 2008 is much more scale-aware than the older ones, I have to open my exported files in ACAD first and change the unit settings before importing the file into my ACAD drawing or model. Otherwise the it will import 25.4 times too large.

Anssi

@cheffey said:

I'm not sure how familiar you are with these guys but you might like their work.
So, if you get a chance take a look at Bart Prince, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Bruce Goff and of course Gaudi. Always a pleasure to see the freedom that you design with.

To add to Cheffey's list, I would recommend the book "A pattern language" by Christopher Alexander - especially the chapters about construction (however impracticable?)might give ideas about how things like this and others of your ideas could be built.

Anssi

Granted, Darth

You now understand him perfectly, but you still can't make his name rhyme with anything.

I wish for a new ultracool whizbang computer (Quote from an old Photoshop error message)

Anssi

@lapx said:

Thanks Guy's, not to get to far off base but how come autocad, desktop and revit don't have a forum like this? They could learn a lot from this place.
cheers!

http://www.augi.com/
It's overorganized (too many subforums with overlapping topics) but overall not too bad. I just learnt a lot about dynamic blocks.

Anssi

@gaieus said:

Hi Molly,

These hadware/software gluitches must be frustrating, really. I'm a windows user so I can only wish I could help (and my only advice would be to play with the OpenGL settings anyway).

Hopefully some mac users (like Anssi) will join the discussion.

Gaieus,

You are misrepresenting me a bit, I am not a regular Mac user. I own one, but it is I think about 10 years old and totally unable to run SU. I bought an Intel Imac for my daughter and tried SU on it a couple of times.

But to Molly's problem: It sounds a bit like your MacBook has an Intel integrated display card. Those typically work with quirks in Macs and are almost totally unusable in PCs with Hardware Acceleration on (Preferences>OpenGL tab). If you have an ATI or NVidia graphics card, you should apply all the available OS graphics upgrades from Apple, and then try running SU with Hardware acceleration on, and turning off Fast Feedback if required. Note that you have to restart SU between changes. Sorry I cannot be of more help, I'm mainly just quoting things read in these forums.

Anssi

Hi Utler,

At work, a QuadroFX 1400, at home a GeForce FXGo 5700 in my luggable and an old ATI All-in-Wonder 9000 in my desktop (my home machines are rather old, and the one at work was the best our service provider could offer, not perhaps what I would have chosen myself). So nothing to brag about, but all of them are adequate for my small models and able to run SU with Hardware Acceleration enabled. All have less video memory than the "recommended" spec, but I have not found that to be a problem. The computer with the ATI will perhaps have to be replaced soon, but I try to postpone until I can really benefit from a multicore system.

For a new computer, I would choose a "higher-end" QuadroFX card, if I hadn't to pay for it myself (I use CAD and BIM applications too), or maybe a midrange Geforce for a "home" computer. I don't play games, so I am not interested in game performance.

Anssi

The SKM file is in fact a ZIP file in disguise, so it can be opened in many ways if you make a copy and rename that with the .zip extension.

Anssi

I am not a regular Mac user, but I read at the Archicad forums that some users are experiencing similar glitches too. Have you applied all the OS updates, I understand there is a Graphics update that does not install automatically?

Anssi

I am afraid there is no solution that doesn't involve some extra work. First I tried TIG:s Section Cut Face Ruby script. It works fairly well, if the wall sections are properly closed. Then you can also draw a large rectangle, paint it black, group it, move it to a position a little below the plan section plane, go inside and perform an Intersect with model, some cleanup, and then remove the extraneous edges and faces (to perform manually what TIG:s script automates).

Anssi

@gata said:

Review the list of cards to avoid in maintenance release 2 notes http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajg9d7mmp8rt_4gp925h, the section on Vista issues.

Re Omega drivers, developers will not test product on everything. It's unrealistic. With my ATI and NVidia cards, I never experienced graphics issue that would cause me to look for something 'better'.

Anyway, your GPU also has to play nice with your operating system, CPU, other assorted drivers, software, BIOS settings, running processes, hardware, your modeling needs, etc. This is one of the reasons it's hard to tailor-fit these hardware/software questions.

The card list quoted is about Vista compliancy. Let's hope that the driver situation has improved since. For me, the Quadro FX 1400, for instance, works faultlessly with XP. I don't know why the manufacturers so often mess up with their driver releases. I strongly recommend that when you find a driver version that works, stick with it. My other home computer has an old ATI All-in-Wonder card that also works OK if I keep Fast Feedback off, and I haven't dared to upgrade the driver for years.

Anssi

For an architect, using AutoCad as a precise layout tool could be handy, but I have found out that the colour raster output from ACAD is crappy compared to a layout tool like InDesign. I haven't tried it from the latest version yet, though. Nice presentation, Gaz.

Anssi

Here is my usual way of making walls appear solid in plan views. Trick learnt in the forums.

Anssi

solidwalls.skp

Utiler,

If you are happy about the graphics performance with SU, I see no reason to switch the card.

Anssi

Happy New Year Majid!. To think of it, not a bad day to start a new year.

Anssi