Posts made by Anssi

Oops-Urgen's texture flows seamlessly across the corners. Wow.

Anssi

@krisidious said:

I find that when this happens to me if I select the black background, a button the image ribbon on Autocad 2011 ADT pops up and says "transparency" you can click it once to enable transparency for png files.

this should fix you up too.

Thanks, Kris, I hadn't noticed that in ACAD 2011. Older versions supported transparency only for 2-bit raster images (tiff, pcx).

This would apply to raster-rendered LayOut viewports that appear as Xref'd images in the DWG exports. If you export a vector-rendered LayOut page to DWG, everything gets converted to native AutoCad objects, and if your standard AutoCad modelspace background is black, you will at first see nothing of the LayOut lines, because they have been assigned a RGB colour of 0,0,0 that always displays pitch black

Anssi

I don't know much about Mac OSX, but it seems that quite many people have problems with the importers not showing up in SU Pro under OS X. The recommended solutions range from deleting the preferences file and repairing file permissions to re-downloading and re-installing SU.

Anssi

One more flattening technique that works if you have SU Pro:
Export a 2D DWG (from plan view, parallel projection, full scale) and re-import.

Anssi

John,

Mine was somewhere between those two

Anssi

Sorry to be a pessimist, but if you have a reasonably modern Nvidia graphics card (as you seem to, if it has 512 Mb of memory) I would guess that getting a new one will not create a jump in SU performance. When you make big models, the first thing that gets overworked is your CPU - SU is very CPU-intensive, and as it is single-threaded, adding more processor cores will not help either.

Anssi

In AutoCad the drawing area and paper space tab background colours are system settings that you can set in the Options dialog. Background colour cannot be set separately for each drawing file.

The best colour setting for normal lines would be "bylayer", as the lines are exported to layer 0 that already has the colour 7 (white) as layer colour. Colour 7 is special: on a black background, it displays as white, and on a white background as black. Unless you do something with your default printing settings, it always prints black. Using the RGB colour value 0,0,0 forces the lines to always display black.

When I open exported DWG files for further cleanup, the first thing I do is to change the colour of all line and polyline entities to "bylayer". Hatches (that represent faces when I choose to export them) I leave to their original RGB values. I then filter lines according to their lineweights and put them on separate layers (a system analogous to exports from SketchUp).

Anssi

Mass elements are not standard Autocad objects, but special AEC objects created by AutoCad Architecture (formerly Architectural Desktop). These can only be read or manipulated by the originating application, or AutoCad supplied with the appropriate object enabler add-on. To get these into SU in 3D, you will have to use the Export to Autocad function in AutoCad Architecture from a viewport that has a 3D view on. This will convert the Mass elements to standard 3D objects (solids or meshes, I don't know which). The same applies to all Autocad Architecture objects like walls, doors, windows, roofs etc.

Anssi

This brings to my mind a Youtube video from the Nobel Prize dinner, don't know from which year. Even the hosts (the King and Queen of Sweden) seem surprised.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pkqoox9WGo

Anssi

The FOV in SU is measured quite differently than in traditional film cameras. In film cameras, it is measured along the diagonal of the film frame, and in SU it denotes the vertical viewing angle. So a SU camera of a given focal length always has a wider viewing angle than a physical camera.

Anssi

I don't know how it is with the system-integrated PDF functions on the Mac, but Adobe Acrobat printing on the PC has a lot of configurable settings that affect image quality. I am usually doing low-end things to be printed on desktop printers so the default downsampling of images to 150 DPI, for instance, is usually OK with me, but I can easily see situations where a more ambitious setting - with the greatly increased file size - would be preferable.

Anssi

I would also recommend that you don't use the default number of segments(12) when you draw small arches such as these. 6 or even less are most often quite adequate to create the right impression, and you get a much smaller number of larger faces.

Anssi

@unknownuser said:

:lol:

"Don't believe everything you think."

Yes, that was the best
I also liked "I believe in the separation of church and hate"

Anssi

I don't know how Allplan has been getting on since the merger of Nemetschek with Graphisoft, as it is a directly competitive product to Archicad. The version I saw years ago was, I think, the first for Windows, and it was then a somewhat clumsy port-the software had by then existed for years in Unix, had a different interface from anything else, and a file format consisting of a plethora of folders and files.

Anssi

@thomthom said:

@edson said:

thomas,

it is a jpg measuring 7990x1146 pixels. I think it is too much but am not certain. how much do you think it would be ok?

SU will not display that image in its full resolution, it will sample it down to max 1024x1024 - or 2048x2048 if you enable Maximum Texture Size.
If you need larger for rendering I'd try to use a smaller size in SU to keep the SU model small and link the render material to a larger version.

I haven't tested it with the newest version, but when I last tried it, PhotoMatch background images were not being downsampled by SU, and I could export images with the detail intact.

Anssi

I seem to remember that High=300 DPI

If you use only Vector rendering, textures will be ignored.

Anssi

Your model lies quite far from the SU model origin point (more than 2 kilometers). As it is, a scaled export from a plan view worked OK, but the unscaled perspective view didn't. When I moved the model to the origin it worked OK.

Anssi

Thanks, Ross, for the fresh air...

Anssi

Another popular way to simulate a shiny material in SU is use a texture - I most often use the CorrugateShiny standard material but increase the texture size, and sometimes even rotate it.

Anssi

This is nothing new. The bug was already in version 3. The number of undos possible before the SU window loses its focus seems to vary. Clicking on the titlebar enables undo again, for a time.

Anssi