Aaaaaand
The 17th has come and gone!
sad

It would be very useful to have line hops for "One Line Riser Diagrams." Doing these manually in layout is a pain and takes three-four times longer than in something like AutoCAD. I've added an example image. A majority of my work in layout would be with system diagrams and one-lines, but it's just too time consuming to make it look good when one line crosses another.

Example from another program, OmniGraffle, where line hops are automatic:

Example from LO, where I've painstakingly cut the lines I've needed, created a separate line to the length I want the "hop" and then shortened each line individually to that length by "double-clicking" into 'point edit' so I only change the end point and not the whole line:

Thanks for the reply, Ken.

I've been using Maxwell Render. I like how the settings act similar to a camera setup.
The one is quite grainy indeed. I didn't give it as much render time as I should've liked. I needed my main rendering machine for other tasks at the end of that weekend. My rendering setup isn't that complex. I've got a mac mini with a quad i7 and 16GB of ram.
The larger, less grainy render took all of a weekend to get to the point it is. There were a lot of specular reflections from the light fixtures at the ceiling, and the "EXIT" signs added a lot of time, too, with the SSS material.

TK2

Here's renders from a project I've been working with recently. The space is meant for choral and small instrumental assemblies. The lens angle in one of the shots is much wider than I'd anticipated. I've made no post production edits, other than the text at the bottom left.

Disclaimer: I didn't design this room; I made a model and rendered what was on the CDs.

If you haven't found answers elsewhere so far, I believe I can answer the last two. I am also somewhat of a beginner with Maxwell, but have been messing around with it for several hours a week for the last six months.

3: Because Maxwell is a "physically correct" render engine, it looks at all the surfaces in your model that light could bounce off of, even the ones behind the camera, or in a separate section of your model. Eliminating unnecessary geometry would speed up your render time. Of course you could just hide the geometry in a layer which is off and make sure Maxwell is set to not render "Hidden Layers". That setting can be found in the Maxwell Scene Manager window, on the "Output" tab (file folder icon).

4: So long as your default/SU materials are not "full saturated" materials, you shouldn't need to change them. Maxwell does not do well with these types of surfaces and colours, such as pure white (RGB 255.255.255, 0.0.255, etc.) because they do not exist in real life. They tend to cause noise or 'fairies' in the final render. I'm not saying that you need to change each surface, just go into your materials editor in SU and change the model materials. (I have a MAC, and for me that means the colour window and the 'brick' tab. I'm not sure how editing SU materials is accomplished on a Windows machine.)

Hope these brief explanations help out!

Thanks to you both, Richard and Frederik! I'm currently working on using both your suggestions to build out my Scrapbooks with certain devices. I guess my biggest complaint may not have been clear in the original post, or there at all. (I think I might have done the first time I wrote it, but my browser crashed when I tried to post the first time. I must've left this out when rewriting it!)

My biggest complaint was the lines between the plates and devices, especially the line-breaks/jumps at intersections. I know it can be done using 'Start' and 'End' arrow styles, because I've already made a riser diagram in LayOut, but it is certainly more of a pain than using a custom LSP to cut lines, then another LSP to pull the lines back a short distance. This is really the only bit I wish I could speed up (because after taking the time to eventually create/convert any common devices from CAD, I see the lifework connections as being the biggest time sink in LO).

I use ‘single-line’ diagrams/risers (a.k.a. ‘one-line’ diagrams) to show connections between electronic devices, typically for Audio/Video systems (see image). Currently my office uses AutoCAD to get these done, but I have been trying to find ways to move the process into LayOut. For the last couple of months I’ve tried a couple different ways to make these diagrams in LO only to be disappointed by how long the process takes compared to AutoCAD. For some processes (such as device details), SU and LO have proven to be a great utility. However, the two main hurdles keeping my firm from ‘full implementation’ of the SU Pro suite are creating these ‘single-line’ diagrams and also the lack of ability for importing DWG/DXF into LO for device location symbology. (I suppose a third issue, though not quite as prevalent and much easier to get around is creating schedule tables for our symbol legends.)

I’ve been snooping around these forums looking for solutions by others into the riser problem, but alas have been unable to find anything.

Does anyone have suggestions? It would also be great if someone could point me to existing topics/threads elsewhere with solutions! — Tim K 2