R2D2

No - since I have replaced colours from the dwg to render materials. Reimporting brings in all dwg colours again.

So I have done all my materials for Vray, and I import a DWG (Architecture) to render in FZ. DWG has line colours which translate into materials in FormZ (Material 1...x) Now I manually delete the imported materials that come with the dwg and replace them with the needed materials for Vray. i.e. Material 3 (red) becomes a wooden material: delete material 3, replace with wood. Do that 50+ times this takes a while but gives the needed result. render. Problem is that once the Architecture DWG is updated and comes in again (updated version) all of this has to be done again. Can somebody help - how about a script that replaces DWG colours with the materials I have set in my FormZ file ON IMPORT ?

R.I.P. I guess its time to wrap this up, I contacted Thea half a year ago to find out what is going on. My proposal was to issue an official statement here and call it a day. This never happened, neither from Thea`s nor ADS`s side, which leaves me in the dust if this was terminated by Thea or outcome of the Vray/FZ venture and terminated by ADS. Part from their answer was: …„It is true that the plugin has been removed from our e-shop but w e continue the support and maintenance of the integration. There are changes and enhancements to this integration that would let us evaluate better how to proceed in the future regarding its availability. …please note that you can still use both the plugin and the Studio, as the bundle you had bought contained both of them. Thank you for your patience and understanding.“… Bottom line I would be interested if anybody is still using Thea with FZ. Also if anybody is interested in using my license please let me know and we can try to work something out if a transfer is allowed. Finally I think we users who bought this (basically DOA) product deserve a statement from ADS and/or Thea here. thx

JL, I think if your are doing organic patchworking, Vectorworks is not the right way. It imports solid DWG/ACIS architectural objects well, you can set all your clipping planes, sections etc and assign a "style" to those frames. (i.e. hidden line with bolder outlines, or shaded) Layout all your Sheets and in the end reload the final DWG; everything updates and you add annotations and Dimensions. Maybe try a demo of VW... but be warned it is expensive, and no 3D sections in the basic version (think FZ junior and pro...) Basically I only use it for plans/Layout, that works; but no serious modelling in Vectorworks - forget about it. Missing tools should be a separate thread, for example "make 1/2 sided", c-mesh, are still missing. But as mentioned somewhere modelling is so much better and faster now in V8 than in V6.x, theres no way I would consider using V6 still unless I really had things I could not do with 8. (Which I personally dont have) I am on mac (or on OSX to be precise) and I really like how the latest FZ runs here together with Vray. Zero experience using FZ on windows.

I use vectorworks for drawings when I have to. A good way still is just to reference your FormZ dwg export (ACIS), generate all sections, plans etc. (Viewports) in VW. Add dimensions and Text - dimensions of course will not auto-update. Continue modelling - update your dwg and all viewports in vw, this is a quick way to generate a set of plans, but you need the „architect“ version (pricing is ridiculous) This works well (VW also has good options to hidden line, dahed, shaded modes) and essentially is what people seem to „also“ want to have from within FormZ... quite a task.

No problems here. Osx 10.13.5 FZ 8.6

Sometimes I get this (example: some 3D Person) when I try to reduce polys. Object doctor cant fix it. Any hints apart from trying to unstitch/restitch ? And what does the error message ask me for ?

Bonjour, As far as I understand all the GPU rendering is based on CUDA technology by Nvidia. You may want to check out some results posted in the Vray-benchmark thread. No Quadros there yet - the reason seems to be they are much more expensive but dont increase performance the same amount as price. (Or cuda cores per dollar...) From what I ´ve read the 1080Ti / 1080 / 1070ti/1060 cards are best, so if you are on OSX put one of those in your macpro to test.

Gaming Laptop i7 6700hq GTX 1060 6GB Windows 10 and OSX 10.13 Performance almost identical

I wasn`t referring to the face normal but the segments direction towards the face. in the plane example, no segments run towards that face thus it can not "extend" somewhere. (But you can extend the side segments) (You are right, extrusion and reshape on that square face give the same result, just like "thicken" can do too.) Reshape does not work when you prepick different objects I think. It does work when prepicking several faces of a (simple) object to an extent though. (Generally it works best using just no picking at all - so that it finds the face automatically) Draw a pyramid and cut off the tip now you can: reshape the upper face up - all remains one object, face dimensions remain (or reshape down, substracting volume) extrude the face, making a new object extend the face numerically, where the face is scaled thicken the face (or the whole object) (just as a quick example) My point is I don`t see it as a battle of the tools but as possible ways to get different results, depending on what geometry you work on.

If you have i.e. the 30 rectangle surfaces to work with, reshape and extend tool does nothing as your objects are 2D (No direction vectors for the face). That makes sense to me. Extrusion and thicken will work and turn these into solids, pre or postpick, which makes sense too. (THEN Reshape /extend/thicken/extrude faces of these) Thicken gives a fixed height and direction, extrude allows dragging and num input. Reshape has numeric input and keeps the moved face "as is" , in face direction or reference plane based; while extend will also work numerically and to a tilted surface and also alter the Face dimension. Enhancements are of course always possible but you would have to be more specific in detail (or maybe I got the question wrong) I find the diverse functionality of this set of tools is one of FZ major strengths.

It appears that after getting vray implemented, ADS is in now hibernate mode. The silence here is not a good sign, lets hope it is just due to collective effort on the new Version....9. But if the latter is true why not communicate it ? On the Forum it appears some new people have appeared, which is good, but FZ need to get the word out and advertise the new rendering capabilities to attract new users. ( i.e. Look at Chaosgroups website, big announcements for Vray for Revit, Rhino and Sketchup - nothing on FormZ (unless you search for it)) Make a rocksolid 8.6.x release and dont overpromise on things to come. my2c

Maybe you are trying to export out of shaded mode ? Set to wireframe or hidden line, then go "export image"- works here (Build 10027 OSX)

It would really help if the Build number was visible on the download page - after some trial and error I found only the full installer has 8.6.0.2 vs. the app only installer still had 8.6.0.1...

Please bring back the "make 1 - 2 sided tool" - unless I am missing something I would have to install V6 for that ?