Tech

The V-Ray proxy is not broken, its just limited. Proxies only include a mesh and a list of discrete face color indexes. To be clear this is not the material itself, just an index of a material the face should use. When importing a proxy, form•Z creates a unique material for each discrete index in the file, maps the imported mesh to the new materials and you then need to "fill in" the material with the desired color/texture etc in the material editor. V-Ray proxies are included in V-Ray for formZ primarily for users who have older content created with V-Ray 2.x. V-Ray scenes are newer and much more powerful as they encapsulate the complete description of the scene (geometry, materials, lights, settings etc). In fact if you export a vrscene from form•Z you can render the scene with V-Ray standalone outside of form•Z and it will render exactly as it does inside form•Z. Some V-Ray scenes can be slow to process when placed because the preview is not saved in the file and must be generated when the screen is placed (even the bonding box is not necessarily stored in the vrscene file). This is an area of improvement that we have requested from Chaos Group. Since vrscenes include lights, you may want to disable these when placing the scene as Andrew describes (but they can be useful for things like light fixtures). Components are not wholesale broken, but they do not handle large components or nested components efficiently. This is an area that has had major improvements made for form•Z v9

Martin, We will certainly look into this. What does it look like in V-Ray? Its possible that V-Ray and RZ my be fighting each other and confusing the shaded texture. Can you send your example model and textures to support@formz.com? Its always better to work with real data! Thanks!

Allan, These "headless" machines are designed to run V-Ray in standalone mode or as part of the V-Ray distributed rendering. It is not clear if they provide some management tools for making this process easy to configure. V-Ray CPU rendering is still quite good and will scale well on the Xeon architecture, however the rendering world continues to improve in the area of GPU performance (both hardware and software) so a solution not designed for GPU's may not be a good long term solution.

We released v8.6.4 today. This version improves support for OS X Mojave (as well as other improvements and corrections) You can update your installation by selecting "Check for Update" from the Help menu. Note that if you are using 8.5 or 8.6.0 (or if you experience issues with the software update feature because of a fire wall or other connection issue), you will need to install from HERE . Here is a list of what is new in the latest version: http://www.formz.com/products/formz/update/whats_new.html Best!

We released v8.6.4 today which includes improvements for OS X Mojave. You can update your installation by selecting "Check for Update" from the Help menu. Note that if you are using 8.5 or 8.6.0 (or if you experience issues with the software update feature because of a fire wall or other connection issue), you will need to install from HERE . Here is a list of what is new in the latest version: http://www.formz.com/products/formz/update/whats_new.html

Roger, Yes we were closed on Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving, however your upgrade license information was sent via email on Wednesday the 21st. We are sorry that you have not received this. Please check you junk/spam mail folder. We have re-sent the information again today. If you do not receive this please email our sales team at sales@formz.com.

Hi Rudy, We just did a test here. OS X High sierra, formZ and 8.6.3, worked fine with a number of different smooth objects. Maybe its a data specification problem? If you draw sphere in a new project and export it to obj with the same settings , does that work for you? Can you send a .fmz file with the object to support@formz.com so we can investigate? Thanks

Thanks for the excellent tutorial FZnoob!

Allan, Text should be imported from DXF/DWG files. Can you please send the file (or a link to it) to support@formz.com so we can investigate?

Apple has changed the alpha channel of icons in Mojave and we are investigating if this is something that they will be fixing and if not what we can do to adjust for the issue without breaking support of other OS versions. This is just an aesthetic issue, the icons still function as expected. We hope to have a fix for this soon!

You can draw your own guides with the guide tool. The manual created guides and the smart guides are only available when the Guide snap is enabled. If you want to create some references for a drawing you can easily draw them on their own layer, set the layer to be not snap-able and use the line style override to set a dashed pattern for the layer. You can then enable and disable the reference layer by turning the layer visibility on or off.

The key to getting good results with Sub-D objects is to start with a simple frame of the desired shape and edges at key edges of the shape. For this shape we made a frame with a single edge at the flat ends. The whole object was given a 60% sharpness and then the end edges and points were selected and assigned a 100% sharpness to make the hard edges.

formZ 8.6 supports SU 2018. formZ 6.7.3 supports the old SU 7/8 format.

The same issue with the "Add to project" and "options" buttons happened with the first release of High Sierra as well. We are not sure yet if Apple will fix this again in Mojave or we will need to adjust for it. The workaround fo "Add to project" is to open the file and copy and paste into the desired project. The import options dialog will open anyway if not previously selected, so this is fairly minor. We are investigating the transparency issue with the icons to see if we can adjust for this as well without raising the minimum supported OS version.

We are not aware of any firewall issues with the V-Ray license server. We have a number of large company's with very secure networks that use the V-Ray license server with no issues. Please contact formZ support so we can get the issue resolved!