Tech

It seems as though your GFX card isn't getting used for the render. Open your V-Ray Settings palette and click the arrow in the bottom right corner next to Utilities. From that drop-down menu, select GPU Device Selection. Then choose your Nvidia card in the next window. Make sure you click Set Devices, then try a render. The artifacts should be gone. In the future, please contact us at support@formz.com for quicker response times.

This follows the broad UI standard that you normally expect with a paste operation (think of how in a text editor the paste operation replaces the highlighted text). While a 3D application is a bit different, its not uncommon to copy a set of objects, paste them in an empty project to work with them and then copy and paste them back into the original project. In this workflow you want to replace the original objects but there are also times where you may not won't to replace them and its easy to forget to deselect first. We can easily add some control over this function, the question is what is the best way? One option is a preference setting (Replace on Paste: on/off/ask) but that is hard to find and tedious to change. A better solution may be separate paste commands in the edit menu (ie "Paste" and "Paste and Replace").

You can do that already by going to Project Settings > Appearance > Select or create and custom style > Select Pre-Pick to change the colour to green or whatever. Thanks Des. Also be sure that you have "Selection Preview" checked in the Edit Menu. When enabled, the preview of the selection will be shown in the "Pre-Pick" color when the cursor is over the Object/Face/Edge etc or in the boundary of an area selection. This option is on by default (but could have be inadvertently deselected in the Edit menu).

The SDK has been available since v6 as both a C(/C++) interface and an FSL (form•Z script language) interface. With v9 we are introducing Python support. This simplifies and standardizes the scriptable interface for form•Z making extending form•Z easier and opening an channel to a wealth of existing python libraries that offer a variety of functionality. The C interface will still be supported in v9, but we expect the to be used primarily for existing plugins or development that needs to access external C libraries. FSL will be discontinues. We expect that the Python interface will bring new interest in extensions and to the LAB project which has not been updated in a while. We expect to start beta testing towards the end of next month so stay tuned!

Are you using the new Toon material with GPU enabled? We are aware that GPU creates artifacts with this shader. See this post:

Not quite sure what result you are trying to get here...Based on the position of your source and path objects, The Axial Sweep tool with the "As positioned" option yields the result below. Is this what you are looking for?

There are none by default but you can set the desired keys and values from the "Nudge" tab of the "Quick Keys" palette (Palettes->Quick Keys->Nudge).

You can select "Check for Update" from the Help menu to patch you installation or Use the link from the email you received from us with your license codes (it will always have the latest installer) or Select "Download Archive" from the "Techinical Support" Menu on the formZ website and choose the v8.6 page.

Toon with GPU rendering is not yielding consistently results so we recommend not using GPU with Toon at this time. Toon is admittedly and older shader not offered by all modern V-Ray products. We have had a number of requests to add it and it does give some nice effects. We have reached out to Chaos Group to get more details on planned GPU support for Toon.

As of today...... Current version of formZ v8.6.5. Current version of V-Ray for formZ is v3.6.6 Sorry for any confusion caused by the the progression of version numbers!

Here is the list of changes. Mostly stability improvements. http://www.formz.com/products/formz/update/whats_new.html

We tested here and it seems in order. You used the V-Ray mesh light tool to make the mesh light, correct? Can you confirm which version of V-Ray for form•Z you are using (V-Ray settings palette, Utility menu ->About V-Ray for form•Z)

We made some improvements in v8.6 to support opening of older files without needing to go back to the older versions!

We do monitor the forum. Frankly we have been a bit “heads down" on v9 so our apologies if we are not always quick to respond lately. We will will try to do better. Having said that the forum is mostly intended as a place for discussion of ideas, experiences in a sharing community. If you need technical support please email us at support@formz.com. Every support email is assigned a ticket number that gives us a much better way to track issues and respond to your questions and resolve problems.

This is being improved in v9 but we also want to make sure everyone is aware of a subtle feature that was added in v8.6. When you right click on a material there is a new option at the bottom of the context menu to select all of the objects (and faces) that are assigned the material. An additional benefit of this is that if the material is not used, the menu item will be dimmed giving quick feedback if the material is in use or not. While this is not replacement for the Elect By Criteria palette., it is a quick way to get to the common talk of finding the object that use a material.