AccuRender Studio for AutoCAD

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

We're up to Build 0082.  This new major release of the AccuRender and nXt product line now includes a plugin that works entirely within AutoCAD just like previous versions. It's got a ton of new features and is available for free for a while.  Take a look and let me know what you think.

See the Download->AccuRender Studio menu items for more details.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Spotlights and feature lights are also coming across in mine-- make sure you have the latest from RenderPlus on their download page-- legacy data translation is still a work in progress.  After a few seconds:

[Peter Milner]

Yes, I have the latest versions of nXt and ArRender.

[Peter Milner]

Just spotted a new verion of nXt. I'll install it and give it a go.

[Peter Milner]

The back wall and rug have decals mapped to them.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Thanks-- I'll check on that.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I see the problem--

Decals attached to solid objects are not working properly (I'll fix it today-- probably.)  I have a couple of other bug fixes to work on.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Looks like it is working-- I didn't have the concrete decal.  I think your problem may be related to not having the latest renderplus product-- currently ra15.  The rug decal is working in mine.  I'll include the decal you just sent and repeat the test. 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

It's working-- I'm sending this to the cloud for an hour or so just as a test.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Here's the result of an hour on the cloud using Azure's h8 machines:

[Peter Milner]

Here's a 40 minute rendering with the latest software.

The balance of lighting seems very different and it looks like the rendering times are going to be longer.

Also note that the mapping of the wood grain on the coffee table has changed.

[Peter Milner]

I've also noticed that everything runs very slowly.

ArStudio takes 1 minute to open up.

Selecting between different lights takes 5 seconds to respond.

You mentioned tagging the windows as thin. Why has this now been moved to the material rather than the object?

To me that doesn't make sense.

Glow seems to have been taken away from materials. This is useful in making light fittings look brighter without increasing the amount of light omitted.

The grain direction on the coffee table has changed because, in the material editor there is now no way to orientate the texture image i.e. it should be rotated 90 degrees (this also applies to the bump map).

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I fixed the light thing selection thing-- I'll have a release for that today.  Stepping through the AutoCAD database and grabbing the data is slightly slower than before due to moving to the .net interface from .arx-- but it's only very slight.  Some of the delay you're experiencing is because I'm not telling the user anything during the process-- whereas before I opened the walkabout view first.  A bit of the delay ( a few seconds) is likely the checking for updates, I'll see what I can do about that.

I've always considered that Thin switch to be an object property, but I lost that battle.  The industry standard everywhere is for "architectural glass" to be a material property.  I need to play ball here in order to be able to import other formats correctly.

The light balance thing is very interesting in this one.  Some of what you're seeing is a place where previous versions did a really crappy job.  In particular, illuminating surfaces close to light sources, as occurs in the "feature" cove light. The old engines seriously undervalued the amount of light received by a nearby surface.  This was necessary to prevent certain artifacts but resulted in large errors.  That is not a problem in the new engine.