nXt Backward Compatibiltiy?

[Steve Mayman]

Greentings,

 

I am just wading into nXt after being an AR user since the first release.  It seems, at first, like there is effectively no backward compatibility with AR4.  This can't be true can it?  We have numerous rather complex models with rather complex materials, views, etc.  I tried to render one with nXt and found that material settings didn't come through, materials didn't come through, camera views and batch processes didn't come through, etc.  It seems like it will be many, many hours of manual work for each model to get them to render in nXt.  What am I missing?  I can't believe that I will have to keep a copy of AutoCAD 2008 and AR4 around forever to render old files, or is this actually the case?

 

Thanks,

 

Steve

[Kevin Lockwood]

Roy has always suggested that we work with copies of files (or have backups available) during the beta process. It won't really be backwards compatible because the materials and plants and totally different.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Be sure to have Nxt pointing in the right directions of where your maps, textures, plant library are. This way clicking render should have the old AR rendered scenes render properly.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

nXt is not an update-- it is a new product which will recognize much, but not all, of the old data. Generally speaking you can make legacy materials in older drawings work provided they are assigned by layer or by object. There is a conversion routine, but if you are rendering on a system which has never seen ar4 you will need to manually add the search paths to the materials and their textures as suggested by akinlolu. There is an Update Legacy Drawing item under Widgets which can sometimes be useful in these cases (this is done automatically the first time you load a drawing into nXt-- but if you happen to save and it didn't correctly grab the materials-- you can rerun the updater)

Non-AutoCAD camera views aren't supported, nor are the old batch processes. If you're considering this product only to render legacy models you may be disappointed....

The product is no longer in "beta"-- I do, of course, still recommend safe backups-- be more careful if you are downloading and running the "latest" version rather than the "stable" version-- these occasionally have problems.