have a problem with rendering

[Assis_111]

I use AutoCAD 2000

and my problem is with rendering (usually it works fine) - but today for some reason when i select the materials for each component, put the smoothness on 10, arc smoothness on 20000.....select photo real and the seperate window render......and for some reason every component colour is faded (u can see dots, not the grid - red = pink etc) apart from a few which have rendered fine.......then when i save my work to floppy, CAD won't let me and comes up with an error.....but when i save it to the hard drive it lets me....and when i close the drawing after i have saved it....then click on the drawing again on my hard drive.....the drawing opens but its vanished, i mean.....there is a few pieces of my work there (2 in fact) but almost everything has gone.....

so, i had to go back to one of my backups of my work....and redo most of it what i did cos of this.........took me about 90 mins to re-draw.....then i started all over again at the rendering stage.....select materials etc and guess what? yup u guessed.....it didn't rend properly again (same as above).....so i tried to see if it would save in my floppy.....and it didn't.....so this time i didn't do the cock up and save it on my hard drive after render......i made an error then.....this time i saved before i rendered.....

what do u thinks up then?

- error
- faded colours
- doesn't save on floppy, but on hard drive yes, but its dangerous doing that as i lost my work......

p.s.

what is the recommanded value for arc smoothness? surely not 20000.....i have tried using different values but i get the same as above

and i know its a bit long.....just that av had a **** poor day today trying to get me work finished for 2morro n all.....and am bloody knackered too

thanks in advance, Craig.....

[robfowler]

Hi Craig,

First, I would never do a save to a floppy from an open drawing - you're asking for problems - AutoCAD doesn't like to work that way. Always do a save to a hard disc first and then copy the file from the hard disc to the floppy once the drawing file is closed and only use the floppy as a backup or for tranferring the file to another computer.

I find the a setting of 2000 (max is 20000) is sufficient for most purposes for arc smoothness.

Also a setting of 5 for rendered object smoothness (max is 10) is sufficient most of the time.

Of course you can increase these values from what I normally use but then you put extra strain on your system resources.

Try Photo Raytrace instead of Photo Real as the rendering option - it's much faster with only a marginal loss in render quality.

When you reopen the drawing check to see all layers are ON and not frozen.

I have found that sometimes when materials are attached to a model it changes the line colours of the layers as viewed on screen and if the screen background is set to black it's sometimes difficult to see the model against the background. Setting SHADEMODE to 2D helps to view the model in this case.

Have you tried selecting everything on screen to see what is there?

Have you got the latest video drivers for your graphics card?

Rob.

[CADTutor]

Rob, that's a model answer I couldn't have put it better myself. Just hope Craig appreciates your efforts.

[robfowler]

Let's hope we hear back from Craig.

Thanks for the positives David

Rob.

[Mr T]

'Render to file' makin sure you use a large resolution look for the HIGH res one, 32 bit colour. That may fix the colours.

You can then save that into another program and save as a *.jpg to fit on a floppy.

Nick