Remarkable Renderworks by Daniel Jansenson

Renderworks is a “bolt-on” option to the Vectorworks computer aided design system from Nemetschek, of which I’ve previously written (see Residential Garden Design and Animations). Once a 3D model has been developed with Vectorworks, using the Renderworks component brings presentation images of the design to life - by adding textures to the surfaces of objects and creating depth through the lighting tools which give both general illumination to the scene and modelling to the highlight/shadow details.

Daniel Jansenson prepared this book for Nemetschek as part of their tutorial series. He is well-qualified for this, being an architect in private practice, a long-time Vectorworks user and a teacher of both Vectorworks and Renderworks. He’s also author of the earlier eBook “The Renderworks Recipe Book”.

Remarkable Renderworks is sub-titled “An Introduction to the Basics”, but – although it does indeed serve to help novices get to grips with Renderworks – it’s not a Vectorworks primer and, as stated in Daniel’s introduction, the manual is “intended for the Renderworks user who already has some experience with Vectorworks”. That said, I find it to be more than just a primer for Renderworks too – it has value as both revision & skills enhancement to those who already have some familiarity and experience with the Renderworks software.

Format and content ...

In common with other tutorial manuals from Nemetschek, the book is an excellent, A5-sized, spiral-bound, format - which lets it fold flat and occupy minimal desk space when working at a computer. It has some 33 chapters, or topics, which guide readers from the simplest forms of rendering through to the use of built-in (default) textures, creating your own custom textures, and applying textures to specific types of 3D objects. From here it goes on to explain lighting types and effects, for both interior & exterior scenes, before concluding with a treatise on the system’s capability to produce supremely realistic images via the Custom Renderworks & Custom Radiosity tools - and the trade-offs between ultimate realism and image processing time. Throughout the book there are high quality colour images of screen segments which make it very easy to follow through the exercises that are used to provide the tutorial.

Exercises and Software Versions ...

The exercise files are provided on a CD-ROM which accompanies the book. Although there’s no mention of software versions, as a newly published tutorial it is, naturally, designed to work with the current software, i.e. Vectorworks/Renderworks 2010, and the files are 2010 format – so if you have a prior version you will not be able to use them. Pre-2010 users can still get some benefit – anyone with Vectorworks experience can easily re-create the early chapters' exercise files. For later chapters, with more complex exercises, it may be more effective to just follow the principles and apply them to some of your own work – but note that there are significant changes and improvements to the tools and methods of working in the 2010 version which the tutorial is based upon.

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At first, I was disappointed that the exercises did not represent a journey through a real-life project - being instead a series of mainly unrelated, simple, abstract models. However, after working through the book, I now recognise how well these are used to describe & teach the concepts – something which may have been more difficult to achieve, and perhaps more confusing, in a real-life example. It’s also worth saying that Renderworks is applicable to Vectorworks Fundamentals users, as well as those with Design-series options such as Architect, Landmark and Machine Design, so using abstract examples makes it more universal as a tutorial.

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The more complex forms of light rendering are most appropriate to building interiors and the exercises are based on this. There is a chapter on exterior scene lighting, though this doesn’t add much to Tamsin Slatter’s excellent book on Residential Garden Design.

There are some improvements I can suggest for the next revision ...

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  There’s little reference to the wide range of (non-default) ready-made texture libraries which ship with the Vectorworks/Renderworks software, so you may be left thinking there’s a lot of work you have to do for yourself, which may not actually be the case.


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  As a garden designer, I’d have liked more information on using Renderworks to show exterior schemes in both daylight and “nightscape” scenes and some discussion of the effects / limitations of lighting used with the ”Image Props” that represent planting in 3D models.


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  My major criticism is the lack of an index, which limits its usefulness as a reference work. It is possible to skip-read chapters (which are only about 5-6 pages each) after skimming down the Table of Contents for a topic of concern, but it’s a tedious way of working and (unlike Tamsin’s book) the CD-ROM doesn’t include a searchable PDF version of the manual.
  

Conclusions:

Would I recommend this book? Yes!

Who would benefit from it? Anyone who already has enough Vectorworks experience to build 3D models and who wants to leverage their investment to produce, or improve the quality of, their design presentation images – whether they’re working in the field of architecture, interiors, or, like me, landscape/garden design.

Where can you get it? From Nemetschek.

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Steve Rice, Blooming Good Gardens, Southampton, UK

Residential Garden Design with Vectorworks Landmark

“Residential Garden Design with Vectorworks Landmark”
by Tamsin Slatter





This is a great book! Or, perhaps, I should say “a great manual” since I don’t suppose there are too many sad people like me who would take it to bed to read!

For anyone completely unfamiliar with “Vectorworks” here’s a brief bit of background. When I first started out from my college Garden Design course, I tried out several of the very cheap “design your own garden” programs before giving up and returning (literally) to my drawing board. I’m not saying that these programs don’t have their place – but that isn’t in the toolkit of a professional designer. A couple of years ago, I looked again at professional-level CAD packages and decided that, for me, Vectorworks looked the best and that it would be a worthwhile investment for my business. I opted for the “Landmark” and “Renderworks” components, in addition to Vectorworks itself (there are other components specifically for Interior Design, Architecture, Engineering and so on), which together provide huge capability – but, unsurprisingly, with a huge learning curve to become truly proficient and efficient in their usage.

I took a 20-hour training course and, after an initial delay due to other work commitments, started to use the package for my design work. With practice, I got fairly good at drawing up my surveys, working up concept plans, hard landscape construction drawings and soft landscape planting plans. What I hadn’t got to grips with, because it seemed too difficult, was using the 3D modelling capabilities – hence I was not making use of Renderworks, nor offering my clients the benefit of 3D views, with lighting and shadow shown at different times of day, or seasons of the year. Instead, I resorted to separate hand-drawn sketches or simple Google Sketchup models. This also meant that I was putting in extra effort developing isolated section views of construction drawings in addition to the plan views and the hand-drawn sketches.

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That’s where this book comes in!

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Tamsin prepared this book for Nemetschek, the developers of Vectorworks. She has excellent credentials for this – 20 years working for IT software companies before retraining as a garden/landscape designer, learning to make best use of the Vectorworks CAD system and becoming a renowned trainer and the UK’s leading expert in the software. In addition to this expertise, she has a personality, which really comes across in the friendly “sitting next to Nellie” style of this book.

So why’s it so good?

Firstly, the concept: It’s a project-based workbook which takes you on a journey from when you first, excitedly, fire up Vectorworks after installing it on your machine, into how it looks & feels, how to set up an efficient & effective “virtual drawing board”, and into the design workflow based on a sample project. This goes right from bringing in a survey file or drawing up your own survey data, through developing a draft plan, creating the 3D hardscape features, adding lighting (both daytime sunlight and nightscape artificial lights), creating planting schemes with varying levels of detail, to end up with hardcopy of plans, perspective views, materials and plant schedules – the lot!

Secondly, the practicalities: The book itself is convenient A5 size, and spiral-bound, so it lays flat within a very small footprint on your desk, or even held in one hand, while guiding your mouse with the other. It includes colour screen images or sections of them throughout, which are well-positioned to match the text. There’s a CD which holds both a PDF copy of the book and a set of Vectorworks files which constitute the sample project at various stages within the workflow and exercise files so that you can try things out without screwing up the project files.

After completing this book and project, the 3D features of Vectorworks/Landmark are completely de-mystified and just make sense as the natural way of working with the package – I found that I could easily work through my current design project alongside the book’s sample project and gain all the benefits and efficiencies which I’d been missing out on. I’m not saying that the supplied Vectorworks manuals aren't useful, but they are descriptive of what the various tools do, not how they are applied, and they seem to be written by “techies” not practitioners – which left me using only a fraction of the package in the 12-months-plus which I’d employed it. Not any more!

I do have some criticisms – there are a lot of “typos” which a better proof-reading should have found, though usually these don’t impact on comprehension. The screen-image clips are very small – presumably to keep the physical size of the book down – which is fine if you’re just using them as a visual cue to what you’re seeing on your screen as you work through the project, but sometimes they make using the book for reference difficult - unless you have much more acute vision than me.

My major criticism is that the book has no index, so to use it for reference you either have to thumb through the contents pages, which list topics within the workflow of the sample project, and then skip-read through that section; or you have to resort to the PDF copy and use Adobe reader’s “find” facilities to locate the item you need. The sample project is “split-level”, so the book does cover retaining walls, steps, raised beds and so on, but it doesn’t cover site modelling of a “real” situation where there are undulating contours and how to construct a design over this. Nor does it discuss “real” hardscape which has a rainwater run-off gradient. Perhaps these might be the subject of a future “advanced” landscape design book.

Conclusions:

Would I recommend this book? Wholeheartedly and without reservation!

Who would benefit from this book? Students of Garden Design or experienced designers who are new to Vectorworks, and those people, like me, who are experienced users of Vectorworks but who’ve shied away from some of the most productive parts of the package because they seemed “too difficult”.

One final word of caution – make sure you have the appropriate version of the Vectorworks software - the book is for Vectorworks 2009, so you can’t read the exercise and sample project files if you’re running Vectorworks 2008 or below, though you could possibly manage with a 2009 demo version on another machine. If you’re lucky enough to have Vectorworks 2010, it should work OK, but I presume there’s a revision or new edition coming along to pick up on the enhanced 2010 features.

Steve Rice, Blooming Good Gardens, Southampton, UK