B. Ludin

How come in IC2019, SketchFab, GrabCAD, and Cadenas are greyed out? Do I need to configure them somehow?

perpetual +1

Now I get the same result as you. I must have accidentally hit the lowQ button. Sorry for the false alarm. Would you happen to know why the web deployment from file doesn't work with Chrome, while it does with other browsers?

Ok,local deployment works now. I had tried it earlier on (pre-SP1), and then it didn't work either. Anyway, what we need is server deployment. And the rendering in Chrome looks very bad. No edges, hardly any shading.

it's not fiel-specific in my hands. Just made a new scene from scratch. Shows the same problem. I have dropped it in the mail for you

Windows Regional Settings are set to English (US). Chrome is up to date.

I can't get models to load in Chrome (under Win10pro). The loading progress bars shows up but stays empty forever. Same files work fine with Firefox and Edge. Any ideas what this could be? (IC2018SP1)

Interesting. We don't see this for nvidia mobile boards. The quadro cards don't seem to offer any advantage over the GTXs. It seems much better to spend the money on a top range GTX than on a mid-range quadro. In most cases, it seems to be the CPU which is the FPS limiting part in our environment.

You may get an idea from trying out the pre-define functions (e.g. the Sine Wave Cylinder)

Thanks. But what we are trying to do is very different. More like singe-picture random-angle stereogrammetry with a lot of prior knowledge. To give you an simplified idea. We have a picture taken at a random angle with a table and a box on it. We have a model of the table and we want to model the box. For that we need to align the scene such that the model of the table exactly overlies the table in the picture. Adjusting the camera position, angle and perspective is a tedious trial&error process with the existing camera tools but with a proper tool, it would only take 8 mouse clicks.

hi IC folks - Happy New Year to ya all Every now and then I would like to align an IC model/scene with a picture. I use a tool to make the IC window 50% transparent and the I try to align the model with the underlying picture using the camera tools - and usually fail miserable. Does anybody know how to go about that? (aligning, not failing ;-) ) It would be fabulous if there was a tool where I could select 4 points in the model and click the position where they should appear on the sceen and the tool would adjust the camera parameters accordingly.

Are you aware that you have to export the model in the IronCAD MOBILE format (*.icsw, not .ics) before you can open it on the iPad?

Thanks for the link. But as I said, we have the strong impression that the graphics card is not the speed limiting component, because IC's rendering engine doesn't seem to male use of the capabilities of the GPU. Does SW use the same rendering engine as IC?

It's now time for the acquisition of new notebooks for our company. For a long time we have been wondering about whether it would be worth investing in Quadro graphics cards, or whether the GeForce cards would work just as well or possibly even better. We got the hint that Quadros would be better at OpenGL while GeForces would shine with DirectX but apart from that, there seemed to be very little solid info on that subject. Luckily, Schneider in Germany lent us two notebooks that were absolutely identical but for the graphics cards, so we were able to directly compare a Quadro K1000 to a Geforce GTX770. We are always working with smooth shading and drawing parts edges and we usually have a lot of transparent parts in the scene. So that was the base for our tests. The interesting outcome was that we couldn't see a significant difference between the two cards. The quality of the images rendered by the two cards were identical, pixel by pixel even, as far as we could say, whether we compared under OpenGL, OpenGL2 and DirectX. We also used tools to check the load on the GPU and on the CPU. Our findigs: Transparency rendering was best (but for an annoying bug) AND fastest under OpenGL. Part edges are rendered by the CPU and not by the GPU. An this is what limits the speed. As long as we rendered part edges while rotating the scene, one CPU core would go to 100% while the GPU load rarely exceeded 25%. As soon as we switched part edges off, the frame rate would go up several times, CPU load would go down and GPU load go up to 60-90%. According to a (older) white paper by Nvidia, one of the differences between Quadro and Geforce cards should be, that the former are able to render edges. It appears that IronCADs rendering engine doesn't make use of that capability of the Quadro cards. Or at least, we haven't found a setting the would put this burden on the GPUs shoulders. IronFolks, can you comment on that? Our conclusion: at the moment, it looks like the frame rate when rendering part edges is limited by the CPU not by the GPU, so it seems more beneficial to invest in a faster CPU than in a great graphics card. Any comments and contributions are welcome, but please don't ask me for a protocol of all the settings we've tried. We were three people investing maybe 20 hours in total, but still, there so many possible combinations,that we could only test a small fraction. Cheers, Beat

Hi ICfolks What's the current word on GeForce vs. Quadro cards? Has anybody run any tests? Do the latter provide a significant advantage? And if so, in what respect? This pertains primarily to the upcoming IC2014, of course, since that is what we will be working with shortly, I hope :-) And I should add that we're mostly interested in realtime smooth shading rendering, not in photorealistic rendering. But if somebody knows about the latter, it won't hurt either. Cheers, Beat

No, and I hope I won't. So clearly, when you save a scene, it should be written to disk, even if the scene is linked into another scene that is open at a same time, right? I just want to make sure, I'm not doing anything wrong.

I just had a very annoying incident. I had two scenes open in IC2012(64)PU2. Scene A was linked into scene B. I've been working on the geometry of A for two days, sometimes in A, sometimes in B. I saved A (but not every hour or so. Then things suddenly went haywire and IC started producing error messages galore. Since I had just saved A a few minutes earlier, I simply quit IC without saving A or B. Then I restarted IC an re-opened A - just to find that all my recent work was lost Indeed, the timestamp on the files was more than 24h old! Was that my fault, i.e. is that behavior expected? Or di something in IC go wrong? Beat

Couldn't you release PU1 and provide the CAXA update with a hotfix or PU2 later on? We really don't care about draft here (except when we go to the pub).

If you can get your work done in half the time, you will only have to wear them half-day I have yet to see a movie that really gains significantly from being in 3D. And still, there's a boom. Seeing your CAD model in 3D, however, may really facilitate your work. And shutter-glasses are getting lighter and more comfortable. Look at the new series from Samsung, for instance. So don't underestimate the potential. Beat

Hi ICfolks Does IC support stereoscopic displays or are there plans to implement that in the foreseeable future? Beat

Look here: Subscriber Downloads The trial versions have also worked fine in the past. Don't foget the hotfix. Beat

I'm looking for a new schleppable (=portable desktop replacement) and have noted that Dell now offers the Precision M6600 mobile workstation with the new Nvidia Quadro 5010M graphics card - but the price is very high indeed: ~$2'500 more than for the next-in-line 4000M card. The main differences between the two cards seem to be the RAM (4GB vs. 2GB) and the ECC (Error Correcting Code) and Fast Double Precision features. Obviously, more RAM will help in certain situations, but does anybody know whether the other options will significantly improve IC's everyday performance? In more general terms: will IC profit from Quadro cards at all, or will consumer-level cards perform just a well? Beat

if that is a general fix, can i get it, too? Please.

I'd like to add some metric fine threads to to Custom Hole tool, e.g M3x0.35, M4x0.35, M4x0.5, etc. How can I do this? If found a file called "CustomHole.txt" but editing edit doesn't seem to change anything. Beat

Yes, that is one crucial point. The toolbars are arranged in a logical fashion (for me, that is) around the screen. I find that a lot more effective than the ribbon interface. I still haven't got used to it in MS Office either... Beat