Design ACAD 3d design, light, render, plot software help

[acbeen1]

I just started working with a small design firm that uses ACAD for all designs. I have been using Martin Show Designer for year in the live entertainment arena, but it comes up short in the Design area.
The company currently builds 3D ACAD files off all our rooms, and i need to take that file and add lighting, Render some views, but also put the lighting plot on paper for the installers.
I am looking for advice, i am looking at LD Assistant and Wysiwyg but do not want to invest money until i am sure which product will work best for me.
LD Assistant seems to work directly with ACAD, i would love stay in ACAD and work with those files without exporting them and then Importing them into another program. After i have finished the 3D renderings, i would like the paper plot to be added to our ACAD CD release without much trouble also.
Does anyone have experience with a program that will help me speed up my workflow, any advise would be great.

 

[Sony]

The Entertainment Lighting and Stage Design industry has pretty much adopted VectorWorks w/ RenderWorks as the standard for Computer Aided Design. VectorWorks can import ACAD files and modify them and RenderWorks can render those files into Solid 3D. Pretty much all professional lighting designers will use VectorWorks. Few theatre designers use ACAD, VectorWorks is much better for Theatre Design because it can produce all the paperwork and documents you need to implement a plot including Equipment Schedules, Circuit Diagrams and Inventory. I suggest using VectorWorks.

Vectorworks 2009 by Nemetschek North America - Realize Your Most Inspired Visions

 

[bdkdesigns]

I'm curious to see how VW 2009 works with rendering. To this day, I'll dump my file to VW 12.5 before I start rendering. I hate the visualization tab and how you have to go edit the actual instrument itself to change the levels. VW 12.5 was much easier because everything was in object info and you didn't have to go digging through different areas to get a rendering. I also can't get gobo's to render anymore in 08. A fast quality renderworks shows the light being on but when I jump to final quality, I get no output out of the instrument.

 

[Sony]

I'm curious to see how VW 2009 works with rendering. To this day, I'll dump my file to VW 12.5 before I start rendering. I hate the visualization tab and how you have to go edit the actual instrument itself to change the levels. VW 12.5 was much easier because everything was in object info and you didn't have to go digging through different areas to get a rendering. I also can't get gobo's to render anymore in 08. A fast quality renderworks shows the light being on but when I jump to final quality, I get no output out of the instrument.

Did you update your VW2008 to Sevice Pack 3? There were a bunch of glitches in the original release VW2008. SP3 fixes a lot of them! I installed SP3 and everything started working smoother and faster immediately as well as some features worked a lot better.