topic Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed in Visualization

ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Thu, 11 May 2023 10:41:05 GMT

Some of you may have noticed that I previously posted about what I considered to be insanely high rendering times for the sketch renderer when shadow casting is on. Today I am now officially an ArchiCAD 9 user and I have some good news to report. I tested the sketch rendering speed using the latest version of ArchiCAD 8 against version 9 using the Kohr-I-Noor rendering style in its default configuration.

The image rendered in ArchiCAD 8 took 30 minutes to render while the same image took only 4.5 minutes to render using version 9. That's a 666% speed improvement. I don't know if there is a problem with my installation of version 8 (there is no functional reason to suggest that there is and I've never had an OS X program become corrupted) but this improvement is pretty impressive from my point of view. What are your experiences with ArchiCAD 8 vs. 9 performance-wise?

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Dwight — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 16:00:39 GMT

Of course its faster - it always should have been when compared to similar Sketch rendering products.
They must have fixed it or something - probably told it to ignore smaller bits in the vector image.

Another way to speed up the sketch render is to make the actual rendering smaller than usual.

Who's going to notice? It is all a mess anyways? joke.

Ben?

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 06:48:22 GMT

Ditto, from California regarding speed.

ArchiCAD V9 deserves a very loud applaud! Thanks GS!

Opening the activity monitor shows the calculation hitting both processors of a Macintosh G5. This happens with both the LightWorks Rendering engine and the Sketch Engine.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Jefferson — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:40:14 GMT

Any PC guys noticing similar speed increases?

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:57:59 GMT

This is too much, Yes!

Calc. Times

Vectorial shadow casting
Generated : 215600 segments 44114 polygons
Start time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:46:49 AM
End time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:30 AM
Elapsed time : 41 seconds
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Polygon painting
Sun direction : vertical 43.3 horizontal 231.16
Start time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:30 AM
End time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:36 AM
Elapsed time : 6 seconds
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hidden polygon removal
Sun direction : vertical 43.3 horizontal 231.16
Start time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:36 AM
End time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:42 AM
Elapsed time : 6 seconds
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Aaron Bourgoin — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 18:25:38 GMT

Great news. If for noo other reason than rendering, I'm looking forward to the arrival of Dual Core CPUs next year. Two chips on one die sitting on this year's motherboard! Yippee!

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 07:17:33 GMT

One bad note in the otherwise happy review of the new sketch renderer's speed is that it appears that the bug is back where lines that should be hidden are drawn. Like for instance the automatically hidden line between walls and slabs with the same material. I hope this gets hammered out in the first patch to version 9. Are others experiencing this? I noticed it in my rendering and the posted renderings in this thread.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Jefferson — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 14:02:05 GMT

.........not only that, but check out the "swing" on the lower door

It seems the sketch engine draws averything it "sees".

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 19:49:08 GMT

Playing with the Example Model included with ArchiCAD 9. The top image was generated in about 4 minutes with the LightWorks sun object that was brought to my attention by Dwight.

Then I exported the model using 3ds, imported the model into the FREE C4D Demo program found at: TIME for 9

http://www.maxon.net/index_e.html

Drop in a floor object, a sky object, turn on just the Sun Object, set radiosity for stochastic, wait about 8 minutes. Screen grab (no save function in Demo). Radiosity or any other great effect offered by C4D can be used.

Eventually become hooked on C4D, buy the real thing,.. etc.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 19:56:22 GMT

Jefferson wrote:
.........not only that, but check out the "swing" on the lower door

It seems the sketch engine draws averything it "sees".

Well actually I think the door swings are suppose to be shown if the option in the object is selected (in can easily be turned off). They will show in internal rendering engine so they will show on sketch rendering. The lines I am talking about don't show in the internal 3D window but do when using sketch rendering engine. Funny thing is that they only appear when the option for shadows in on using the sketch renderer.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:25:08 GMT

a rebuild immediately before you use the sketch renderer seems to kill the extraneous lines

bill

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 22:17:45 GMT

mark

if you're using radiosity in c4d you really should try using the sky object as a light source

create a material with a luminance channel (only) at about 250% (pale blue colour/color)

apply to the sky object

add a render tag to the sky and kill all options except gi

render with radiosity with a diffuse depth of 1 or 2 (external scenes) or 3+ (interiors)

wait for an excessively long time for scene to render

bill

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 22:34:16 GMT

bill wrote:
a rebuild immediately before you use the sketch renderer seems to kill the extraneous lines

bill

This rebuild technique doesn't work for me. You must keep in mind that it only renders with extra lines when shadows are on in the sketch renderer (and when you don't rebuild before rendering the same image without shadows after rendering it with shadows). I am almost positive that this is a program bug, because it was like this in version 8 and 8.1 until it was fix in the last or second to last update to version 8.1.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 23:22:29 GMT

michael

a rebuild works for me (ac8)

if it doesn't work for you then, yes, it's probably a bug

bill

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 00:29:20 GMT

nik

save as 3ds from an ac 3d window and import into c4d

saving textures seems to cause problems so switch that that off in the save as options

save 'by material' is the simplest approach to exporting

set up your materials, lighting and render settings in c4d. it's easy, not

next question

bill

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 01:06:03 GMT

bill wrote:
michael

a rebuild works for me (ac8)

if it doesn't work for you then, yes, it's probably a bug

bill

Bill you must note that I am talking about ArchiCAD 9 not 8. In version 8 it has already been fixed so you are correct. My comment was that it seems to be back in version 9. In ArchiCAD 9 vs 8 the sketch rendering engine w/ shadows is over 600% faster. To me it just wasn't practical to wait hours for sketch renderings w/ shadows in version 8 at such an early phase of a project. With ArchiCAD 9 it is because on larger projects I've seen speed increases over 1000%. For now I just use Photoshop to get rig of them and even thought I've only had ArchiCAD 9 for a week I've already saved many hours of sketch rendering time.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 03:52:06 GMT

In C4D, look for the light objects, if you see several, look for the sun, click on the sun to open, run the color sliders to white, close and then click on the two grey dots next to the sun object. They should be green. Now try to render.

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

stefan — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 10:14:31 GMT

wr1nkles wrote:
next question, why is it black when i render it?

thanx

It might also bve that the 3ds-file which contains the ArchiCAD sunlight is giving a spotlight on a long distance and with a very small lightcone. Delete it and use a sun/spot of Cinema4D instead.

And in case you didn't knew this page:

http://www2.asro.kuleuven.ac.be/asro/English/HOME/SBs/tutorial/tips/ac2c4d.htm
(It's my workflow)

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:42:46 GMT

nik

"next question, why is it black when i render it?"

more possible answers

switch on auto-light in the render preferences - useless for a final render but can be used while you're setting up the scene (especially if you're doing a radiosity render with a sky object with no 'lights') - the auto-light is simply a light placed at the camera position which will illuminate all seen surfaces equally

if you're using a 'sun object' for lighting it defaults to the middle of the night. how dumb is that?. double click it's sun tag and change it to some time during the day!

check the position of your camera

bill

Re: ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 22:45:56 GMT

Post screen grab of the area in question, pleeeeeze.

MB