topic Re: West Meets East in Visualization

West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Thu, 11 May 2023 12:26:48 GMT

It's been a long looong time since I've posted anything from recent projects and I thought I'd post a few images from this current project which is still a Work-in-Progress. But I had produced some test renders of a couple of views to show material options as well highlight some design issues, and I felt they might be good enough to show off some of ArchiCAD 21's really great new features (particularly the Rail tool).

Yes, I do realize (re: the subject heading) that technically speaking Hungary is in Eastern Europe.
But relative to China it's still "West" and this project is a Buddhist Chinese temple being designed in ArchiCAD (and other software) to be located in upstate New York but designed in the style of Imperial era Ancient Chinese religious style (incorporating both Buddhist and Taoist precepts)
It was and is a really fun project to work on as I learn quite a bit about ancient Chinese architecture and design style to correctly incorporate the correct vernacular and drawing from inspirational sources as far flung as the Forbidden City.
Anyway, enough talk here are the images.
Modeled in ArchiCAD and rendered with Corona Renderer through 3DS Max

....more images to follow

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 05:17:13 GMT

.....continued......

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 05:18:16 GMT

.....and here are some screencaps from the ArchiCAD source model and workspace.....

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 05:18:53 GMT

....last screencap...

As I mentioned the project is a great showcase for ArchiCAD's rail tool which was particularly helpful with the complicated Roof tile cladding as well as the stone railing, (although I paid a heavy price in the performance of ArchiCAD due to the heavy Morph use. GS please improve ArchiCAD's handling of morphs),
along with that it's also a great showcase for Corona renderer which plays great with ArchiCAD and which you may or may not be pleased to hear is now having an ArchiCAD plugin and bridge developed for it by the developers, to allow ArchiCAD users to use it directly from ArchiCAD and not have to rely on 3ds Max or Cinema4D - complete with the interactive Real-time renderer direct from ArchiCAD's 3D window.

I can't wait for it.....

Critiques and comments welcome.
As mentioned the images are W.I.P. and the project is likely to undergo some changes in the coming weeks.
But I hope to post some more final images when it's done.
Thanks for visiting.

Re: West Meets East

Barry Kelly — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 06:44:45 GMT

Bricklyne wrote:
As I mentioned the project is a great showcase for ArchiCAD's rail tool which was particularly helpful with the complicated Roof tile cladding as well as the stone railing, (although I paid a heavy price in the performance of ArchiCAD due to the heavy Morph use. GS please improve ArchiCAD's handling of morphs),

Archicad 21 is so yesterday!

It looks like your wish may have been granted in 22 already - although I am yet to test it.
From the 'New Features Guide' in the reference manual ...

Improved Performance of Morph Elements
In ARCHICAD 22, we significantly increased the performance of the large number of complex Morph
elements. This was achieved by reducing the memory footprint of them, which will require a
magnitude less memory compared to version 21.

Awesome work by the way.
I am sure it would be fun to tackle something like this.

Barry.

Re: West Meets East

Carstenem — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 23:41:31 GMT

Quite an amazing 3D model , love it great work !

If you don't mind you should improve some textures in the render as they "stick out" straight away as none realistic. You can see the tiling on larger surfaces, just use better textures which don't show so repetitive. This usually means you need larger textures like 4K so they don't repeat so often. ( even if they are seamless, smaller textures show almost always a repetitive pattern )
Plus some surfaces could use a bit of a dirt map, like the roof ( composite material in Corona - 1. color/texture 2. then on top dirt texture usually black and white at around 20 to 33 % layer option on multiply )

Cheers Carsten

Re: West Meets East

Laszlo Nagy — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 15:07:50 GMT

Great work, I like this model a lot!

Re: West Meets East

Mats_Knutsson — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 20:34:58 GMT

Cool and unusual project!

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 20:18:49 GMT

Thanks everyone, for all the comments and feedback.

@Barry Kelly

I did try ArchiCAD 22 for a bit but it was on a different project that didn't involve a lot of morph use, and unfortunately I ran into a pretty severe bug (the 3D screen orbit freeze) that other people encountered as well, which forced me back to version 21.
As I understand the latest hot fix is supposed to have fixed that issue, but I haven't been able to get a chance to test it again.
I broke with my usual habit of not getting into the latest version until around December when they're already about 3 or 4 hotfixes in and all the really serious issues have been ironed out, and I suppose in retrospect that was probably the wrong decision.

From my memoery it seemed to handle more geometry a bit more smoother and faster than 21, but since I never tested it with a (really) morph-heavy project, I couldn't tell you how it would handle a project like this. MY suspicion is that the bottleneck still exists - meaning that it handles them fine up until you hit a certain limit or number and the ArchiCAD gets brought down to its knees and becomes a pain to use.

@Carstenem

Thanks a lot for the great critiques and points and I agree with you on all counts.
As I mentioned this series of images were largely still a Work-in-Progress snapshot intended to give the client an idea of what the mass and some of the material colors would look like and they would give back feedback for some updates and revisions.

The project has changed quite a bit since this post and I will be posting more updated or final images down the road when I'm able to.

I most certainly agree about some of the textures and as you can tell a good number of them are straight out of ArchiCAD's own material library with the limited tools for mapping and tiling that ArchiCAD has (and I didn't spend that much time tweaking them in 3ds Max with the exported model, as I normally would with other renders).
I'm currently trying to build up by material library with higher quality and higher resolution seamless textures to use in situations like this along with HDRI maps as well. Using a high quality (photo-)'Realistic' renderer like Corona always runs the risk of exposing just how 'unrealistic' your model is by way of exposing some of the CGI-ness and computer-iness things like the texture are when rendered in real light.

I'm certainly looking forward to the ArchiCAD-Corona bridge they're are currently working on and hope it will allow for a more fluid workflow between ArchiCAD and what I imagine will be a stand-alone engine that connects to ArchiCAD in a similar manner to how the Maxwell renderer currently works.

@LaszloNagy and @Mats_Knutsson

Thank you both so much for your comments.

Re: West Meets East

Eduardo Rolon — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 20:49:33 GMT

Impressive.

Re: West Meets East

Carstenem — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 21:07:00 GMT

Yes a Corona bridge would be nice. As this is a WIP it makes more sense now as some textures are not yet finalized I am sure the final versions will look amazing, looking forward to see them !

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:01:43 GMT

Hi guys,...

Just a little update to this thread.
As I indicated these images were done with Corona renderer - that would be Corona for 3ds Max.

So for those that may not be aware or who may not already know, the Corona renderer Development team were working on a plugin for direct render from ArchiCAD, and they just announced this morning that they have a public Alpha version ready and available for download and testing and they would really appreciate any feedback the ArchiCAD community can give them on it.

It's a really thorough alpha version (the most thorough I've ever seen, and even more polished than some final releases of some software I've encountered), and has a lot of features already, although it's worth mentioning (and warning) that since it is an alpha version after all, some bugs might be encountered, which if you do encounter any, let them know as this will help them clear it up.

The thread discussing it is here:-
https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=61404&p=288890#p288890

And the plugin can be downloaded from here (you have to register to their forum first):-

https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php?topic=22424

Just an additional note:-
They currently only have the PC/Windows version but have indicated in their forum that a Mac version is high on their list of requests.
They also have working versions for ArchiCAD versions 20-22, and EXPERIMENTAL versions for ArchiCAD versions 18-19.

KNowledge of their 3ds Max version is helpful but not necessary as Corona is generally an easy-to-use and learn renderer and pretty straight-forward and the ArchiCAD intergration was done really nicely (from what I can see so far.

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:03:04 GMT

More info pages including tutorials:-

https://corona-renderer.com/blog/corona-renderer-for-archicad-alpha-2-released/?fbclid=IwAR24w7RryVtUIMriKJWg6QLX9dzzgupypn_ei1Bq1XU0AfWH7QtKL5mm3Fg

Feedback and feature requests:-
https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php?board=45.0

Oh, and I forgot to add that it's free to download and test since it's an alpha version and they're only interested in bug-testing at the moment.

So I would jump on the opportunity if I were you.

Re: West Meets East

Eduardo Rolon — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:04:26 GMT

Thanks BC,

Though lack of a Mac version means that it will be more difficult for me to test.

Re: West Meets East

Bricklyne Clarence — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:13:34 GMT

ejrolon wrote:
Thanks BC,

Though lack of a Mac version means that it will be more difficult for me to test.

I know and it's unfortunate.
But they mentioned in their forum that a Mac version is high on their priority list of things to get done.

Their development process is contingent on their resources and who they have available, so if you happen to know any Mac developers familiar with ArchiCAD's API and who might be interested in working with them, let them know as they are always hiring and it's worth noting that the only reason we got an ArchiCAD(for PC) version at all is because some of their current developers are familiar with ArchiCAD (and I imagine are ArchiCAD users themselves).
To put it in perspective, they currently have no plans to develop a Revit plugin despite it's greater usage (at least here in North America), because ( I would guess) they don't have any developers who are Revit users or familiar with it.

Just goes to show how useful it sometimes is to have many ArchiCAD users out there or just people familiar with ArchiCAD.