topic Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam in Visualization

CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Thu, 11 May 2023 09:45:48 GMT

Have a couple of days to start learning the new CineRender so I'll probably have a few of these.
I am trying to create a new Standing Seam Roof surface. When I look at it in the library it shows this nice standing seam in the middle of the rendering ball. When I select it the seam disappears and I get the round ball only and a flat roof in my rendering. How do I get the seams to show? When I select the corrugated roof that pattern remains as shown even though it is way too shiny.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 22:49:26 GMT

And on my surface.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Eduardo Rolon — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:43:49 GMT

in Cinerender you need to turn on the Displacement Map (if you want the geometry to deform) or Bump Map (if you want to fake it). using displacement might slow things down considerably so use with caution.

For an example check AC's soccer ball example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMS3NhtMlDI

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 18:13:47 GMT

So I turn on displacement and the standing seam shows up on the ball and you are correct the image now takes MUCH longer to render. But I still get no standing seam in the rendering. I have tried it for different standing seam images and it doesn't seem to work. I also don't understand how you would change the seam spacing. At this point I am not using 18 at all because I can't get a good image out of anything. As I mentioned before corrugated metal roofs seem to work fine and much faster as a bump map.
We need much better support videos because this is all black box to me and my $wonderful$ update is unused because I can't get the fancy new automatic renderer to work. And boy is it SLOOOOWWWW it takes minutes for even small pieces of the model. I see why they had to make it background rendering.
That rendering the ball video is nice but is too fast to be of any use even with me pausing it every 2 seconds.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Barry Kelly — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 01:57:10 GMT

You need to activate displacement in the material which will show on the ball preview as you have done.
But you also need to turn displacement on in the rendering settings as well.
Barry.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 19:02:09 GMT

Except I can't find displacement in the rendering setting. Can you give me a better location?

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Karl Ottenstein — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 21:57:15 GMT

Under Options > General Options

It is disabled for the "Fast" predefined scenes, such as the one you show in your screenshot.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Eduardo Rolon — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 22:00:13 GMT

This one?

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 18:52:39 GMT

Thanks but still no joy. I have attached an image rendered in final. Can someone else test this? My client wants a standing seam roof. The rest of the image is coming along nicely now.
Aslo, at some point I clicked a question mark in one of the windows that took me right to the ArchiCAD rendering help which was very useful except I can't find it now. Does anyone know where that was?
And finally, When you are in surface settings is there any way to know what CineRender material you are using? If I create a new wood siding there seems to be no way to tell which one of the dozen options it is.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 22:05:54 GMT

So I received a phone call that helped me out and on a small roof (10x10) on a new drawing I can get a beautiful standing seam roof. However trying to put this on a relatively small 2,500sf structure ends up with a 3+ hour render that ends in an ArchiCAD crash. To top it off the bug reporter also crashes on launch so I get to kill it as well. So at this point AC18 is unusable to me. I have to be able to show clients 3d imagery and just ok is better than nothing at all. I find it ironic that the alleged main improvement to the program doesn't work and is making me abandon the upgrade. I would love to try some of the new features but I can't get that far.
I have signed up for the rendering seminar so we'll see what happens.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Eduardo Rolon — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 22:08:31 GMT

Instead of using the displacement map, have you tried to use Roof Accessories to add the standing seam an render as usual. Normally that is what I have always done.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 22:34:11 GMT

In the past I have had a hard time getting that to work right on more complex roofs but I'll give it a try.
As I mentioned earlier I wouldn't mind a close fake either. I don't understand why I can get a decent looking corrugated roof that renders in a reasonable time but not a standing seam which seems like it would be simpler.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Eduardo Rolon — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 01:21:46 GMT

Also did you tried using bump maps? They will give a reasonable "fake" to the roof.

See Karl's example here

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=46594&highlight=displacement

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

David Maudlin — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 12:28:24 GMT

ejrolon wrote:
Instead of using the displacement map, have you tried to use Roof Accessories to add the standing seam an render as usual. Normally that is what I have always done.

Another option is to use the Roof Tool to create one standing seam, then Multiply. This allows accurate placement, and will show in elevations as well as 3D.

David

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 17:29:50 GMT

Karl's link uses the displacement button that sends my render time effectively to infinity. But does look great on a very small sample roof. If I could figure out how to make the bump map work I might be fine.
The standing seam roof accessory worked pretty well in my test and rendered quite nicely and quickly. I'll have to remember it. However a lot of these renders are during design when I'm moving roofs around so I'll have to delete and regenerate quickly.
I have realized part of my difficulty is that the fake lines show up in the Open GL view and are ok but disappear in the CineRender view.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

vfrontiers — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 18:11:49 GMT

Ummm... The roof surfacer should stay LINKED to the roof that generates it.. so making changes to the roof plane would follow thru to the surfacer piece(s)...

Yes?

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:58:10 GMT

I appreciate you guys hanging with me on this.
Yes, as long as both layers are on. If you hide the accessory layer, say to make the roof easier to work on or you want to see a different roof finish or your plan layer set doesn't have it turned on and you forget and make a change you lose the link. Over the course of the project in the past I have found that I loose the link a large percentage of the time.
But at least this gives me work arounds. But is this typical that adding the displacement on a relatively small roof turns a simple render in to an all day plus or in my case a crash inducing ordeal? Also does anyone else have a bug that the preparing process which can take seconds can also hang.
Is it reasonable that a very simple shell model renders in 14 minutes at Outdoor HDRI Fast does not render at medium or high?
It seems like several years ago before lightworks someone put up a standard model and people rendered it to see what a reasonable time was. Maybe we need to do that again.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Eduardo Rolon — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 23:03:08 GMT

For 90% of the time the Fast setting is the only one you need to use, provided that you turn on "Ambient Occlusion" 😉
Which I could tell were it is but then I would have to kill you.

---
This took about 10 min render time on a 2008 MacPro 8 Core while working on other AC projects.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Eduardo Rolon — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 23:09:48 GMT

and a white model were nobody misses the standing seams on the roofs.

Re: CineRender Roof Standing Seam

Brad Elliott — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 23:31:42 GMT

OK fast with ambient occlusion is nice. Why is this not the pre-set? I don't know that I will look at anything else at this point.
As for white I really like the idea but this is what I get. Very moody which is not how I want my clients.