topic Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ? in Collaboration with other software

Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

PB — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:52:18 GMT

Advice / opinions please:

I am working on a large beach front project for which I wish to create good still renderings and animations. The project is located in West Africa and has a considerable number of palm trees, 66 apartments in 3 blocks, reception building and 30 villas.

I am currently looking at Artlantis Studio (adequate quality / features compensated by ease of use & speed?), and Vue 6,5 Infinite by E-on which appears to have the ability to produce excellent settings / renderings with considerably more features than Artlantis.

I shall try the trial version of Vue, but was hoping that some of you may be able to share your experience & opinions of Vue - particularly in comparison with Artlantis.

From the recent press release I see that Artlantis are introducing some new features (version 2.0) but these do not seem to be in the same league as Vue....

Is Vue appreciably more difficult to learn / implement than Artlantis? Is Vue much slower in generating stills / animations?

In my particular case, the ability to animate beach front waves & have atmospheric/wind effects appears very tempting...... but please bear in mind that I am a novice in the field of rendering!

All help gratefully received,

Patrice

http://www.e-onsoftware.com
http://www.artlantis.com

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Thomas Holm — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:57:41 GMT

If you're a rendering novice, start with a simple-to-use program that has easy lighting options (radiosity) but still is fast enough to allow you to do many trial-and-errors in a reasonable amount of time. (That's Artlantis.)

Search in this forum for Dwight's advice on this subject.

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

PB — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:11:47 GMT

Thomas, thank you for your reply.

I had found a number of threads with good advice regarding render programs, including the knowledgeable advice of Dwight, prior to posting. It was based upon this very advice that I have invested in Artlantis Studio - I am currently preparing stills and animation for my current project. I should perhaps have been a little more specific in my query:

Artlantis is providing good results for the buildings themselves, but I am finding its capabilities in landscaping a relatively large site frustrating (perhaps just my inexperience?), and I admit to being seduced by the thought of opening and closing my animations with flights to & from the site over moving ocean / beach waves and palms billowing in the breeze !!! Furthermore, I have nearly a kilometre rock sea walls featuring prominently in the scheme and I am struggling to find the best way to model/portray them - I had picked up on the displacement rendering featuring in Vue (amongst others). If anyone could suggest a means of rendering rock sea walls that is sufficiently realistic when seen from a couple of metres away, but does not involve actual 3D rocks applied over a sea wall 8m wide and 1000m long I would be most grateful.

In posting, I was seeking an appraisal from those experts such as yourself & Dwight who might be able to clearly give a comparison between Artlantis & Vue in its latest iteration (6.5) from the perspective of an ArchiCad user. I have also sought to gain sufficient understanding from the Artlantis & Vue forums. Below are some insightful replies from Jim on the Artlantis forum, and Lee on behalf of e-on (Vue):

"We have been trying to successfully get Vue into a profitable workflow since version 5.0. It has never really paid for us.
The program seems to have been developed on the PC platform, and ported (very poorly) to the mac. The interface is very hard to learn, and many of the features are hidden.
render quality can be very good, as well as animations. However, the render speed is THE SLOWEST WE HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED! To resolve this we set up a 100 CPU render farm with a mix of AMD's Intels, and our multi-core mac workstations. The render network uses nodes (small apps) that are called "render cows". They are supposed to be totally cross platform, however we had to find our own solution to get the application to see them on the network. What we finally did was to install apples "Bonjour" on every PC in the farm. After that they would all go to work rendering the jobs...for a while.
They would constantly crash and take down the rendering on the master workstation.
Moreover, getting a good render in vue takes a lot of learning. The material editors are really too in depth for architectural work. A very small adjustment in a bump map would give really overpowering results. Rendering materials are copy protected, and not all can be exported to other applications. Imports are passable, with the program handling most formats good enough, but not outstanding. The best format to import seems to be .3ds, and obj. Sketchup imports can be terrible, despite the claim to being able to import them directly.
To Vue's credit, it is terrific for more organic scenes, as you can actually populate an entire ecosystem with all types of "live growth" plant life. Atmospheres and lighting are out of this world cool! But getting them to render is like pulling
teeth! Right now I have a small scene running on a 8 core mac pro with 16 gigs of ram, and it will be done in 2 hours. The same scene in modo was done in 15 minutes.
IF I were to try Vue seriously, I would plan on a big learning curve, deep pockets for render farms, and crappy support..oh and stay completely on the PC platform.
You must remember here that we are a high volume rendering house, and have to make the jobs pay. If you are just a casual user, you might not be as critical, or impatient as we are."

"As to the the idea of exporting Vue to Artlantis, I don't think it is possible. Even if you could, the fact that there is no network render in Artlantis, would preclude any animation rendering.
The only real strength of Artlantis is still renders. Moreover these renders are very limited as far as realistic landscapes.
If you are real serious at becoming real marketable in this field (and you are not opposed to using PC's), I would become an expert at 3d studio max. The only reason we have not done it is that we are all mac guys, many times to our own detriment.
Studio Max handles Autocad DWG native, with no translation problems. Not matter what ANY software company tells you, their import of Autocad DWG will NEVER be clean and seamless. That is because Autodesk will not share the code. All DWG importers are reverse engineered to work.
Studio Max also supports network rendering, and animation with ease.
If you are a mac person, I think your best bet is Modo, from Luxology. Or possibly run bootcamp on one of the new Intel model macs, and learn Studio Max.
But you must remember that these programs are MODELLERS as well as great renderers. They are a huge step above the capabilities of Artlantis."

Thanks to Jim on the Artlantis forum for the above advice, and to Lee from e-on for the following:

"Hi Patrice,

Since there is no direct interface between Archicad and Vue, any buildings would have to be imported into Vue. Vue supports .obj, .3ds, .lwo and others. You could import the textures as well, or do your texturing in Vue.

You could also import your terrain as an object into Vue, then plant your vegetation as desired.

With no direct link between the two programs, if a change was made to a model in Archicad, you would have to re-import the changed model into Vue.

Objects in Vue can be exported in many formats for use in other programs. You would be unable to export a terrain covered in an ecosystem of lush foliage to another program - the size would be prohibitive. Vue can handle these terrains beautifully because of the instancing technology.

Best regards.
Lee Randall"

Between the three forums I believe that I have gained a better understanding of the pros & cons of the two software solutions. In my case, and perhaps most Architects, Artlantis would be more appropriate for most of the time on most projects. In this particular instance I am caught between the devil and the deep blue sea (almost literally!) in that I would definitely benefit from the ease of use and speed of Artlantis but the project perhaps merits the advantages that Vue could bring to bear...

I am making solid progress with Artlantis but shall also have a shot at Vue 6.5, and let you know how I get on!

Kind regards,

Patrice

PS I hope too many of you haven't fallen asleep reading this post!

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

PB — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:33:53 GMT

PS I have suggested to e-on that they create an export/import plugin for ArchiCad: Perhaps others might also contact them with the same request....

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Dwight — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:59:44 GMT

Archicad renders should be as seamless and effortless as possible for the architect
.
Artlantis 2.0 seems to be such a product.

To be a thoroughly skilled animator/renderer might mean changing careers.

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Eduardo Rolon — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:39:39 GMT

Dwight wrote:
Archicad renders should be as seamless and effortless as possible for the architect
.
Artlantis 2.0 seems to be such a product.

To be a thoroughly skilled animator/renderer might mean changing careers.

I keep telling my students this and they still don't believe me …

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:10:18 GMT

Hi Dwight and Thomas,

I can't find an answer to question: Artlantis 2.0 multiprocessor, YES or NO? (one Italian website says Yes)

Reason is that I am about to buy new iMac or Mac Pro (if my application can use those eight processors).

Andy

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:11:38 GMT

Hi Andy,

ArtLantis supports multiple processors (I am not sure how many, maybe 4). Even the current version does it. Version 2 has just been announced, but no release date has been given.

Anssi

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Karl Ottenstein — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:48:34 GMT

Anssi wrote:
ArtLantis supports multiple processors (I am not sure how many, maybe 4)....

I do not believe that there is any limit on the number of processors. 8 core people have been posting benchmarks that show very good utilization and speedup even with the current version (1.2.6). 😉

A teaser listing some of the new features of 2 has been posted by Abvent here:

http://www.artlantis.com/products/introduction.php

(I worry that the bubble-head man's neck is going to snap...not the best posture for a runner!)

Each thumbnail there is yet another movie showing a feature...

Karl

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:11:08 GMT

Hi there,

thanks for answers, YES it is going to be Mac Pro.

By the way, may I share my happines since I will be mac user once again (1989 started on MacIIfx with whooping 40Mhz, 2002 was G5 ).

Andy

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

stefan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:14:08 GMT

Vue is optimized for landscapes, Artlantis is optimized for rendering of mostly mesh-based flat CAD models.

Ideally, you would integrate the CAD model in a Vue scene, but it is a complex beast to learn. In practice, Artlantis might give you faster and good results for architectural renderings, but I agree that it is not the best tool for detailed landscape visualization.

If you want to have the leafs billowing in the breeze, Artlantis will not help you at all.

Vue is targeting collaboration with high-end animation software, e.g. 3ds Max and the others. Not Artlantis.

For a still, you could try to combine renderings from both with Photoshop, but for animations it is almost impossible.

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

PB — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:12:53 GMT

Thanks Stefan,

Indeed I would agree whole-heartedly with you: I have invested in both Artlantis Studio & Vue Infinite recently and am (very) busy learning both!

Artlantis takes a few full days to be comfortably up & running, and provides quick, efficient rendering and animation. 'Artlantis R & Studio, The Missing Book' has been invaluable in getting upto speed with the necessary advice for using glass/neonshaders, etc.

I am currently using Art Studio 1.2.6 with V2.0 on order, and to date it is great for rendering buildings in a relatively simple setting: Ideal for communication between architect & client, and for city scenes which are dominated by buildings, with only a scattering of plants. And of course there is an elegant interconnectivity between ArchiCAD & Artlantis. The combination of ease of use, speed and quality, for interior work is pretty much ideal for me.

However, so far, Artlantis is too weak on creating/portraying 'seductive' landscape settings for its buildings - although the features in V2.0 appear to address this to some extent. To date, my two real criticisms of Artlantis are the cost of becoming sufficiently well equiped with shaders/objects, which is almost prohibitively expensive: I feel that they are milking the higher budgets available to professionals as opposed to personal purchasers. And, an almost complete ineptitude in marketing/sales by Abvent (my personal experience & opinion).

Having come to the above conclusion regarding Artlantis, I have also taken the plunge with Vue Infinite: I currently require the ability to create very seductive external views (& eventually animations) of a development on the West African coast.

I am very much in the learning stage at the moment, but my current opinion is that Vue will allow one to very quickly set up and render excellent detailed and planted scenes created within Vue by the presets of their tools. By adopting any one of a multitude of preset atmospheres or scenes, excellent results are quickly achievable.

However, straying from the well beaten path - essential for us since we wish to import buildings/terrains from ArchiCAD and insert them into models of existing sites, is so far proving to be a much more taxing matter: There is a pretty steep learning curve, and I am currently having what Vue terms 'resource' problems when importing 4 buildings as 3ds objects. I am currently trying to find out how to resolve this issue ...... and would be most grateful for any advice from any ArchiCAD user who is using Vue in their work flow.

My current feeling with Vue is that the learning curve is similar to that for ArchiCAD - a little bewildering at first, and one needs to attain a certain level of competence before it becomes comfortable (and efficient): Although it is agreeable to see that it is much less expensive to purchase materials/objects for Vue than for Artlantis....

Hope this helps any other 'novice' renderers in the ArchiCAD community considering these issues: As I was advised on this forum, Artlantis will give good results with a relatively friendly learning curve, & is 'optimised' for use with ArchiCAD. Vue (& others?) have the potential to offer results that are of a greater order of magnitude but the learning curve (and system resources?) are not to be under-estimated.

When I've progressed sufficiently, I'll post some 'works-in-progress': But you'll have to be gentle with me!

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

stefan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:19:43 GMT

A long time ago (in a galaxy far far away) I used Vue 2.1 and 3.1 with an ArchiCAD model: http://www2.asro.kuleuven.be/asro/English/HOME/SBs/render/vuedesprit.htm

It involved loading the 3ds file exported from ArchiCAD. I currently assume this to still be the best approach. Texture mappings survives the translation. You can create better materials in Vue afterwards.

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:19:02 GMT

Am I hearing correctly that LIGHTWORKS is being phased out of the MINDS of our Pro ArchiCad users which will follow by non pro ones like myself?
Thanks,
Joseph

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Dwight — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:55:15 GMT

We will "keyboards and minds" them.

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:17:19 GMT

Dwight wrote:
We will "keyboards and minds" them.

Do not realy understand the comment but assume an Artlantis "(LightWorks) Artlantis In ArchiCAD" book is on someone's mind
Joseph

Re: Artlantis Studio 2.0 or Vue 6.5 (E-on) ?

Dwight — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:24:30 GMT

This is derived from a Vietnam war propaganda phrase where the American forces were to "hearts and minds" the Vietnamese people with gum and chocolate. Didn't work.