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!
AC27 Apple Silicon. Twinmotion.
16" M1 Max MacBook Pro 32GB, Apple Studio Display, MacOS14
