Artlantis vs. New User!

[Anonymous]

Hello all,
Just wondering what kind of a learning curve to expect with the Artlantis Studio. I have been working with ArchiCAD for some time now and I need a solution to produce photorealistic images that can be placed on large brochures for a local company. I am fairly familiar with Lightworks (many thanks to Dwight for his awesome book) and wondered how much of a learning curve to expect. I know this is a broad and loaded question, but looking for any advice.
Thanks,
Chris

[Anonymous]

In the little time I have spent with Artlantis (several years ago now) I found it to be very easy to get going on and possible to produce good results almost immediately. The really high end work takes more time (which I didn't have) but it didn't seem that the program was any problem to learn in this regard, it's just an inherently difficult task.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Chris,

Artlantis Studio (and R) are pretty intuitive (especially compared with prior verisons - 4.5, 4.0 etc). Download the demo and the tutorial videos and try it out. An hour or so will get the basics; another hour or so for animations. The Artlantis forums are pretty active.

Drag-and-drop and immediate feedback for materials, lighting, etc are huge benefits.

Most frequent complaint is the lack of a printed manual with complete "how to's" - and occassional Franglish that requires deciphering.

Here's what I would guess is the top issue that someone might have when first taking an ArchiCAD model into Artlantis via ATL export: ArchiCAD materials come across properly oriented, but they are implemented as applied textures. A new Artlantis user might want to drag and drop a new material onto an ArchiCAD mapped surface, but will have to delete the ArchiCAD texture via the shaders panel first before anything will be visible. (Note that there is a fair amount of power there, too - you can apply multiple textures - even by drag and drop from Finder or Explorer and vary the opacity/etc of each - and also drag non-tiling textures - e.g., manhole cover or carpet, and drag them to the desired location on the surface. All visual.)

Cheers,
Karl