Visualization
About built-in and 3rd party, classic and real-time rendering solutions, settings, workflows, etc.

Is there a comprehensive book on rendering in Archicad?

4hotshoes
Advisor
I had a book on rendering years ago. I don't remember the author. It was created by a user. It was very helpful and explained in detail what each setting and combination of settings would do with plenty of full color images of results and dialog boxes. There were tips and tricks. Does any thing like this exist now?

It dealt with:
Texture creation
Texture mapping
Sun and environments
Lighting
Optimizing for speed while maintaining quality
Understanding which settings are useful and which are not
Camera settings
And even help with Photoshop

I don't use rendering in Archicad enough to remember how to use it best. I could easily spend multiple hours changing settings to experiment before I get what I want and then forget how I got there or not knowing which setting got what I wanted. It would be great to have a reference from a common sense approach.
Todd Oeftger
AC27 Mac MacBook Pro 15", 2019, 2.3 GHz i9, 32GB, Radeon Pro 560X 4GB, 500GB SSD, 32" Samsung Display (2560x1440)
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Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
His name is Dwight Atkinson from Canada. He was very active on ARCHICAD-Talk up to a few years ago. He wrote several books:

- The Artlantis Attitude (could not find it on Amazon)
- Illustration in ARCHICAD
https://www.amazon.com/Illustration-ArchiCAD-Dwight-Thomas-Atkinson/dp/9630092557/ref=sr_1_7?qid=155...
- Lightworks in ARCHICAD
https://www.amazon.com/Lightworks-Archicad-Dwight-Atkinson/dp/0973756403/ref=sr_1_6?qid=1559918707&r...

Unfortunately, there is no CineRender for ARCHICAD book, either by him or anyone else.
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27
4hotshoes
Advisor
Yes. I remember now. I use to talk with Dwight. I wonder if he might consider doing an update. Maybe not but I wish. It was very helpful. Is he still a member?
Todd Oeftger
AC27 Mac MacBook Pro 15", 2019, 2.3 GHz i9, 32GB, Radeon Pro 560X 4GB, 500GB SSD, 32" Samsung Display (2560x1440)
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
Yes, he is still a member, his User Name is "Dwight", but the last time he was active was about 1.5 years ago.
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27
4hotshoes
Advisor
I don't know if he will get it, but I sent him a personal message. Thanks
Todd Oeftger
AC27 Mac MacBook Pro 15", 2019, 2.3 GHz i9, 32GB, Radeon Pro 560X 4GB, 500GB SSD, 32" Samsung Display (2560x1440)
With the popularity of eBooks (Apple Books, Kindle, etc.) I think this would be more lucrative than before. In the 90s I was working on a book for my MaxATS templates. I had the support from Graphisoft and everything, but it was just too costly for me to publish myself with the marketshare and selling potential for ArchiCAD. I did print short runs and distributed them in my seminars and HighTechHighNature. Now with digital distribution, you'd think there'd be a surplus of books for ArchiCAD niche topics. Hmmm, maybe there's an opportunity here!

As for rendering, I really see Twinmotion as the future, and there should be a lot of tutorials for that since it's utilized by the big 3 (Revit, Sketchup and ArchiCAD). I also think AR is the future, but that's another topic!
Rex Maximilian, Honolulu, USA - www.rexmaximilian.com
ArchiCAD 27 (user since 3.4, 1991)
16" MacBook Pro; M1 Max (2021), 32GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, 32-Core GPU
Apple Vision Pro w/ BIMx
Creator of the Maximilian ArchiCAD Template System
Erwin Edel
Rockstar
The way cinerender is setup, it is possible to get fairly decent results without knowing all the bells and whistles as a starting point.

There is a library with a lot of surfaces set up to look good in cinerender. Ussually these are enough or easy enough to just change a colour somewhere in the colour channel settings to get what you need.

There are also preset scenes for outdoor and indoor renders with fast, medium and final tags.

I started out with these things and since we need our renders to be fast, but also decent looking I researched a bit which advanced settings changes from the fast preset yield results. This is the advice I've given on several posts on this forum.

The help documentation and youtube tutorials are heaps better than the information that was out there for Lightworks at the time. We also used artlantis for a while, but that was 3rd party software, so can't really expect GS to provide information there.

Coming back to scenes, once you find something that works, you can save it as a scene and export / import that for future use.
Erwin Edel, Project Lead, Leloup Architecten
www.leloup.nl

ArchiCAD 9-26NED FULL
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