Thomas wrote:
Bricklyne wrote:
...Will 12 be up to the challenge?
I've read the review. I find Lachmi either heavily biased, or just uninformed. She also reviews Archicad. She shouldn't do that if she's impressed with this. The rendering seems improved but not beyond Lightworks in Archicad.
Obviously nobody is going to argue the point that Lachmi is ridiculously biased to the point of parody or to the point of comical levels. Not to mention the fact that AECbytes are so deep inside AutoTable's pockets that you're more likely to find the Lochness monster in their articles than you are to find objectivity in their reviews.
But she still raised some valid points in that "review". For one thing not many people are going to argue that Lightworks, as it is implemented in ArchiCAD (sans radiosity or a decent material/texture mapping interface, or extensive texture library in general) doesn't even begin to enter into an conversation where Mentalray is involved. For one thing Mentalray is a professional render engine, meaning it's employed by everybody serious about visualizations from professional CGartists and Archvizer's to Hollywood's VFXers. It's not even a competition.
But as I've always argued, all that Graphisoft need to do to counter that effectively is to license ASGVis to write a Vray bridge for ArchiCAD and even have them develop it as a separate module that can be purchased from ASGvis directly themselves as they've done with Sketchup, and Rhino's bridges. ArchiCAD 12 with the option of a Vray bridge to go with the existing Maxwell renderer bridge. Job done.
Thomas wrote:
But judging from this review, this Revit release really seems like a me-too, compared to Archicad 11. No need for a 12 to beat that. Of course, she might have missed the point, like she obviously has regarding Archicad.
Well, that's true, and she also did kind of allude to this by pointing out how the new so-called Swept-blend freeform tool still handles clunkily compared to ArchiCAD's Complex profile manager and wall modification tools when it comes to placing construction elements such as windows and doors onto the created profiled wall, and having them align right.
It's obvious that in certain aspects and features, ArchiCAD still holds the standard, by virtue of its intuitive workflow and interface, but the point would be that this Revit release has still made considerable strides in closing some of those gaps. And basically they are doing so by addressing their own seriously lacking capabilities (such as replacing the vastly outdated Accurender rendering engine with a flavour of Mentalray). My question however was can we as ArchiCAD users also hope that GS will sooner rather than later address some of the long-standing weaknesses of the program (Stairmaker, improved custom door/window maker-designer interface, graphical interface to replace GDL manipulation and creation of parametric library objects and so on and so on......) rather than just releasing a version to play a kind of "Keeping up with the Jones'..." game with Revit?
In any event I wouldn't expect that whatever they release they will be getting any love or positive review from AECbytes or any of the now horribly Autodesk-contaminated Stateside Architectural journals, periodicals or reviews. Last year AC v11 didn't get reviewd in Architectural record until close to 6 months after it had been released, and even then they did a shoddy job of it. I don't expect this to improve any time soon as long as AutoTable keeps lining their pockets with advertising dollar$$.
