ArchiCAD 18 announced

[Laszlo Nagy]

Find the official announcement and new features at:

http://www.graphisoft.com/archicad/archicad-18/overview/

[Eduardo Rolon]

Ivan wrote:
…
Can we export this grass and carpet as real 3d objects into Artlantis, or it works only in Cinerender.

The carpet is not an object it is a C4D Material (Procedural with Displacement) optimized for use in Archicad so it will not export to Artlantis.

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costingh

AFAIK Cinerender was optimized so that you could keep working on your construction documents or doing design development while it was rendering the views. If I understood correctly at a minimum AC will leave 1 core for the OS, will use 1 for itself so you can keep working, another for PBC-section/elev generation and the rest for rendering.

[MSotero]

ejrolon wrote:
If I understood correctly at a minimum AC will leave 1 core for the OS, will use 1 for itself so you can keep working, another for PBC-section/elev generation and the rest for rendering.

So if the "minimum" reserved cores is 3, wouldn't that mean the maximum number of cores ever available for rendering with my 4 core iMac is 1? Or did you mean something else?

[Eduardo Rolon]

In your case yes and this is based on my understanding of what was said and I could be wrong. C4D basically works like this in that it will use what is available and my experience using it with Vray is that I can let C4D render switch to AC and keep working instead of waiting for it to finish.

[MSotero]

Karl wrote:
A standard material library, tuned for CineRender, comes with AC 18.

Well, if it is really "tuned for CineRender" that would deserve applause!

Not to sound negative, but in the past, I would not describe the materials to be tuned for Lightworks or Archicad.

Your increasing my expectations and hopes. Looking forward to it.

The grass thing sounds cool. Does it only do common grass or can it be manipulated to look like similar forms of ground cover?

[Karl Ottenstein]

MSotero wrote:
The grass thing sounds cool. Does it only do common grass or can it be manipulated to look like similar forms of ground cover?

Just grass-like things. You can change parameters for the blade length/height, width and density.

As Eduardo pointed out, it is a procedural shader thing... generated by the rendering engine itself, so cannot be seen in OpenGL, nor saved as an object, etc.

[Karl Ottenstein]

costingh wrote:

Karl wrote:
Renders happen in the background, so you can keep working in AC as they happen.

Hmm, after I hit the render button in 3dsmax, the CPU usage jumps to 100% and i can't do anything on my computer, not even web browsing. This means that Vray is squeezing every last drop of CPU power for rendering, and that's what i'm expecting from an rendering engine. It seems that's not the case with the new rendering engine? Or it has a "background rendering" mode which it's not using all the CPU cores, besides the normal rendering mode?

Management of cores is an operating system function, along with the number of threads the app creates, priority-setting by the app, etc. Either 3dsmax has given itself highest priority and/or your computer only has one core (100% = 1 core), and is underpowered to run multithreaded apps.

See attached for AC 18 with a CineRender running on my 8 core Mac. In the shot, CineRender is using about 6.6 cores and AC is using about 0.5 cores, leaving about 1 core for the OS and other stuff at the moment the screenshot was taken.

Responsiveness - mostly due to Mac OS X - is very good. While rendering, Mail checked for new messages and downloaded them, and CineRender utilization temporarily dropped to 550%, giving more processing power for Mail to finish its job, then returned to 665%. Switching to the 2D window and working, I'm not aware of anything slowing me down.

And, my Mac is 6 years old!

[Anonymous]

@Karl Ottenstein, my cpu has 4 phisical cores (i5 2500) and it's running win 7.
Maybe 3dsmax has set for itself the highest priority (I didn't check) but for me it's fine, it means that it is finishing faster the rendering and have to wait *only* 3 hours instead of 4 . I never had to work on a model in the same time as the model was rendered (for me this is a nonsense, first I finish the model and only after it's finished I'm texturing and rendering it) that's why i don't see the point of such a feature as background rendering.
Procedural grass... probably using displacement? Displacement is usually CPU and memory hungry and increases a lot the rendering time... i'm curious how does it look and how fast does it render...

[Karl Ottenstein]

Grass: it is a bit slower, but not dramatically. For normal distance 'shots', where shadows in the grass wouldn't really be noticeable, I turned off grass shadows and having grass probably only increased the render time by 20 seconds or so. I'd have to really test to give you a real number.

Background rendering is huge for architects... you can continue working on details, layouts, other parts of the building, whatever, while a render generates. When you say "when I finish the model and only after it's finished, I'm ...rendering"... well, that's how rendering specialists work... it's not how (most) architects work. It's fine if the background feature is of no use to you... doesn't hurt you in any way to have it. 😉

[Bricklyne Clarence]

costingh wrote:

Karl wrote:
Renders happen in the background, so you can keep working in AC as they happen.

Hmm, after I hit the render button in 3dsmax, the CPU usage jumps to 100% and i can't do anything on my computer, not even web browsing. This means that Vray is squeezing every last drop of CPU power for rendering, and that's what i'm expecting from an rendering engine. It seems that's not the case with the new rendering engine? Or it has a "background rendering" mode which it's not using all the CPU cores, besides the normal rendering mode?

I'm surprised that in this day and age people still don't know about setting core affinities for various programs and tasks in Task manager in Windows.

Open your task manager and under Tasks, for the specific program, Right-click, and then select 'Set affinity' to turn off a particular core (or more) for a program, if you don't want it to use 100% of all your cores leaving your computer unusable.

Of course it will render slower (in the case of rendering), but as soon as you're done doing whatever else you're doing, you can set the affinity of the rendering program back to 100%.

[Anonymous]

@Bricklyne Clarence, I've learnt about setting the affinity long time ago,I remember that the best processor of the time was intel pentium 500MHz and I had a dual celeron machine runing on a abit bp6 motherboard... that would be... 15 years ago I think
But not setting the affinity was the idea. I was saying that if the rendering engine isn't using all the CPU cores at 100% then it means that probably it isn't using the computer at its maximum and this leading to longer rendering times.
@Karl Ottenstein, i think every architect has his own workflow. For example, at the time I do the sections,details, etc. there's no point of making renderings as the client already knows how the building looks. I'm using renderings only in the early stages of a project. What if the client doesn't like how the building is looking in my renderings and wants me to change, i don 't know, something, and I have finished all the sections, details, etc, even my structural engineer has finished his part of work?
But this is my scenario, probably everyone has his own and it's better to have a new feature rather than not having it.