Niranjan wrote:
Maya and 3ds max were obvious choices of a few people i asked around but i am not too happy with the quality of the output of both, as in the renderings are too animated and the reflections nowhere close to archicad's rendered images.
Surely you are joking here, as Maya, 3ds, and Cinema 4D are all greatly superior to ArchiCAD for such images, and of course, all allow the animations you are asking about.
As Thomas says, Artlantis Studio is the easiest solution for adding animated elements to an ArchiCAD model. But, it is not without its own peculiarities. For example, getting tire wheels to spin at an appropriate rate for the forward motion is not at all easy. Animating ArchiCAD doors requires converting them to Artlantis objects and then animating the object - and at that point, getting the door to rotate at the hinge side and not the center is a challenge. Etc.
Within ArchiCAD, people used to talk here about using the Alfaville cars (for example) in animated flythroughs - there are animated people, etc as well:
http://www.objectsonline.com/customer/product.php?productid=121424&cat=0&page=1
I haven't seen these mentioned in quite a few years though, so don't know if anyone is still using them successfully in current versions of AC?
Because they rely on GDL animation, those objects can be animated in ArchiCAD flythroughs, but none of their animation 'intelligence' would be available externally - in Artlantis or whatever.
HTH,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier • macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB