ArchiCAD 18 - Interior Animation

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,
I have a problem with my interior animations in ArchiCAD 18 in that the light sources (lamps specifically) seem to be recalculated in a slightly different manner in every scene, thus creating a time lapse/disco light feel to the animation.

Has anyone experienced this and been able to solve it? I have been racking my brain on this for a few days and I would hate to have to ditch the work I've already done and go to Artlantis.

Thank you in advance!

[Anonymous]

Sorry, I meant to say in "every frame"

[Csaba Kezer]

Hi BernardoA,

this phenomenon is caused by the Global Illumination calculation. If you turn off GI you can verify that the "disco light" feel is gone.

Global Illumination is responsible for simulating the effects of not only direct light sources, but also indirect light effects – that are interreflections caused by light rays bouncing off surfaces. When the frames are rendered one by one for the animation, the interreflections are different on each image - as these are calculated based on the camera position. That’s why when these images are put together as a movie, a strange flickering effect will appear.

It is possible to achieve a lot better quality by changing a few settings with the parameters of Global Illumination.

Document > Creative Imaging > PhotoRendering Settings > Global Illumination:
- General Settings > Diffuse Depth: 5
- Sampling Settings > Stochastic Samples > Method: high
- Irradiance Cache > Record Density > Method: high

Even though these settings might slow down the render time, the difference will be significant in the rendering quality.

Hope this helps with your project.
Best regards,
Csaba

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much for the help, Csaba. Are there any plans to change this in the future? As it stands, turning up the GI settings as you have recommended will make the rendering too slow to be of use with a video of a few hundred frames.

[Anonymous]

I'm having a similar if not the same problem:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=236511

The proposed solution is absolutely unacceptable since these settings send the rendering time in ranges of weeks, when we talk about a fly-through.

I also have doubts on the explanation for this "clouds" or "spots" problem. Light reflections do not change their path "based on the camera position". There should be no such disco flickering at all. Most probably this is a bug in the calculation of the reflections.

[Anonymous]

I ended up having to use Artlantis for the interior animation portion of my rendering because of this issue. The exterior animations work just fine, since the sun is the only light source, but as it stands, interior animations are not feasible at all in any type of deadline situation.

[Dali_]

I too am getting the same problem with interior scenes when being rendered; Maxon rendering creates strange patches of light on the walls and floors.
The only way to get rid of this is use a plug-in to render to another render programme. I avoided the problem by rendering in Artlantis, and I also tried Maxwell (also good results).

Obviously, this is not the answer, especially if you have just paid a lot of money for ArchiCAD 18 and it is supposed to have a built-in renderer – that only works with exterior images.

ArchiCad need to improve this situation (especially as they are part of the Nemetschek Group that also owns Maxon – oh, the irony). Users of ArchiCAD 18 should be able to create quick renders (albeit noisy images) without 'patchy' light effects, and without having to wait 40 hours for a render to finish!

[Csaba Kezer]

Hey All,

thanks for sharing your experiences on this one. We have also made some tests and agree that creating nice fly throughs can take up quite a bit of rendering time with the currently available options. We plan to enhance this in the near future, we are already testing our options how to evolve this with the CineRender engine.

Best regards,
Csaba

[Emmanuel ROBERT]

Hello,

could you tell me where are you from solving the flickering problem? The problem will be resolved in archicad archicad 19 or 18?
I also had this problem for a rendered animation, and to reduce artifacts, I deleted the side lights and changing the settings of the physical camera.
An upgrade cinerender with the settings for animation probably improved things a lot. I am cinema 4d user, and comparing with cinerender, I noticed he was missing all the settings of the global illumination for animation.

I understand that not maxon integrates the latest version of the rendering engine (Version 16) in archicad, but they could at least fully integrate that of the R14.

Also, if Maxon preferred to limit cinerender to give then move on cinema 4D, they could at least guarantee a complete export to Cinema 4D, included animation.
I have not found a way to export an image sequence from archicad to cinema 4D. Is it possible? If I have to get back on course on C4D, as I have already done on archicad is not practical.

Thank you in advance for your answers.

PS:
Please excuse me for my very poor English, full of mistakes

[Csaba Kezer]

Dear Emmanuel,

The flickering problem will be solved in ARCHICAD 19.

Unfortunately we can't implement the entire feature set of Cinema 4D into ARCHICAD, so if you need the full functionality you have to export the ARCHICAD model to C4D with our export Add-On. This C4D file contains all surfaces/attributes and your rendering settings as well, therefore you can continue work in C4D exactly where you left it off in ARCHICAD.

Exporting the Fly through path is not an option just yet so I have added your report about it to our wishlist.

We plan to update the CineRender Engine in the next ARCHICAD versions to utilize MAXONs new technology.

Best regards,
Csaba