ArchiCAD 9 Rendering Speed

[Anonymous]

Some of you may have noticed that I previously posted about what I considered to be insanely high rendering times for the sketch renderer when shadow casting is on. Today I am now officially an ArchiCAD 9 user and I have some good news to report. I tested the sketch rendering speed using the latest version of ArchiCAD 8 against version 9 using the Kohr-I-Noor rendering style in its default configuration.

The image rendered in ArchiCAD 8 took 30 minutes to render while the same image took only 4.5 minutes to render using version 9. That's a 666% speed improvement. I don't know if there is a problem with my installation of version 8 (there is no functional reason to suggest that there is and I've never had an OS X program become corrupted) but this improvement is pretty impressive from my point of view. What are your experiences with ArchiCAD 8 vs. 9 performance-wise?

[Dwight]

Of course its faster - it always should have been when compared to similar Sketch rendering products.
They must have fixed it or something - probably told it to ignore smaller bits in the vector image.

Another way to speed up the sketch render is to make the actual rendering smaller than usual.

Who's going to notice? It is all a mess anyways? joke.

Ben?

[Anonymous]

Ditto, from California regarding speed.

ArchiCAD V9 deserves a very loud applaud! Thanks GS!

Opening the activity monitor shows the calculation hitting both processors of a Macintosh G5. This happens with both the LightWorks Rendering engine and the Sketch Engine.

[Jefferson]

Any PC guys noticing similar speed increases?

[Anonymous]

This is too much, Yes!


Calc. Times

Vectorial shadow casting
Generated : 215600 segments 44114 polygons
Start time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:46:49 AM
End time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:30 AM
Elapsed time : 41 seconds
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Polygon painting
Sun direction : vertical 43.3 horizontal 231.16
Start time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:30 AM
End time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:36 AM
Elapsed time : 6 seconds
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hidden polygon removal
Sun direction : vertical 43.3 horizontal 231.16
Start time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:36 AM
End time : Thu, Oct 7, 2004 10:47:42 AM
Elapsed time : 6 seconds
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Great news. If for noo other reason than rendering, I'm looking forward to the arrival of Dual Core CPUs next year. Two chips on one die sitting on this year's motherboard! Yippee!

[Anonymous]

One bad note in the otherwise happy review of the new sketch renderer's speed is that it appears that the bug is back where lines that should be hidden are drawn. Like for instance the automatically hidden line between walls and slabs with the same material. I hope this gets hammered out in the first patch to version 9. Are others experiencing this? I noticed it in my rendering and the posted renderings in this thread.

[Jefferson]

.........not only that, but check out the "swing" on the lower door

It seems the sketch engine draws averything it "sees".

[Anonymous]

Playing with the Example Model included with ArchiCAD 9. The top image was generated in about 4 minutes with the LightWorks sun object that was brought to my attention by Dwight.

Then I exported the model using 3ds, imported the model into the FREE C4D Demo program found at: TIME for 9

http://www.maxon.net/index_e.html

Drop in a floor object, a sky object, turn on just the Sun Object, set radiosity for stochastic, wait about 8 minutes. Screen grab (no save function in Demo). Radiosity or any other great effect offered by C4D can be used.

Eventually become hooked on C4D, buy the real thing,.. etc.

[Anonymous]

Jefferson wrote:
.........not only that, but check out the "swing" on the lower door

It seems the sketch engine draws averything it "sees".

Well actually I think the door swings are suppose to be shown if the option in the object is selected (in can easily be turned off). They will show in internal rendering engine so they will show on sketch rendering. The lines I am talking about don't show in the internal 3D window but do when using sketch rendering engine. Funny thing is that they only appear when the option for shadows in on using the sketch renderer.