Estimated Rendering Time Window- v.16

[Anonymous]

In the past when I would create fly through animations a little window would pop up with the estimated rendering time. I liked this because if an animation was going to take 4 days I could decide to let it go or run it over a long weekend, or play with the rendering settings to try to reduce rendering time.

I'm now in v.16 and there is no estimated rendering time window any more. Is it still available but I need to turn it on somewhere?

Side question, my renderings seem to be taking wayyyyy longer in v.16 than a comparably complex rendering might have taken in the past. Is something up with lightworks in v.16? should I be using something else? I know about artlantis and such but I just can't afford an aftermarket product right now so keep that in mind if you answer that part of the question.

[Dwight]

I can only speculate that you have engaged a higher rendering quality than before. The attached shows the current optimal rendering quality. Archicad runs into two productivity walls:
Rendering Method defines the number of transparent surfaces it can calculate. If you don't have enough, things like partially open patio sliders turn to plywood, and Supreme quality anti-aliasing is limited to one processor. [Or it was.]

Imaging and Calculation under Work Environment for estimate box, altho it is crap.

However, it remains sad and tiresome to see colleagues struggle with ill-implemented software like LightWorks. Personally, I consider any Archicad user, regardless of financial situation, an idiot for not exploring Artlantis for its quality, speed, accurate preview, and ease-of-work, altho those French, they have a different dialog box for everything!

Try this Artlantis demo

demo

and you WILL find a way to pay for it. Perhaps you have an heirloom watch to sell. If you have any paying rendering work at all, you need Artlantis.

[Anonymous]

wow. it's almost like you've got a personal financial interest in convincing people learning artlantis.

[Dwight]

Right. I can see how you might feel that way since people sharing strong, knowledgeable opinions are often suspected of subversion by the obstinate. At least you can feel your way through to a successful rendering with Artlantis. It takes hours of experimentation with LightWorks just to get started and you still get bad results.

Try and get over your resentment about being given a bad renderer and save yourself hours of lousy work, now. Of course, many users can't appreciate soft shadows, glowing surfaces, background calculation and fast rendering with instant previews, so they should definitely stay with LightWorks.

However, i think that even you can produce more quality work in an hour with Artlantis than in a month with LightWorks. Invest an afternoon and see for yourself if I am giving bad advice or not. Let me know.

[Anonymous]

Dwight wrote:
However, i think that even you can produce more quality work in an hour with Artlantis than in a month with LightWorks. Invest an afternoon and see for yourself if I am giving bad advice or not. Let me know.

I have to agree with Dwight here. I have been using LightWorks religiously since AC9, it may have all the tools necessary to create generally good renderings.... but the time consumption to produce outputs attempting to get even close to Artlantis quality is ridiculous. It had it's time. One of the many reasons I end up using LW+sketchy outputs+Photoshop was to reduce the amount of time spent tweaking materials and the amount of time the computer took doing the actual renderings by reducing quality - an attempt to increase production speed. This method completely eliminated the need to get higher quality LW outputs. So using LW in that way is still tolerable (if LW was your only choice).

Regarding the 'estimated rendering time' thing.... I find it to be inaccurate and completely ignore it.

Arlouper wrote:
Side question, my renderings seem to be taking wayyyyy longer in v.16 than a comparably complex rendering might have taken in the past. Is something up with lightworks in v.16? should I be using something else?

This answers my annual question about LW being updated. Looks like that's a big fat NO. At this point, there are many alternatives to LightWorks with varying prices, Artlantis being one of them. It's a matter of verifying export/import workflow and then choosing something that fits your budget should you decide to retire LW.