How to render out a color mask with ARCHICAD

[Carstenem]

Over the last couple of months I came across this question a couple of times but because I use Max + vray, I never really had the need to do it in ARCHICAD.

So to ease your pain, I decided to show you how it's done in ARCHICAD ! Yes you can and it is VERY easy, after you watched this quick coffee tip, you will pull your hair out and say to yourself, why did I not think of this

This option has been there ever since Graphisoft introduced CineRender. Ok it's not really an option, it's a solution but see for yourself.

Quick coffee break tips with ARCHICAD come on a weekly basis subscribe to the channel and click the bell to receive automatic notification.

Enjoy! Carsten

[Karl Wir_n]

I've tried this and I can only get it to work if I got to 3d Projection Settings ->Sunlight and turn the sunlight down to 0%. If the sunlight is on the result can't be used as a colour mask in photoshop.
Or is there some setting i've missed?
//Karl W

[Carstenem]

You did everything right. A couple of options if you have a problem selecting the colors on the mask.

- in Photoshop increase the Tolerance of the selecting tool, sometimes you have to play with numbers a bit.
- in Photoshop use: select - color range, click on a color you like to select and move the fuzziness slider
- in ARCHICAD, move the sun so it "hits" the corners at 45 degrees, this will distribute the ambient shadow ( or no shadow ) equally either side of your model. Obviously that depends on where the camera is.

[Barry Kelly]

Also you can turn shadows off in your 3D styles settings.

Barry.

[Karl Wir_n]

In both examples in my picture with the cube and sphere , shadows are turned off in 3D-styles settings! The objects cast no shadows on other objects but they still have some kind of self shadow unless you turn the sun down to 0%.
Karl W

[Barry Kelly]

Karl wrote:
The objects cast no shadows on other objects but they still have some kind of self shadow unless you turn off the sun completely.

There is also an option for "Shade surfaces using sun" when you are using the Vectorial 3D engine (which you should be for this).
That should save you having to set the sun at 0%.

Barry.

[Karl Wir_n]

The setting "Shade surfaces using sun" is for the 3D window. It seems to have no effect on the rendered result. The thing with rendering out a colour mask is to get it perfectly overlapping your original picture pixel by pixel, so using a screenshot from the 3D window is not an option.
Karl W

[Barry Kelly]

Karl wrote:
The setting "Shade surfaces using sun" is for the 3D window. It seems to have no effect on the rendered result.

Of course - I wasn't really thinking this would have no effect on the render.

I just had a quick try (I haven't set up contrasting material colours though).

In the render settings, use the 'Basic' rendering engine.
Turn the textures off.
Turn the sun off.
You can't turn the sun and lamps off but turn off the lamp shadows as well.

This was my result.
Basic colours and only the slightest of shading (maybe the ambient light will have an effect on this?).

You can increase the brightness if you need to.

Barry.

[Carstenem]

As ARCHICAD has no color mask option, this is a "run around solution".

I like your option of turning off the sun that works better. At the end of the day this is as good as it gets in ARCHICAD.

If you saw my earlier post with how to select in Photoshop, there is absolutely no problem selecting any color, even if you have a slight shade in it. If it is not taking all of the color mask, then just click again in the slightly different shade with shift click ( windows ) , which adds on and it will select the rest of the desired color mask.

To match your main textured render, the most important part is to render out a high resolution color mask, at least 4000 pixels. Because of the settings and no texture this won't take very long.

[Lingwisyer]

As long as neighbouring colours are not similar, the shadowing will not affect selection as you can just increase the tolerance without having to worry about selection other areas.