Is there a comprehensive book on rendering in Archicad?

[4hotshoes]

I had a book on rendering years ago. I don't remember the author. It was created by a user. It was very helpful and explained in detail what each setting and combination of settings would do with plenty of full color images of results and dialog boxes. There were tips and tricks. Does any thing like this exist now?

It dealt with:
Texture creation
Texture mapping
Sun and environments
Lighting
Optimizing for speed while maintaining quality
Understanding which settings are useful and which are not
Camera settings
And even help with Photoshop

I don't use rendering in Archicad enough to remember how to use it best. I could easily spend multiple hours changing settings to experiment before I get what I want and then forget how I got there or not knowing which setting got what I wanted. It would be great to have a reference from a common sense approach.

[Laszlo Nagy]

His name is Dwight Atkinson from Canada. He was very active on ARCHICAD-Talk up to a few years ago. He wrote several books:

- The Artlantis Attitude (could not find it on Amazon)
- Illustration in ARCHICAD
https://www.amazon.com/Illustration-ArchiCAD-Dwight-Thomas-Atkinson/dp/9630092557/ref=sr_1_7?qid=155...
- Lightworks in ARCHICAD
https://www.amazon.com/Lightworks-Archicad-Dwight-Atkinson/dp/0973756403/ref=sr_1_6?qid=1559918707&r...

Unfortunately, there is no CineRender for ARCHICAD book, either by him or anyone else.

[4hotshoes]

Yes. I remember now. I use to talk with Dwight. I wonder if he might consider doing an update. Maybe not but I wish. It was very helpful. Is he still a member?

[Laszlo Nagy]

Yes, he is still a member, his User Name is "Dwight", but the last time he was active was about 1.5 years ago.

[4hotshoes]

I don't know if he will get it, but I sent him a personal message. Thanks

[Rex Maximilian]

With the popularity of eBooks (Apple Books, Kindle, etc.) I think this would be more lucrative than before. In the 90s I was working on a book for my MaxATS templates. I had the support from Graphisoft and everything, but it was just too costly for me to publish myself with the marketshare and selling potential for ArchiCAD. I did print short runs and distributed them in my seminars and HighTechHighNature. Now with digital distribution, you'd think there'd be a surplus of books for ArchiCAD niche topics. Hmmm, maybe there's an opportunity here!

As for rendering, I really see Twinmotion as the future, and there should be a lot of tutorials for that since it's utilized by the big 3 (Revit, Sketchup and ArchiCAD). I also think AR is the future, but that's another topic!

[Erwin Edel]

The way cinerender is setup, it is possible to get fairly decent results without knowing all the bells and whistles as a starting point.

There is a library with a lot of surfaces set up to look good in cinerender. Ussually these are enough or easy enough to just change a colour somewhere in the colour channel settings to get what you need.

There are also preset scenes for outdoor and indoor renders with fast, medium and final tags.

I started out with these things and since we need our renders to be fast, but also decent looking I researched a bit which advanced settings changes from the fast preset yield results. This is the advice I've given on several posts on this forum.

The help documentation and youtube tutorials are heaps better than the information that was out there for Lightworks at the time. We also used artlantis for a while, but that was 3rd party software, so can't really expect GS to provide information there.

Coming back to scenes, once you find something that works, you can save it as a scene and export / import that for future use.