Lightwork- Pls comment

[Anonymous]

To AC 9.0 user: What is your recommendation after using Lightwork in AC9? I attended the lauch meeting of AC9 last week in Hong Kong. Great and pretty lighting effect can be get now. However, I worry it's difficult to render and slower than Artlantis 4.5.

Could user give some recommendation.

[Dwight]

Since LightWorks is included in ArchiCAD and uses the ArchiCAD lighting controls, you are ahead on the learning curve.

Lightworks brings more sophisticated materials than does Artlantis as well as emulating all existing ArchiCAD materials.

It is integrated into the workflow of ArchiCAD and if you do renderings professionally, the file transfer time to Artlantis for anything but a final image is absurd, especially during design development where changes occur.

You are ahead in preliminary light studies with Artlantis since the previewing is so quick, but the Lightworks lights are very forgiving if used at lower power. Neither provides technical accuracy in lighting.

We are promised wonderful things in the next version of Artlantis, but ArchiCAD users needing ordinary imagery will be quite satisfied with Lightworks. For advanced rendering, you'd be better off considering Cinema 4D than Artlantis as it is much more adaptable....

Attached is a LightWorks/ArchiCAD test - lot of goofs in it:
ceiling no glow, cyclorama casting shadow blocking penetration of sunlite into livingroom area. Fruit and cheese lack texture - general under-exposure. Pendants too high....

And how did the table top get shifted? Demons!

[Steve Jepson]

Just my opinion...I think I am better off with Art*Lantis 4.5.6 than with the new LightWorks rendering engine in AC9. It is an improvement over the old AC rendering engine but not good enough or fast enough that I will ever use it.

The only thing I use the AC rendering engine for is sketch rendering. I love that!

If the only reason you want to upgrade to AC9 is the rendering engine your money would be better spent on upgrading to Art*Lantis 5.

[stefan]

I'm slowly (slooowly) getting a hang out of it.

1 - disabled Sun & Camera Lamp in LW rendering settings and set Ambient to 10% (like Karl told us to do)

2 - used a Skyobject, Sunobject and a few window-lights.

The sky = lat 3 long 6 soft off quality 1

The sun = 100% intensity 12 lights

The Windowlights: 100% intensity
one for each window: Light Resolution 3 / Soft Shadows on / Quality 3
one for the ceiling (thanks Dwight): resolution 5 / soft = on / quality 3


3 - LW Rendering settings:
Method : Final - Antialiasing : Better (so I can increase it if I want)
Brightness : almost at maximum, since the rendering is too dark


These are not the highest settings, but they took 246s on 600x400 pixels on my Dual P3 1Ghz with 768 MB RAM running XP Pro

[Dwight]

make sunlite yellow
make windowlites away from sun mauve

Put translucent blinds on the window to articulate sunlite.

DWIGHT SECRET:
Make a window lite on the ceiling to increase directional ambience