Piranesi

[Karl Ottenstein]

Thought I'd start a new thread just for Piranesi ... another thread has Sketchup included, and it should be its own thread as well.

It would be useful to hear other people's reasons for purchasing Piranesi and any tips and tricks that they have discovered.

I've convinced myself to make the purchase after several days with the demo and will write more about that later. Neither the Piranesi web site nor comments on archicad-talk were specific enough to explain to me (a hard-sell) why I would want this tool. Now that I've played with all of the tutorials as well as images from ArchiCAD and Artlantis, I understand just how revolutionary a product this is ... very eye opening (just as is Sketchup ... but keep that in a different thread please).

Cheers,
Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Artlantis 4.5 (and AC) billboards and Piranesi do not mix. This is no doubt obvious to long term Piranesi users.

Artlantis 4.5 billboards are alpha masked images mapped onto a rectangular plane. That entire rectangle comes across in Piranesi as the billboard material, messing up painting. See the attached image of a woman sitting on a sofa - material view and RGB view. Painting in RGB is ugly just to emphasize that the alpha-masked parts of the woman's billboard cannot be painted...because the full billboard rectangle covers up what is behind.

The same thing would happen with the bitmapped trees and people from ArchiCAD I would imagine.

So, tip of the day to new Piranesi users (like me): don't use billboards in Artlantis or AC, or at least delete them before exporting to EPix format. Piranesi cutouts have much more control anyway.

Karl

[Anonymous]

Piranesi,
Its a grreat application. It gives you the opportunity to create images that are comparable to hand rendering. Artlantis 4.5 now has billboards for adding scaled entorauge, and is better with full motion QT but, so far Piranesi is easy to learn, offers drawing tools that will allow you to "wear your beret" --So what's so bad about that.

[Thomas Holm]

This is a church project (will never be built).
A complicated room with curved walls and glazing between wall sections as well as different roof lights. One image shows the best I coudl do in Artlantis. Lacking radiosity, I wasn't able to show the secondary light on the curved walls in the centre of the image. Had I had radiosity, I wouldn't have been able to finish the rendering in time - I had 36 hours for the whole project presentation.
After the competition was ended (of course I didn't win) I got Piranesi and made the last image. I don't know if you like it, but it prints perfectly and is exactly what I wanted - some kind of crossing between photorealism and a hand-made color pencil rendering. Perhaps the competition would have ended differently had I had it then!

[Thomas Holm]

Artlantis...

[Thomas Holm]

Piranesi...

[Thomas Holm]

Please note that if you clikc on the previous images you'll get a bigger version. I don't know how to control iamge scaling in this forum.

[Ben Odonnell]

Thomas wrote:
Piranesi...

Nice work Thomas..
I must say that Piranesi does give a really nice result. Maybe it's time to satrt learning

Ben

[Thomas Holm]

Thakns.

I'm sorry for stumbling on the keyboard all the time. I want a hard-pressed oen, but Apple's are too soft these days!

[Thomas Holm]

Something's happened!

Earlier this evening when I posted the Piranesi/Artlantis examples attached to the messages above, i could view them alright. Now, they're gone!

Anyone, please reply to this message and tell wether you can see the attached images or not.