Quovadis..LW,Cinema4D, Artlantis? Hello Dwight!

[Anonymous]

I think for AC-users, 4aternatives:
LW with AC9 and AC10
Cinema4D with Maxonform
or Artlantis R.

To have everything is gut, but expensive.

Dear Dwight, with your knowledge, will you buy Cinema 4D or ArtlantisR?

[Anonymous]

This is all crazy in a way.. AC9 brought Lightworks, right? So why this conversation? The half-hearted implementation.. No Radiosity, hard to get the final 15%..

[Anonymous]

That is the reason, why we discuss:

http://www.lightworkdesign.com/full_pr.php?prid=112

AC-user is permanantly AC-user.
Graphisoft will check, what we want.
For this reason we must discuss

Or will you just wait?

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

One other thing about Artlantis R that is great for productivity is the way it handles objects. Being able to insert, drag around, replace, modify the colors of planting cars people decoration in the rendering program makes a lot of sense for composing your pictures, and it is great that they made the process so fast and easy. Also the objects out there are very good quality, and Artlantis handles the polygons pretty well. That is a major new thing since 4.5.

[Anonymous]

Hello Ignacio,
Artl. must be good.
But the example gallery from every rendering programm looks very professionell (also with Artl. 4.5, etc....)
I want to know, with my normal knowledge wheather I can do or not (with LW from AC9)
If yes, why should we invest?
If we must invest, than now two alternitive...Artlantis R or C4D (with Maxonform)

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

samsung wrote:
I want to know, with my normal knowledge wheather I can do or not (with LW from AC9)
If yes, why should we invest?
If we must invest, than now two alternitive...Artlantis R or C4D (with Maxonform)

I can only speak for myself today: coming from Artlantis 4.5 I tried rendering in Lightworks and found it painfully slow, so that has kept me away from Lightworks except for very quickie very preliminary small sketches (the computer equivalent of the napkin sketch, which is great to be able to produce from the CAD program itself).

I was fed up with faking radiosity in Artlantis 4.5 and for a while considered C4D, but I was scared a bit by the learning curve and another bit by the price. Then Artlantis R came out (very short learning curve needed to produce the effect needed for ordinary work; no need to fake radiosity with multiple lights; moderate price) and I never looked again at C4D.

In this last year I needed to produce a couple of large presentations with very large renderings, and that made me wonder about C4D again, mainly because of the ability to set up a render farm, do animations, and do some 'high end' stuff that you can't do in Artlantis. But then again the purchase cost and learning time has kept me away from it. In my case the litmus test is 'if you are a multitasking ArchiCAD user doing renderings *fast* a few hours a month, Artlantis is the way to go; if you are an ArchiCAD-based team with a full time rendering guy dedicated to producing very high quality presentations, C4D is the way to go' (at least for those high quality extraordinary presentations).

And if on the other hand you have all the time in the world to learn the quirks of faking radiosity in Lightworks, don't have a problem with longer rendering times, want to minimize purchase costs and want to maximize the benefits of integration (which also involves a high setup cost and usually a few trade-offs: your curtains and wine glasses and planting and cars and people will all be ArchiCAD objects), then Lightworks is probably the way to go.

[Anonymous]

Ignacio wrote:
... want to maximize the benefits of integration (which also involves a high setup cost and usually a few trade-offs: your curtains and wine glasses and planting and cars and people will all be ArchiCAD objects), then Lightworks is probably the way to go.

I am not so sure about that, Ignacio.

Like you said, ArtR handles objects superbly (for instance, it adapts the positioning of an object to the inclination of the terrain). You have instant preview of them.

On the other hand, most of the objects I use for rendering - curtains and wine glasses and wall pictures and carpets in the interiors, cars, people, streetlamps, road signs on the exteriors - are just props, I don't want them on my main project file, I will not use them anywhere on the technical documentation.

So, it makes perfect sense to have them on the render file, so there acctually is no big advantage - and maybe it is a disadvantage - to have them in ArchiCAD.

[Djordje]

Agree with Miguel!

Plus - any object that you need as Art•Lantis Prop, and you have in ArchiCAD or any other format readable by Art•lantis, you just open in it, save as an object ... and drag to the library. Done.

Different people and offices do the things differently.

The rendering quality is down to the user, and has absolutely nothing to do with software.

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

Djordje wrote:
Agree with Miguel!

Well I must have messed up the grammar a bit because that is what I trying to mean too. Being restricted to the rendering quality of the objects you can find in ArchiCAD, and the effort that goes into finding them in the first place, is a big tradeoff in system setup-related costs and outright object availability that may make sense for some and will not make sense for others.

It doesn't seem to be a problem for the very impressive
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=7928
and I've seen very impressive pictures of a kitchen in this forum too.
I guess that if you work in a very definite job type with props you will reuse again and again, with a pallette of lighting and materials that you will become very familiar with, etc., you can pay off those costs with the advantages of rendering straight out from the program that is allowing you to put out the 2D drawings and do the calculations.

Each solution (Lightworks, Artlantis, C4D) has advantages and disadvantages relative to the others, and I was trying to define the user who would find each of them most suitable.

[Rakela Raul]

On the other hand, most of the objects I use for rendering - curtains and wine glasses and wall pictures and carpets in the interiors, cars, people, streetlamps, road signs on the exteriors - are just props, I don't want them on my main project file, I will not use them anywhere on the technical documentation.

normally, and when ready to export out for rendering, i put just a few cars, and sometimes a few street light and a few street signs in the ac file....this works x me.

[Anonymous]

Let me spice this up a bit

I come along this argument many times, "whatever works best for you", especially in matters of faith: religion, football and political affiliation, and computer software.

Problem is, most of the people don't want to bother (or are afraid) to try different stuff, or even hear other opinions with an open mind.

How many times you just gave up trying to explain the advantages of VB/IM to flatCaders? You can not understand why they just WONT LISTEN!

Well, truth is, we also don't listen

So, honestly, you only know "whatever works best for you" if you give a fair sample of rendering programs a shot. And alleging you don't have the time is cheating, after all what do we say to flatCadders when they tell us they don't have the time?

The other option is to hear others arguments with an open mind, but that, on matters of faith, is impossible...