Show some of your Renderings

[Anonymous]

I thought it would be a fun idea to show some renderings of homes you've designed in Archicad, kind of like a little portfolio or show and tell.

So I'll start with a few:

[Bricklyne Clarence]

greysheep5 wrote:
so Bricklyne Clarence, was it vrayRT now or the "normal" vray? i don´t quite get this whole comparison thingy? you could light the model in vray at least as good as the maxwell model if you want to, would be no problem! a few vraylights here and there and a sun/sky system i guess and it would look just the same as your maxwell rendering? and as you said, the rendertimes speak for themself... but to say maxwell produces better renderings? nah, i really doubt that i have to say.

christoph.

As I stated in the previous post, the Vray renderings were done using the VrayRT engine.

And the whole point of the comparison is for people who may be interested in seeing or comparing the quality of the output between the 2 engines versus the workflow, time taken, ease of use, scene complexity and other factors one might consider when trying to decide between different workflows and different options.

AndI completely disagree about your claim that you could just as easily achieve the lighting quality you get from Maxwell by simply "adding a few Vray light systems here and there and a sun/sky system".

Vray is an unbiased renderer, which means that by default it takes short-cuts to get you a clean image render in less time, and also to allow it to handle more geometry and more effects that other renderers can't handle in the same amount of time. These shortcuts show up in the slight reduction of quality of the image produced which may lack some shadows, or have less light diffusion accuracy.

Maxwell is unbiased; which means no shortcuts, and it's physically accurate and converges to the closest thing you can get to taking a photograph given an adequate amount of time and with the right camera settings.

Obviously I could keep tweaking Vray and increasing settings to get an image close enough to what a Maxwell render could look like, but even that would come at a price since as you increase settings, the rendertimes also climb concurrently, which kind of defeats a major point of choosing Vray over Maxwell.

For example, in the image below produced as a direct Maxwell export from ArchiCAD, you can see it automatically calculates things like Caustic reflections from the glass pane railings (or dielectric materials which I have highlighted, and which would not be automatically calculated in Vray as Caustic reflections and Caustics tend to be turned off by default in Vray. those reflections I have highlighted in the image below typically wouldn't appear in a Vray render.
One can, of course, turn them on, but like I said, the price is that you watch your render times increase dramatically.



Furthermore, you'll have other things like Depth-of-Field (DOF) blur automatically calculated in Maxwell, and unlimited reflections/refractions through transparent/translucent materials - both of which can be turned off, and/or limited by a value, in Vray because they also tend to increase the rendertimes, but at the same time the also have a significant impact on the quality and realism on the end result.

But like I said, this is all merely for the purposes of comparing the quality produced versus the workflow versus the equipment/time available for those interested in knowing. And the statement that the Maxwell renders are superior in terms of light quality are merely my own personal opinion as someone that's produced images in both engines and knows that goes into getting that kind of quality for both.

[greysheep5]

point taken Bricklyne, of course vray is biased and maxwell is unbiased. and yes, this CAN be an advantage, but it is also maxwells biggest disadvantage.

but, you can believe me that, you could easily render an image like the one above in a very short time in vray with all the gadgets like caustics, DOF and so on enabled! and by the way, vray also has the ability of progressive path tracing, for so to speak "unbiased" rendering results. but i wouldn´t want to use it.

what must be the biggest advantage for people using archicad for all of their modeling is the direct connection which sounds kind of smooth and hassle free? but tell me, the materials are designed in archiad, or do you use this maxwell studio application for it?

i for myself just like the ability to do just about everything in 3dsmax/vray as a companion to our archicad licence, so it may very well be a matter of taste. as we do architectural visualization and have to deal with multiple file formats (not only just archicad, but we do big parts of our own modeling in archicad) and also quite complex freeforms from time to time, we made our choice for a allround modeling solution and a fast reliable renderer like vray.

i think it comes with a reason that about 70-80% (personal estimate) of all architectural visualizations (and surprisingly even many films like some parts of avatar for example) are made in vray. but as you said, maxwell may be the better solution for an architect seeking to shoot out very good images with a minimum of learning amount!

keep on rendering!

best regards,

christoph.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

greysheep5 wrote:
........ but tell me, the materials are designed in archiad, or do you use this maxwell studio application for it? ......

christoph.

Material editing in the ArchiCAD-Maxwell workflow can be done from within ArchiCAD. Not using necessarily using ArchiCAD's material editor (even though it controls the scaling of bitmaps and textures,) but through Maxwell's standalone material editor which is a mini-application that can be launched from the material editor dialog box of ArchiCAD, and can be used to both create new materials and editing existing Mxms (Maxwell material library format.

So one never has to do anything from the Maxwell Studio Application if they chose not to use it.

Unless you want to use things like proxies, or displacement, then those have to be done from the Studio.


But like I said, it's a question of preference. Personally I use both methods as per the situation's demands.

P.S. - I forgot to mention that another big advantage of the Maxwell method over the Vray method is that you can have a render (or more) running in Maxwell in the background and still continue working in ArchiCAD on your model or drawings. You can't do this with 3ds Max/Vray since it is a serious resource hog and eats up as much CPU power and Memory as is available.

[greysheep5]

Bricklyne wrote:

greysheep5 wrote:
........ but tell me, the materials are designed in archiad, or do you use this maxwell studio application for it? ......

christoph.

Material editing in the ArchiCAD-Maxwell workflow can be done from within ArchiCAD. Not using necessarily using ArchiCAD's material editor (even though it controls the scaling of bitmaps and textures,) but through Maxwell's standalone material editor which is a mini-application that can be launched from the material editor dialog box of ArchiCAD, and can be used to both create new materials and editing existing Mxms (Maxwell material library format.

So one never has to do anything from the Maxwell Studio Application if they chose not to use it.

Unless you want to use things like proxies, or displacement, then those have to be done from the Studio.


But like I said, it's a question of preference. Personally I use both methods as per the situation's demands.

P.S. - I forgot to mention that another big advantage of the Maxwell method over the Vray method is that you can have a render (or more) running in Maxwell in the background and still continue working in ArchiCAD on your model or drawings. You can't do this with 3ds Max/Vray since it is a serious resource hog and eats up as much CPU power and Memory as is available.

not exactly an advantage solely of the maxwell method i would say! as someone who works on daily basis with 3dsmax, if your pc is equipped well with adequate hardware that shouldn´t be a problem, at least what i can tell you.

we work all the time with the pc´s rendering away some images in the background, given you have for example quadcore machines and 8+ gb of ram there should be nothing stopping you. and if you want 3dsmax to render in the background just decrease max´s process priority in the taskmanager or increase the priority of your main task like archicad, photoshop or whatever you are doing besides rendering.

or you just use the backburner renderserver to distribute frames over the network. or the third thing we often do is, just netrender it with the vray integrated netrendersolution for single frames. a thing like that is also in maxwell i think? often two or more of the pc´s in the office have invisible-to-the-user rendertasks running in the background (set up in special render-useraccounts, totally invisible and independent from the user currently logged onto the certain pc). when you do your daily office job like drafting, mailing, whatever the people don´t even notice their pc is involved in the rendering task.

so this applies too to 3dsmax, as always with more complex solutions in a more complex but manifold way...

but generally speaking, the more horsepower the sooner you see the final result of course, so it may not always be preferable to do the rendering in the background... depends on pc´s available and your workflow i´d say.

do you render on a single pc or over a renderfarm?

[Bricklyne Clarence]

greysheep5 wrote:
........
not exactly an advantage solely of the maxwell method i would say! as someone who works on daily basis with 3dsmax, if your pc is equipped well with adequate hardware that shouldn´t be a problem, at least what i can tell you.

....... and if you want 3dsmax to render in the background just decrease max´s process priority in the taskmanager or increase the priority of your main task like archicad, photoshop or whatever you are doing besides rendering. ............

do you render on a single pc or over a renderfarm?

I use a single PC, hence my preference for this workflow.


And yes I know about setting priorities and core affinities in task manager for the different programs running, and often times I'll set the core affinity for a Vray render to be one core less, so prevent 3ds Max from crashing as it fights for resources with Windows. (my PC is AMD based, so no hyper-threading or parallelization).

But again, the bottom line is that if you devote less resources to an application like 3ds Max with Vray running, you will get lower performance (i.e your renders will be slower by default). You obviously know this, hence you're need to resort to Network rendering through Backburner.

Maxwell, by default, is set to function in Low priority mode; which means, that if some other program needs system resources, there won't be a fight with in your system for those resources as Maxwell renders int he background, giving you more system stability (less crashes). As a result it is easier to work in the foreground with another Resource heavy application like ArchiCAD. And furthermore, changing the priority mode of Maxwell (from Low priority mode) doesn't make your renders go any faster or give you more speed.

With Vray, if you change the priority mode, in task manager, you risk getting a lot of crashes (3ds Max does not like "below normal" or "low" priority modes), and unlike Maxwell, you can't resume a render onces it's crashed.

So while what you're suggesting, with Vray, (setting priorities and affinities) is possible, it's not ideal, since ArchiCAD being both a multi-core application (from version 12) and 64-Bit (from version 13), will only suffer in performance if you're running a Vray render in the background (of a single machine) to the point of almost being completely unusable).
The only cost when you do the same with Maxwell running in the background is Memory (RAM), which, on a machine with more than 4GB of RAM does not present too big a problem unless you're working on a really complex model in AC.

My focus is more on the Architecture and Design and not on the rendering, hence my preferences. Yours seems to on the rendering end of things, hence your reasoning as well as your resources (having a network available to render images).

[greysheep5]

well i agree with pretty much everything except the part about max crashing, which happens virtually never while rendering in our studio. of course you can produce crashes with very RAM heavy scenes with massive displacements and lots of millions of polys and many proxies, but you just have to know your tool and what your pc´s are capable of. so no, it crashes like every other program, but not specially at rendering and never ever if i increase/decrease system priorities, at least here...

we use hyperthreading enabled core i7´s here because they are like twice as fast as a amd cpu with the same clockspeed in max/vray. this may very well apply to other renderers too, c4d for example, don´t know how maxwell goes with this...

well, as you too should know, if a process uses less resources it will be slower, the cpu/cores have to divide their workforce and can´t do everything for every program at the same time. hence this sounds to me as a disadvantage of maxwell, if it doesn´t speed up running in foreground it might not use every ounce of your processing resources, what in your case might be good, but in my case and for my purpose sound wierd!?

with my machine it is completely possible to photoshop one rendering, finish another rendering in 3dsmax and draft/model some stuff in archicad. so, not to make any advertising here, but it sounds to me as of the current generation of hardware intel computers must be much more powerful?

as we come from an archviz background we do many of our own architectural designs too with a mix of different programs not only archicad, but it´s like you stated, it all comes down to preferences and your personal focus. and not everyone wants to spend so much money in different programs and can find the time to master them to make use out of it... i know this from many colleagues, but we ourselfs were lucky and did most of the learning of the tools as a side effect of our architectural study at the university!

what about artlantis, anyone? it´s nothing for my workflow, but what do you guys know about it, im kind of curious? last time i used it was as a companion of archicad 6.5 in an architectural office i worked back then?

regards,

christoph.

[Anonymous]

very interesting conversation between you two. I prefer max and vray but I must say it's annoying not to have a direct link to ArchiCAD. So this is where Maxwell is kind of nice. But as it is so slow still, it's not really on my radar yet. another huge advantage in Max and vray is the options of having all sorts of pluins available AND an amazing 3D library to choose from "out there" like cars, furniture, trees etc.
Also having worked for years in a animation studio, max/vray is very good, reliable and FAST and can work through an amazing polygon count.

But as you guys mentioned it all depends what sort of work you do. Single image, kind of easy of use maxwell will do the job just fine.

One more thing about the quality. 7 out of 10 clients won't notice the difference if you used vray or maxwell, even better if you print a marketing brochure, the end user buying an apartment of the plan, 10 out of 10 won't no the difference, remember they are untrained in this field and as long as it looks amazing they are happy and buying !

Cheers Carsten

ArchiCAD, 3D StudioMax, Vray
www.emdeimages.com.au

[Sightline]

Here is a photomontage I did for an addition.

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Another house

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One more