simple QT movies with AC 14?

[Anonymous]

I've just upgraded to AC14 but am having trouble with making a QTVR movie. Is it possible to make a simple movie with AC14 anymore?

[NCornia]

venecasper,

Well to start lets clear this up. QTVR support has been discontinued by Apple so it is legacy. The methods to create VR Objects and VR Scenes still exist inside ArchiCAD 14 but you are on your own essentially.

Here is the Graphisfot official statement on QTVR: http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/downloads/ac13/QTVR.html

But, to make a simple Quicktime movie is very simple. Place your cameras in the appropriate positions around and or through your building model then go to "Document>Creative Imaging>Create Fly-Through". Settings must be adjusted in this dialogue box as well as in the camera settings, so make sure you check in both places. The camera settings window has a button labeled "Path". Click on this to set the number of frames between cameras and the motion controls. Your framerate and filetype are determined in the Create Fly-Through dialogue box.

HTH

[schagemann]

venecasper,
NCornia,

sorry to sound so smarta**ed (there are plenty of others around here... ;0) just to clarify though, there is a difference between the following quicktime formats:

QTVR > allows (or better allowed) you to interactively pan in either a panorama or scene mode, created by placing a so called VR Object (dome) or VR Scene in archicad... strangely the help tags still show these descriptions!

QT movie (.mov) > allows to create & follow a movie along a predefined path of cameras;

up until AC13 this functionality still worked as described on our blog (http://macinteract.com/ac13-qtvr-753), however it seems that the legacy plugin no longer works in AC14 and we could not find a newer one anywhere as asked for by the error message upon loading the pld one... some other users in this forum have also noticed this (http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=166310).

as described on our blog the only way to currently still do native QTVR's is either in AC13 or with C4D.

conveniently grahipsoft now also sells their own (and admittedly much more powerful) version of QTVRs in form of VBE (http://www.graphisoft.com/products/virtual-building-explorer/) - formerly and very briefly known as Zermatt (http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=33859&sid=831f6bbb1a2a9bbf13754e4367465874)... still VBE is not free and i still miss QTVRs as they were a really quick presentation option in my toolset.

ds.

[Anonymous]

NCornia and Schagemann, thank you. This helps a lot. I will play around with this and see how it goes and I agree as well that QTVR's were a very nice and quick presentation tool.

MV

[David Collins]

As another option, Artlantis can also do QTVR single spherical panoramas. They dropped the ability to link them into scenes, however.

The future of QTVR seems to be still in play: Apparently, QuickTIme 7.6.6 (1675) now enables QTVR playback on 64 bit Windows systems. Can someone confirm this?

Not being a Mac Guy, can someone tell me if QTVR panoramas run on the latest MAC OS? 64 bit?

I've always liked QTVRs myself, not just because they were quick to produce and file sizes were small, but because they could be fully rendered. A seriously rendered photorealistic QTVR with everything Artlantis can throw into it is a joy to behold.

On the other hand, I recently compiled a series of QTVR panoramas that were linked by short animations that moved the viewer from one node to the next. I was surprised to see that the sense of three dimensional space in the linking animations was much more powerful than the QTVRs, which nail the viewer to one spot. It seems that parallax, the way things move in space in relation to each other, is critical to the way the brain understands three dimsensional space. You don't get that in QTVR's. So that's one for the VBE side, to say nothing of the option to get your clients to wear nerdy 3d cardboard glasses.

[Karl Ottenstein]

David wrote:
Not being a Mac Guy, can someone tell me if QTVR panoramas run on the latest MAC OS? 64 bit?

We need to keep Quicktime Player 7 on our systems for panos and VR objects. (Quicktime X cannot do these.)

A plus of QTVR or animations over VBE is that you cannot limit what the recipient sees in a VBE file: they get the entire 3D model. So, if you have not modeled part of the project perfectly, the recipient will see that and no doubt get distracted by that instead of what they are supposed to be focused on.

Each has its purpose depending on the project and phase, but neither completely replaces the other IMHO.

Because of the relatively high cost of Artlantis Studio (the Studio version is required to produce QTVR scenes or objects, or animations) ... there is still a need for simple VR's from ArchiCAD itself. Large firms can amortize a single Artlantis license easily and obtain the superior results possible there. One-person firms not so much; so hopefully an HTML5 or other technology will allow Graphisoft to return some form of VR to ArchiCAD in the future.

My 2 cents. 😉

Karl

[Anonymous]

Well said, Karl, being a 1 man firm, I couldn't agree more. The VR Object is a great tool and impresses the heck out of a client ( with very little effort )

[KeesW]

I have the latest Quicktime and 64 bit Windows 7. We can't produce QTVR scenes.

[Anonymous]

KeesW wrote:
I have the latest Quicktime and 64 bit Windows 7. We can't produce QTVR scenes.

QTVR has been deprecated by Apple. It is only possible to produce in older versions now.

[David Collins]

KeesW wrote:
I have the latest Quicktime and 64 bit Windows 7. We can't produce QTVR scenes.

But will an existing QTVR movie run on your system? That was my question. I can produce the QTVRs in Artlantis. I'm trying to figure out if any of my clients will have problems viewing them.

Thanks.