Visualization & visual language - Conversation & feedback

[Illes Papp]

Greetings Everybody,

Visualization and the visual language as a whole is a crucial phenomena when we communicate our ideas to the clients. Should that be vectorial, artistic, non-realistic, photo-realistic, 2D or 3D from classic quick shaded representations to high-end VR or XR, most of us would agree that the way we communicate our ideas is truly essential.

I would like to start a dedicated conversation and hear your feedback on this topic. Please let me know:

• What type of visualization do you do? (Quick Shaded, Rendering, Animations, Real-time visualization, ...)
• What is your current workflow for visualization? (In-house, Outsourced, Partially Outsourced, ...)
• What are the main challenges or obstacles in your current workflow?
• What third party solutions do you incorporate in your workflow if you do any?

Let me know if you have anything else in connection to this topic. Let's start the conversation.

[Mjules]

It was easier than ever to directly connect ArchiCAD with Twinmotion before acquiring it. 

[figge]

1 - Simple linework 3d documents as well as renderings

2 - Majority in-house (on rare occasion outsource high level renderings for marketing purposes)

3 - Turnaround time, can spend way too time to achieve higher end renderings (education / experience needed maybe?)

4 - Twinmotion

[Jim Allen]

• What type of visualization do you do? (Quick Shaded, Rendering, Animations, Real-time visualization, ...)
  Multiple:
  a.) For tender documents I often use monochrome shaded 3d section cuts.
  b.) Shaded elevations - sometimes textured, sometimes with vector fills
  c.) Twinmotion fully rendered 3d views for every major project, realtime walkthroughs with clients/end users over Teams
  d.) Before I started using Archicad, I used to produce panorama images hosted on the web that I could send a client a URL link to. I was involved in the development of a render engine that could enable this in just a few clicks. I haven't done this in Archicad - it's too many steps and too time-consuming
• What is your current workflow for visualization? (In-house, Outsourced, Partially Outsourced, ...)
  e.) Almost exclusively in-house
• What are the main challenges or obstacles in your current workflow?
  f.) Too many of the standard AC textures are just not very good. Although they have improved a lot over the years, some (concrete, metals, landscape in particular) are poor.
• What third party solutions do you incorporate in your workflow if you do any?
  g.) Twinmotion

[Illes Papp]

I am glad to see that your insights keep coming in this thread. I would like to thank you for your efforts for sharing your experience, ideas and wishes in this field with valuable input.

I would like to encourage all new visitors also, to add your thoughts. We are using this input with other sources to have the widest picture possible about your experience and practical workflows in the topic.

In this thread you have already shared excellent, constructive comments, looking forward to learning more.

[Matuts]

An Adobe Substance 3D integration would be great. Creating seamless quality textures can be quite painful but Substance Sampler greatly speeds up the process. It's too time consuming to put all the maps into the correct slots for Cinerender/ Redshift. Exporting high quality jpgs from the 3D window on a high resolution screen is usually good enough when all the textures are good quality and seamless. A Substance integration that allowed all the maps to populate the correct render slots would save time. A one button refresh to reload just the textures would also speed up the round-tripping required when testing the scale and colour etc.

[s_p_b]

It would be really nice to be able to colourize textures right inside of Archicad. I have always liked Sketchup’s implementation of this, it makes it very easy to adjust the look of a finish or facade, coordinate the hue, saturation, and brightness of one material to another, and you end up needing only a handful of base textures, which is way easier to manage.It also helps to have a colour picker that works in HSV (hue saturation value) mode. 
If I ever learn more C++ I would want to code this myself as an add-on.

[Jim Allen]

Adobe Substance isn't free though is it?

Personally I'm not keen on development effort/resources being used to interface with external commercial apps that most users are unlikely to use.

Procedural textures are very much a specialist visualisation thing. Twinmotion and Enscape have their own anyway. Why implement a special facility just for a couple of render engines? Cinerender is slow and complicated.

If the out of the box textures were better (some are still poor - they could licence some lower res ones from say Evermotion or Arroway) that would be good enough for majority of users, and even the standard 3d views would be so much better.