I need a little help choosing

[easy]

I am writing a short report and need some information on choosing 3D software to do 3d architectural visualisation views. With so many packages available how would you justify using one from another. It seems that it really doesn’t matter what application you use these days since most now come with similar tools and can render out excellent results.

 

From these packages Max, Lightwave, Cinema 4D and Maya (they are all well priced) how would you choose. My choice is 3D Studio Max because there is a lot of support and third party software and is a good ‘all round’ out of the box solution. I will also need something that I can use for animations and modelling and 3DSMax fits the bill. But why Max over Maya or lightwave I’m not 100% sure.

 

Is it all down to personal preference, 'i use this because the interface looks the best' or 'this was used in 'xyz' film which means it must be the best at everything'

 

If there are any links anyone could point me in the direction I would greatly appreciate your help.

 

I’m going to email a load of companies to see if I can get their help from the developers. Should be interesting

 

Rich

 

PS.

if anyone is a representative of any 3d software developer then now would be a good time to say your bit because I get the decision on all the software that will be bought.

[dwright]

it all depends on your workflow, are you modeling 3D from 2D CAD or you are going to receive 3D CAD files? or both? How big are the projects? Time frame to finish rendering... this is a difficult subject to talk about.

 

Maya and Lightwave are very good but requires you to know what you are doing since these apps were designed for sfx. MAX is in general great, the only negative, it brakes down with mid-large projects, it is simply to slow for large jobs, requires then to split jobs and post-composite. Maya, LW, and Soft have a much better handling of data. Cinema is also good, and a fast renderer.

 

Maya’s own rendering, expect for mental ray, is very slow, and in my opinion not good, most of the great works done in Maya are actually rendered via renderman or other external rendering engine.

 

We are not a Max house, but must say that Max in general is appropriate for Arch work, has lots of features, and has multiple rendering engine choices for someone that understands 3D rendering.

 

Hope this guides you and does not complicate your decision.

[Paul Griger]

Hi Rich,

 

Well, this the $250,000 question, isn’t it?

 

I’m not an ardent proponent of any package really. It seems to come down to whatever tool best fits that artist’s needs. I’ve seen amazing work come from all of the packages that you have mentioned.

 

Some of the Q’s that David mentioned are valid and should be considered in your final decision. And I think it’s safe to assume that you are looking for a package to do mainly architectural renderings, right?

 

All things being equal [GI, animation, modeling, light effects, {not saying that all of the packages are equally strong in these areas, just that they have the capability or the plug-in available, that’s all}] for me it came down to workflow, speed and price.

 

~

 

For me, I settled down w/C4D XL 7 [i think it’s the XL bundle for R8 now]. You can customize every little aspect of the interface down to the skin, so the workflow seemed logical and easy to grasp for myself. And the rendering engine is one of the fastest out there. It does animations, QT VR objects and QT Panoramas. Lighting effects include Volumetric lights and Caustics. Any object can be self-illuminating. You can assign how much any material will be figured in the GI solution, so you can really tweak the speed of the GI calculation by omitting transparent and black objects that are not figured in a GI calculation.

 

And C4D is rock solid! It has crashed only once on me, and that was because I was doing something incredibly stupid in another program [this other program was acting buggy, and I went to close it through the Task Manager, and the whole computer was stalling, so C4D crashed out.] Recently I have been putting C4D through the ringer by rendering two scenes in C4D [one in the picture viewer, one in the modeling space, uploading large files via email, backing up my drive to a external hard drive, and surfing the internet all at the same time and C4D didn’t crash [running on Win 2K]

 

And C4D takes advantage of my dual processors rendering, but the other packages may do this also. It cuts my rendering time down by almost 50%

 

My only beef so far is that the DOF in C4D R7 is tough to use and problematic when figuring it through transparent objects. R8 seems to have remedied some of this I hear, but the DOF in C4D is not completely bug free yet.

 

~

 

I tried a Lightwave demo, but I couldn’t come to grip with modeling in one program and rendering in the other. I also didn’t like Lightwave’s interface. It didn’t seem very user friendly to me compared to C4D.

 

I’ve never tried Max, but I have a general disdain for Autodesk, so I didn’t really get too enthused about Max. And AFAIK Viz can’t do caustics or volumetric lighting or animation, so I didn’t entertain that Autodesk package either.

 

Maya’s modeling is quite powerful, but the learning curve is like hitting a brick wall from what I hear. Plus from what I know you need a plug-in [as David stated] like Mental Ray or such to render GI. I believe Maya is primarily used for commercial projects such as for commercials, movies and such.

 

Right now I am working on my first project in C4D, modeling, lighting and animation. I have no regrets with my decision and been having a blast working in it.

 

My recommendation would be to download any demos of the programs you are looking to use and give them a fair shake. You should find out pretty quickly which one will be best suited for your needs.

 

My 2 pennies on this nisus length post ,

 

Paul Griger

[dwright]

Regarding Cinema, I used Sculpt 3D and Sculpt Animate 4D on the Amiga back in 87 and 89... Sculpt was the one of the raytracers back in the Amiga days (well C-Light was also, but very unknown, and Imagine/Turbo Silver were also known), Sculpt was the startup base for Cinema, first ported to the Mac as Sculpt. Current Cinema rules, I like it, actually, don’t know why I have not tested into the workflow to check it out, will need to purchase one to test it out.

[easy]

Thanks for you input Paul and dwright you have both given some things to think about.

 

The scale of my projects will be both large and small something in the region from luxury flats, office space, to football (soccer) size stadiums. I will have to do a lot of modelling and will also receive CAD data files. This is by no means a small scale operation and really need to make sure that I get it right.

 

I think that Cinema 4D and 3DSMax are strong players and are very close competition regarding architectural visualisation. But when I think about the long term prospects and third party support maybe, and if I had to choose this instant, then maybe Discreet’s Max has the edge.

 

Reading a lot of the articles on CGarchitect Max and VIZ has been a popular choice with many company's as is Cinema 4D. Though you are right Paul Griger that VIZ is no good for animation, seems to be more of a support application with lighting.

 

I will have to look into this more this week.

[stefkeB]

Although max/viz are not the best, they are used a lot in architectural visualisation (probably because they work together with AutoCAD so well). The new max5 is very nice (although some bugs still exist -- reflectance readout in material editor is flawed?) and includes almost everything from VIZ4 as well.

The adaptive regathering makes it a lot faster then VIZ4 but VIZ4 is better suited overall for architectural work (and only half the cost). Animation, as in opening doors and sunstudies and walkthroughs are adequate in VIZ, so you don't need max for that.

Texture baking is nice for realtime use (VRML, Web-export, games) and thus interesting for client walkthroughs.

For rendering, you can always try to use Brazil or VRay (recommended -- try the free version) or FinalRender to have faster raytracing and other GI (not compatible with max5/viz4 radiosity).

 

Cinema4D is one of the best all-round applications on the planet, certainly for architectural work and considering it's price. It's raytracing and soft (and clean) shadow maps are very good. The radiosity has only a few main settings, but let you tweak every scene to be reasonably fast. I like the interface a lot and the r8 + advanced render module is perfect for architectural work.

 

Maya Complete 4.5 (with Mental Ray) could be the perfect tool for the job, for a modest price.

 

XSI is way too expensive to not use it for animation & F/X

 

Lightwave... hate it or love it...

 

Lightwave, Maya & XSI are all good, but I have very little experience with them.

[nisus]

Hi all,

 

We use max for mainly two reasons:

- good import from autocad

- fluent workflow and pretty straightforward, especially once you've custumized an 'architectural viz'-UI

- maxscript: change tedious repetitive work for a few clicks workflow

 

Honestly, we haven't tried any other application yet as we sticked with this software since 3dsdos3 and didn't feel the need to change because we're able to do everything we want...

 

rgds

 

nisus

 

ps: lol paul