has anyone heard of Autodesk "Newport"?

[blowback]

People will always pay for quality......those who won't, were never wanted as clients anyway.

 

You cannot automate art.

[Vince Paske]

I like your analogy Ian.

As far as lighting and cameras, as already pointed out - architectural photographers go to great lengths to struggle against the natural to produce a photo of something that looks natural. They succeed at this because they are experienced and talented.

 

If reallly good camera work, really good lighting, and really good texturing are not a requirement, then yeah, we could be in trouble.

 

Exactly. I like Ian's analogy too, painting by numbers, hehe I used to do those to

But, like Fran says regarding photography - just because you take pictures, doesn't necessarily make you a "photographer".

 

Most people in the AEC industry don't understand what we do very well, or our value unless they have worked with one of us. Then they understand the multiple layers of knowledge and creativity it takes to do what we do well.

 

This sort of topic has been discussed before, and probably will in the future. If any of the technologies that have been promised years ago have come to fruition in the time frame they said in the past, we would already be "jobless".

It's about educating the people we encounter enough so when a client says - "beautiful rendering!" people who may be presenting don't say "yeah, it's amazing what the software today can do!", but rather "our renderer (or studio) is very talented".

[Mkay]

im sure accountants sh*t themselves when calculators were invented too...

 

There's just one major difference between accountants and viz people:

Accountants have an inflated ego. Most of us don't. They know how to sell themselves well.

 

I'm sure when Quickbooks came out, and it was able to generate many different reports and statements with the click of a button, many were probably - huh, that's 75% of my work time is generating all of this manually. But they now work with it, not compete against it. They took it to the next step.

 

No different here, yeah it may take over a lot of the work which until now has been very time-consuming, but - maybe this is the opportunity to put all the effort into more creativity, more heart, more drama...

[Hazdaz]

Come on people. You guys should ALL know by now that AutoDesk is the king of the geez-whiz presentation, that ends up completely under-impressing you when/if the application actually ships.

 

This reminds me of the last AutoCAD '07 preview that I went to in which the guy was manipulating a fancy model in real time on screen... He was pulling solid models here, tweaking visual display parameters there... it all looked impressive and almost amazing, that is until you actually got your mitts on the program and realized that 90% of the time, all that stuff was BS, and actually slowed you down, rather than helped you.

 

I see little difference in this new (unreleased) program.... lots of typical AutoDesk flash, and lots less to show for it in the real world.

 

No one (that I know of) works even remotely in the manner that AutoDesk thinks people work in. No engineer is going to give you his fully assembled Inventor file. Few (if any) architectural companies are going to give you their fully detailed-out building drawing.

 

:unimpressed:

 

Tell ya what, AutoDesk, lets start by giving us MAX users more than 24 material slots in the Editor, and then lets talk about all this Newport fluff.

[blowback]

Tell ya what, AutoDesk, lets start by giving us MAX users more than 24 material slots in the Editor, and then lets talk about all this Newport fluff.

 

Got that right!

[Justin Hunt]

Alot of what has been said about Face Robot, look at it now. Alot of large animation houses have incorporated it into their pipeline, but it doesnt relace the artist

 

JHV

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Personally I don't think this can get here fast enough. I appreciate having designers and technicians construct the models for me. It takes a lot of my work out of the game, and makes my job easier, and more effective. I don't have to spend hours upon hours building the model, and then be sitting there 120 minutes before the deadline, trying to throw in entourage, and have it look decent.

 

....and if I am wrong, then it will give me a reason to try my hand at something new. Break the addiction for me.

[womble]

I've never quite understood why architectural firms would want their highly skilled and highly paid architects spending hours doing flimsy little viz models that are visually uninspiring and of little use. The big bucks that come in from architectural projects are in designing and detailing the building, surely these people should be spending the majority of their time doing these tasks that pay the bills, instead of spending huge amount of time and money investing in technology, software and training that 'in theory' allows them to visualise design decisions in real time. Sketchup basically allows you to do that right now. Why is it so necessary to have a 'photoreal' image when you want to see what your building is going to look like with 6 windows instead of 5, and white spandrel panneling instead of black?

 

I fear architects may be losing the ability to use their imagination and to hand sketch, which bodes much worse for the design world than it does for our world. When architects are constrained by technology (or perhaps their ability to manipulate technology) design can be constrained. Can you imagine a Gehry building if the designer was trying to model it in 3d as he went along rather than using sketches and maquettes? (Although I know several Gehry buildings pioneered methods of BIM).

 

Can we use this technology? God yes please. Real time rendering of lighting and materials? Brilliant. Saves a lot of time. Will non-visualisers use this? I'd imagine so, but unless material/lighting libraries are incredibly well implemented (and hey, this is Autodesk we're talking about who rarely realese a programme that doesn't need to be enhanced with plugins and user knowledge) then all 'untrained' output from such a programme will look like all output from bad visualisations done using 3dsmax, Maxwell, Sketchup.

 

Flat, uninspiring, uninteresting and unimaginative.

 

---EDIT---

 

P.s. I'm in no way slagging off architects or designers using technology in their design workflow. Several of the guys at my practice use sketchup and photoshop and the like to amazing effect and produce some brilliant stuff. But these are guys with a lot of existing artistic/design talent. I've witnessed the programmes used by other people with horrific results. Same software, different user abilities/training. I'd wager that however hard autodesk tries, they'll never be able to remove the human element.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Interesting point, Gary. I maed my grad thesis on how CAD in general could affect the way architects create. Back then (like 10 years ago), I found that many offices would constrain their work to what their soft could do. Back then, MiniCAD couldn't draw round walls. The majority of offices using it strangelly avoided round walls in their projects as much as they could.

I don't know if this is going to affect the design process the same way, but I really don't see a regular architect, normally PC hater, who thinks drafting is a job for interns, taking the time to create a highly detailed model as the one showed. More: I don't see them taking the time to paint a good texture, or modeling books, appliances and stuff to place in a BIM model.

The way I see this, it's gonna be one of those things WE, as visualizers, think is great as a tool, but will have hardly no impact on what we do and how we do things whatsoever.