Archicad and Maxwell Render

[tom10]

We currently use archicad within our office but are not to happy with the rendering quality of Lightworks. We are looking at the Maxwell Render plug-in for archicad as one possible solution.

 

Does anyone have any experience with it? I have read in the past that it is limited with the plug-in

 

Best regards

 

Tom

[BrianKitts]

It's okay, it allows for some easy transition of UV maps and materials since you can actually build your Maxwell materials in Archicad, but the toughest part is really getting your Archicad model setup for the render.

 

I guess it depends on how many people have their hands on the Archicad model. On our projects at any time there are a dozen plus people signed into an Archicad teamwork project. When you have that many people inserting objects and materials, it's tough to get the permissions in the right areas to clean up the model for rendering. Trying to keep track of all the crap people insert is an endless battle. A cad user doesn't care what a symbol looks like in 3D or how much 3D geometry is embedded in their 2D symbol.... let alone care about the materials that are assigned to it.

 

So it's always just been easier to export the model to whatever ever rendering application you're going to use, be it Maxwell studio or 3dsmax, etc and clean it up on the other end. But since you're going to be fixing a lot of stuff outside of Archicad the whole benefit of using the Maxwell plug in gets kind of lost. To which point you're decision of what engine to render with comes down to what is the most efficient for making renders. And the time you'll save with the archicad plugin for maxwell is no where near a time saver to overcome the rendering times you're going to occur with maxwell.

 

If you save an hour setting up materials but your render takes 20 hours, would you have rather have spent 2 hours setting it up in 3dsmax and rendering it out in a preview in 10 mins or production renders in a few hours with mental ray, vray, or something else that's more efficient?

Edited November 26, 2008 by BrianKitts

[tom10]

BrianKitts

 

Thanks for your post.

 

So this plugin for archicad then. Does it mean you have to export a 3d model into a seperate rendering program such as maxwell or can the the 3d model be rendered in archicad with maxwell render in the same way in which you use the lightworks rendering engine. Granted it will more complex.

 

thanks

 

Tom

[Derek Entesano]

Tom,

Possibly look at Cinema4D with the Vray plugin. The translation between the Archicad model and Cinema is updatible so you will retain materials and mapping when you update changes and it is fast. We bought a Maxwell licence but at the time it took too loing to get an image without heaps of noise.

[brightlight]

And you can render with Vray internally to Cinema4d

[tom10]

Yea i have used cinema 4d abit and find it really easy tp pick up but i do have problems when it comes to lighting a scene with GI.

 

Thanks

[snapcrackle]

Tom,

 

Before you ditch the LW approach, get your hands on the Pro.Render DVD. And yes, out of the box AC implementation of LW is cartoon like.

 

Real control comes with mastery of: a) material and b) lighting. Understanding the 60+ parameters for a material will alter your perception of a LW render.

 

The DVD will, among many basic lessons, also teach how to combine effects. For example, I have created a wood floor with the slightly wavy reflections of a real wood floor by creating a very thin mostly transparent slab with the reflective qualities of water. The light bouncing of the wood slab + plus water slab looks perfect, distorting the reflection of the walls and furniture. You can't tell that it is an "effect".

 

Cheers,

Snapcrackle

[lucho]

Hi i suggest to you to see artlantis web page, the software has made the several improvements, maxwell is ok with archicad, artlantis web page is http://www.artlantis.com see the gallery