Thomas, thank you for your reply.
I had found a number of threads with good advice regarding render programs, including the knowledgeable advice of Dwight, prior to posting. It was based upon this very advice that I have invested in Artlantis Studio - I am currently preparing stills and animation for my current project. I should perhaps have been a little more specific in my query:
Artlantis is providing good results for the buildings themselves, but I am finding its capabilities in landscaping a relatively large site frustrating (perhaps just my inexperience?), and I admit to being seduced by the thought of opening and closing my animations with flights to & from the site over moving ocean / beach waves and palms billowing in the breeze !!! Furthermore, I have nearly a kilometre rock sea walls featuring prominently in the scheme and I am struggling to find the best way to model/portray them - I had picked up on the displacement rendering featuring in Vue (amongst others). If anyone could suggest a means of rendering rock sea walls that is sufficiently realistic when seen from a couple of metres away, but does not involve actual 3D rocks applied over a sea wall 8m wide and 1000m long I would be most grateful.
In posting, I was seeking an appraisal from those experts such as yourself & Dwight who might be able to clearly give a comparison between Artlantis & Vue in its latest iteration (6.5) from the perspective of an ArchiCad user. I have also sought to gain sufficient understanding from the Artlantis & Vue forums. Below are some insightful replies from Jim on the Artlantis forum, and Lee on behalf of e-on (Vue):
"We have been trying to successfully get Vue into a profitable workflow since version 5.0. It has never really paid for us.
The program seems to have been developed on the PC platform, and ported (very poorly) to the mac. The interface is very hard to learn, and many of the features are hidden.
render quality can be very good, as well as animations. However, the render speed is THE SLOWEST WE HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED! To resolve this we set up a 100 CPU render farm with a mix of AMD's Intels, and our multi-core mac workstations. The render network uses nodes (small apps) that are called "render cows". They are supposed to be totally cross platform, however we had to find our own solution to get the application to see them on the network. What we finally did was to install apples "Bonjour" on every PC in the farm. After that they would all go to work rendering the jobs...for a while.
They would constantly crash and take down the rendering on the master workstation.
Moreover, getting a good render in vue takes a lot of learning. The material editors are really too in depth for architectural work. A very small adjustment in a bump map would give really overpowering results. Rendering materials are copy protected, and not all can be exported to other applications. Imports are passable, with the program handling most formats good enough, but not outstanding. The best format to import seems to be .3ds, and obj. Sketchup imports can be terrible, despite the claim to being able to import them directly.
To Vue's credit, it is terrific for more organic scenes, as you can actually populate an entire ecosystem with all types of "live growth" plant life. Atmospheres and lighting are out of this world cool! But getting them to render is like pulling
teeth! Right now I have a small scene running on a 8 core mac pro with 16 gigs of ram, and it will be done in 2 hours. The same scene in modo was done in 15 minutes.
IF I were to try Vue seriously, I would plan on a big learning curve, deep pockets for render farms, and crappy support..oh and stay completely on the PC platform.
You must remember here that we are a high volume rendering house, and have to make the jobs pay. If you are just a casual user, you might not be as critical, or impatient as we are."
"As to the the idea of exporting Vue to Artlantis, I don't think it is possible. Even if you could, the fact that there is no network render in Artlantis, would preclude any animation rendering.
The only real strength of Artlantis is still renders. Moreover these renders are very limited as far as realistic landscapes.
If you are real serious at becoming real marketable in this field (and you are not opposed to using PC's), I would become an expert at 3d studio max. The only reason we have not done it is that we are all mac guys, many times to our own detriment.
Studio Max handles Autocad DWG native, with no translation problems. Not matter what ANY software company tells you, their import of Autocad DWG will NEVER be clean and seamless. That is because Autodesk will not share the code. All DWG importers are reverse engineered to work.
Studio Max also supports network rendering, and animation with ease.
If you are a mac person, I think your best bet is Modo, from Luxology. Or possibly run bootcamp on one of the new Intel model macs, and learn Studio Max.
But you must remember that these programs are MODELLERS as well as great renderers. They are a huge step above the capabilities of Artlantis."
Thanks to Jim on the Artlantis forum for the above advice, and to Lee from e-on for the following:
"Hi Patrice,
Since there is no direct interface between Archicad and Vue, any buildings would have to be imported into Vue. Vue supports .obj, .3ds, .lwo and others. You could import the textures as well, or do your texturing in Vue.
You could also import your terrain as an object into Vue, then plant your vegetation as desired.
With no direct link between the two programs, if a change was made to a model in Archicad, you would have to re-import the changed model into Vue.
Objects in Vue can be exported in many formats for use in other programs. You would be unable to export a terrain covered in an ecosystem of lush foliage to another program - the size would be prohibitive. Vue can handle these terrains beautifully because of the instancing technology.
Best regards.
Lee Randall"
Between the three forums I believe that I have gained a better understanding of the pros & cons of the two software solutions. In my case, and perhaps most Architects, Artlantis would be more appropriate for most of the time on most projects. In this particular instance I am caught between the devil and the deep blue sea (almost literally!) in that I would definitely benefit from the ease of use and speed of Artlantis but the project perhaps merits the advantages that Vue could bring to bear...
I am making solid progress with Artlantis but shall also have a shot at Vue 6.5, and let you know how I get on!
Kind regards,
Patrice
PS I hope too many of you haven't fallen asleep reading this post!
AC27 Apple Silicon. Twinmotion.
16" M1 Max MacBook Pro 32GB, Apple Studio Display, MacOS14
