ArchiCAD 12 - Sneak Preview

I am Kidding!!!

Chad, then Why did you pay for Revit? You could have stayed using pen and paper and saved that money. I can sketch in 3D and draw on paper a lot cheaper (and for some tasks faster than either AC or Revit) than using Revit or AC and I can use oils, pastels, acrylics, water colors, color pencils, etc.

I know the point you are trying to make, but I don't think it works with pen and paper. Its incredibly inefficient compared to CAD, let alone a BIM application. Not to mention federal projects are requiring BIM software in order to be considered for the job...

I can understand that you may want a higher quality render at a faster time, but what I was trying to get across was that you're reaching a point then where visualization is becoming more of a concern than the architecture. Of course all of this goes away if you've got deep pockets - buy 3DS MAX Design and 10 computers set up as a render farm and away you go...

I'm not trying to say Revit can replace your rendering engine. I was responding to a post made that Revit's new engine was comparable to Lightworks, which as you can see, is ridiculous.

ejrolon wrote:
........
Nope, I'm not interested in that, because depending on the project I use AC's Sketch Render or Lightwork, Artlantis, C4D's Sketch and Toon, Advanced Renderer or Vray. Archicad main purpose is not Rendering, there are specialized applications for that.....

Well, with all due respect, just because it doesn't interest you or rank high in your personal list of importance, doesn't necessarily mean that that applies to all ArchiCAD users across the board. Unfortunately in deciding whether or not to improve these tools in their future versions, Graphisoft will inevitably take the path of least resistance in assuming that you speak for the majority (which you don't) and hence justify not investing more in developing these tools or choosing instead to implement them half-baked ala Lightworks sans radiosity as it's currently implemented in ArchiCAD.

Whether you would want to admit it or not, visualization has now become an important part and aspect of architectural design today and not just for marketing as it traditionally used to be. The ability to affect design decisions based on a design space's accurate lighting conditions or accurate material application, representation and sample tests, is now an invaluable part of a lot of architects' design repertoires and tool-sets. The fact that ArchiCAD has Lightworks, the Sketch render engine and has always had Sun-shadow study capabilities attests to this.
It's basically just a question of whether the developers are willing to implement the best support system available: read render engine or system ( and clients will pay for it) or whether they assume that the majority opinion is the one you just voiced and hence justify limiting the development of this part of AC.

ejrolon wrote:
If you consider switching to Revit because it uses Mental Ray and Archicad uses Lightworks then you Might be missing the point, and we start again the debate of the "swiss army apps" vs "one tool for one action" apps.

Nobody is advocating switching over to Revit due to the fact that they now have a superior render engine, and certainly not at the cost of their atrocious workflow and typically migraine-inducing dialogbox-happy interface. But by your reasoning ( of the whole "swiss army apps" debate) why bother having Lightworks or even the Sketch render engine at all to begin with. Why even have the traditional internal render engine if visualization should not be an important element of the design process in ArchiCAD? Why not just focus development on enabling ArchiCAD to export clean models to as many applications out there more suited to this whole visualization thing which isn't important by your reasoning, in an architect's design process workflow?

Perhaps it might be because at some point the cost of having to send out your models to professional CG Archviz houses for high quality renders and output, or alternatively, the cost of having to spend on professional visualization applications like 3Ds Max, along with the the training and/or staff to use it, - or watching other architects you compete with for projects and commissions, capable of producing similar quality renders in-house with more accurate and refined design-intent, win more of those projects from you, all becomes more expensive than can logically justify having just the one design software alone incapable of allowing you to compete fairly in an otherwise competitive field thanks to its intentional limitations.

Like I said before, visualization has always been an important part of design, whether through traditional methods (watercolour, paint, hand-sketches) or whether it's through more photorealistic modern methods that more clients are actually demanding to see and which more and more architects are using to improve and enhance their own design processes.


p.s. - incidentally, this is the same brand of reasoning which, for the longest time, was used to justify the lack of tools like SEO and Complex profile manager, followed the crippled implementation of it (CPM) when it was finally introduced in v10 - i.e. that users didn't need to model such complex forms and shapes in ArchiCAD because they are so rare in architecture. Like moldings, baseboards and cornices haven't been around in architecture for as long as slabs and walls. And think of how many other things one is able to model using those tools that are not necessarily Gehry-esque but still traditional or conventional architecture nonetheless. Sadly that's the same reasoning that's still being used to justify not further improving the modeling capabilities, and in particular free-form and organic modeling capabilities.

ejrolon wrote:
Nope, I'm not interested in that, because depending on the project I use AC's Sketch Render or Lightwork, Artlantis, C4D's Sketch and Toon, Advanced Renderer or Vray. Archicad main purpose is not Rendering, there are specialized applications for that.

Hm...I'd be willing to bet that you are not the person who pays for your softwares and their updates!
Lot of the smaller firms cannot afford to pay for so many rendering programs on top of ArchiCAD. Even if they want to take it to the next step and pay for a rendering program, it'll have to be one of those few options, not all of them!
Also, those external rendering programs are fine for stellar one or two images to win the project or to convince the city people of your project, but I find that I increasingly need to show 3d information as part of my drawing set, and it is so much easier to have views set up in AC that updates to whatever changes I have, which I can then put into my working drawing set with only a few clicks.

This topic has kind of degenerated, but I see the point that Lightworks in ArchiCAD could use SOME improvement. However, I think the depth of complaints here is really unwarranted. Maybe it's just me, who lived with a sub-par photorending engine for years (since v. 4.5), but Lightworks seems to do what everyday architecture needs. We get good renderings quickly, and I can teach it to my oft-untechnical staff. ArchiCAD is already in danger of becoming too cumbersome, and it may be time to clean house (improve OpenGL with shadows/hidden line and Lightworks so the internal rendering engines can be dropped). Hundreds of light settings and shader options would only make ArchiCAD more elitist, and stunt it's growth in America. We have to focus on the concept that ArchiCAD is a great all-around architectural solution, combining conceptual design, analysis, construction documents, and rendering into one unified entity, usable by many sizes of firms, and with less of a learning curve than it's rivals.

There has been some discussion that models are becoming so complex that professional "Modelers" must evolve to allow architects to focus on what really matters... buildings. I would rather keep the software so I don't need to have a go-between. The CAD-drafter/architect relationship has already eroded our profession, and Modelers may just make it worse. Please, keep ArchiCAD accessible to the decision-makers! We will accept "good" rendering results, as long as they do their job, which is to accurately communicate the concept and appearance of a design to the client, so they can comment and eventually buy in. If this is done quickly and efficiently, then we make money and achieve success! "Perfect" rendering is an exercise in diminishing returns, and I don't think it's needed in 95% of architecture firms... indeed, it's not wanted!

SOME IMPROVEMENT? SOME??????

The betrayal, oh "cunning worker" who would warn his offspring to not fly too close to the sun because… their jets would flame out from lack of oxygen, is that Graphisoft chose to implement minor and obsolete aspects of the world's best rendering engine and then tell people it was LightWorks.

Perhaps implementing the full aspects of LightWorks would mean a profound and expensive revamp of GDL lighting calculation - I don't know - but I personally feel cheated by the features one can see on the LightWorks site that aren't a part of Archicad and should be. Previews, Real-time sketch rendering, etc.

http://www.lightwork.com/

http://www.lightworkdesign.com/products/sketch.htm

While i agree that truly professional rendering requires a lot of tweaking and time-consuming material settings, having a soft, quick, radiosity-based lighting model isn't unreasonably complex for mere architects to manage. We would all benefit if such a power was within Archicad even if materials remain rudimentary.

Da3dalus wrote:
..... "Perfect" rendering is an exercise in diminishing returns, and I don't think it's needed in 95% of architecture firms... indeed, it's not wanted!

.....firstly, no one is asking for "Perfect" rendering in ArchiCAD. But most are certainly asking for improved rendering capabilities. Graphisoft deliberately integrated a horribly stunted version of Lightworks into their program based solely on the assumption (correctly it would seem) that users would justify having sub-standard tools using reasoning and logic along the lines of "...it's better now than when I began using it in version 4.5" - conveniently forgetting, of course, that between version 4.5 and version 9 or 10 they never bothered to upgrade or improve it - or because others presume that because they don't need it, then everybody else can't possibly need it.

So obviously anything they give after that long (3 versions at least) will be a vast improvement over good ol' "Internal engine", despite still being far below industry standards quality-wise. There's no denying the fact that Lightworks was an improvement when they did integrate it, even as stunted and crippled as they did so. But visualization ( both professionally dedicated high level and lower-level small firm architecture standard) have come a long long way since then. Sketchup, of all programs, has vastly more options for producing refined output from within the program without having to export the model, than you can get from ArchiCAD, - and even AutoCAD; AUTOCAD!!! for crying out loud, now has a far superior inbuilt render engine than ArchiCAD. I don't think it's too much to ask Graphisoft to give us the capacity to at least keep pace with other products and other architects, in this regard, is it?

Secondly, again I ask, which 95% firms do you profess to speak for in determining that they don't want or need improved rendering capabilities? Because I'm pretty certain they're not the same majority who are increasingly either outsourcing their models for rendering, or who are having to resort to other alternative such as the examples I mention above to get professional looking images for competitions, bids, client meetings and even just design decisions. A lot of the same majority we have to compete against.

Autodesk didn't integrate Mentalray into Revit simply because they could; they did so because they realized that not having a half decent capacity to do these kinds of rendering (without even having to resort to their own other more professional products such as Max and Maya) placed their customers at a distinct disadvantage against their direct competitors.

I'll hold him. You punch.
You can have the laptop. I'll take the wallet.

Dwight wrote:
I'll hold him. You punch.
You can have the laptop. I'll take the wallet.

LOL