Archicad Render Settings
Octavia Leithoff
In this archicad tutorial we want to take a look at the 3D modelling and rendering software by Graphisoft and which settings can be used to create architecture visualization of a day and a night time interior scenery.
We are using the latest versions (18 or 19) of ARCHICAD for rendering here. These versions are not so complicated to use, even if you are not skilled BIM modeler, and have a settings tool which is easy to use and modify.
Here you should choose CineRender for rendering engine. There are other render engines, but CineRender presents one with the best performances. Surely, this will not work well enough if other is not adjusted well.
Quality should always be set as High, although it takes some time to render the scenes (especially if there are some surfaces with reflection. This could be controlled in CineRender section settings.
With this quick run through ARCHICAD tutorial we wanted to touch some basic settings to achieve a proper rendering quality quite quickly with ARCHICAD and the CineRender engine. Hope you enjoyed the insights!
on point 2.
mind that you may have per-face assignments. I have no idea how ArchiCAD exports breps, but it is theoretically possible to loose material assignment if you only check object materials.
Would you post a simple example - a .3dm input from archicad, and the same file modified manually to the final point you want to go. The I can help you figure out the required steps to get from A to B.
Also what is your preferred programming language ?
One final thing to note - when running the vrayMtlfromRhino command - the UV mapping channel was set to 2 for each (converted) vray material, instead of 1. Having the channel set to 1 displays the texture mapping correctly when rendering. I manually corrected this in the _vray file.
What is the advantage to export the model as 3dm from ArchiCad?
From AC 25 I get the textures assigend only with the meshmodel export option.
For this purpose the obj export is faster with less file size.
Hi,
assuming all materials are standard custom materials (not PBR materials), then we have only 4 textures to check. Also I change the mapping channel to a hardcoded 1. I guess all these assumptions are valid, but in case they are not, you can alter the code as you please
Glass, also referred to as architectural glazing in the context of architecture, is an amazing material that provides a barrier from the elements while allowing a visual connection to the beauty around us. It provides light and even desired warmth in the cold season and is also aesthetically pleasing in many ways, including its reflective qualities.
This article will cover how to render architectural glazing within a Revit model for a realistic-looking architectural visualization. With the evolution of Revit materials, there are three primary ways to define glass: Generic, Glazing, and now Advanced Materials in Revit 2019.
Understanding the differences between these options and how they look in Enscape is key to getting the realistic or aesthetic results you are looking for. The images above and below highlight the amazing results we can get from Enscape with just minimal effort. Not only that, but this effort is all encapsulated within the primary Revit model, not exported and refined in another format or copy of the model.
When dealing with glass in SketchUp the Tint Color and Reflection Roughness are key. Here is an example in SketchUp showing three different glazing conditions and their respective settings.
The Refractive Index slider determines by which factor light is being bent when traveling through a transparent surface. You know this effect from looking at a glass of water or very thick glass. Air has a refractive index of 1.0, so light rays travel through it in a straight line. Water has an index of 1.33, while the index of window glass is 1.52. Diamonds, for a further example, have an index of 2.42: they bend light quite heavily. For architectural glazing, this value can be very low or 1.0 (i.e. no distortion) for efficiency.
Using Autodesk Revit, we can also achieve amazing results in Enscape. However, Revit has its own built-in material editor and multiple material shaders to reach similar results, with slight differences between them. The following image highlights the three options: Generic, Glazing and Advanced.
TIP: At this time, this material type is NOT recommended to achieve optimal results in Enscape. It is still touched on so the reader can better understand the differences and limitations.
It is interesting that the new advanced material has a Visual Transmittance (T-Vis or VLT) value. Anyone specifying glazing or involved in daylight analysis or calculations will be familiar with this real-world physical property.
The following image shows the results of this material definition within Enscape. It is easy to see the transmissive color within the glass, which is great! The one big limitation with this material within Enscape, at the moment, is that the glass appears frosted when receiving direct sunlight.
Tip: Adjust the Luminance value within Revit's color dialog to adjust the VLT when using a color rather than grayscale RGB. This ElumTools article describes how to map an RGB value to a real-world VLT value.
There is still much more that could be said about architectural glazing in buildings, or even glass in objects. But the information covered in this article should provide enough detail to achieve the beautiful results shown and additional variations by adjusting the related settings. Keep in mind, with Enscape open on a second monitor, many of these settings are visualized in real time, making the process incredibly easy.
As glazing is such an important part of architecture, it is truly exciting to see such dramatic and realistic results in a real-time rendering engine which also has a live link to our favorite 3D modeling environments.
Let's take a closer look at the rendering settings. Notice the bump mapping channel with high resolution imagery. This is what now sets apart the new materials. Much higher pixel size, and more fine tuned render settings for the materials. Thanks Graphisoft!
My goal with this, is to get the pens and hatching to match as closely to the 3D texture as possible, so it's easy to understand in sectional and elevation views, and naturally correlates with 3D texture settings.
This image below is 3 separate snips. The top row is a plan view with label. The imagery shown here in the background is actually snipped from an AXO 3D top view, and pasted onto the 2D plan so it's a nice quick reference...
The middle row is from section, with "own surface colors" turned on for uncut elements. These sectional views are really helpful to understand how the pens and hatching look together. This is typically where I'll go back and forth between section, and surface settings, making adjustments to the pens and fill colors as needed to try to match the surface texture image.
In this first tutorial in the new ARCHICAD Design Views series (24 minutes) I demonstrate how you can set up simplified or sketch-style drawings in ARCHICAD for client meetings and proposals. Sometimes it's advantageous to show less detail - or give a feeling of tentative, preliminary design - rather than use a hard-edged, overly detailed view.
Hello, this is Eric Bobrow, and in this ARCHICAD video tutorial, I'll show you how you can get simplified schematic-level drawings as well as sketchy concept output from your model, regardless of whether you're in the early stages and actually developing the concept, or perhaps you've developed it a lot further. If you want to meet with clients and not give them the idea that you've done too much work or have too much detail put in already, or if you want to just simplify it down to communicate with them better so that they focus on the concepts and not the details, this can be extremely useful. Here we have a simple model that I started putting together in the standard USA template. Now, what I'm going to demonstrate works in the USA template. It works in the international template or any template that you have for your projects.
In this particular case, I've drawn some basic doors and windows and a roof. I've put in the walls. All of them with the same simple generic building material- simple, just two parallel lines like that. Now, when I go to 3D, we're gonna see that the model is very basic, and if you were meeting with a client at this point, they would understand that this is just the beginnings of a sketch of what might happen in the project, but what happens when you start putting in some more detail? We'll just go here, and let's say select all the walls that are on the outside by selecting all walls and then deselecting these interior ones, and I'll switch them from single mono-element fills to composites and choose, for example, a 2x6 with stucco on the outside here. Then, I'll go and pick the interior ones and possibly go make the decision that it's going to be on the interior wall layer so we can separate them out, and that they're going to be composites with, say, 2x4 with gypsum on both sides.
Now, before I proceed with the main presentation, I want to point out an issue in the US template. You notice that doing a standard 2x4 meeting a 2x6 exterior wall that the framing has this funny issue. It's easy to fix, and I think I'm just going to demonstrate that for you. Select the two walls, in this case, and you're not going to change them. You're simply going to change the building materials that they're made from, so I go to the options, building materials, and when we have elements pre-selected, you can see that the building materials that are used are shown in this light green. Now, we can sort them by name, so we can see them alphabetically, or we can sort them by priority, where the ones that are lower down on the list have a higher priority.
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