My impression is that Mstn may soon be able to offer itself up as an alternative to 3dMax/Design as the preferred stills rendering app in the AEC market?
3dsMax users... what is still missing in Mstn that is fundamental...?
Plug-in infrastructure? Fully scriptable?
Procedural materials editor? BIM-aware materials assignment ?
Hardware based preview windows?
Better integration with Photoshop..render to layers? Include 3d plane / depth info so that PS extended can 'paint' like Piranesi?
Other question would be if there any AEC specific functionality / opportunities for Mstn to consider?
Photo based or 'infused' workfkows?
Image based 3d modeling, texture /decal acquisition....?
Point clouds are becoming popular.. but mashed up with particle shaders for rendering? Laser scanners can also capture colour inf0.. convert to textures?
Something that is aimed at rendering landscaping / foliage? Mesh? Particles? Voxels?
Geo-referenced / Verified View Montage tools
Environmental ?
Good story dwy.seah,
I think MicroStation could indeed be improved on some points, but if you don´t have to model, materialize and render a dinosaur, or make advanced animations, why should you already buy an expensive 3D studio Max licence next to MicroStation? Does the extra costs of the program weigh up against the few extra functions you maybe use?
I think that for architectural or engineering visualization MicroStation is an excellent 3D application. The quality of the end product is in my opinion, already comparable with advanced 3D applications like 3D studio Max. The biggest influence is the knowledge of the user. Look for example in the Gallery to images of Kurt S.
Regards Louis.
Louis,
" why should you already buy an expensive 3D studio Max licence next to MicroStation? "
I can only speak from the architectural side, and I would say that most firms do NOT use Mstn, even those who are Mstn shops, as their viz application. The most popular package is 3dMax.
I have always thought this to be a problem, as there was always the translation barrier and the coordination headache, because last minute changes tended to be done in Max and the rest of the CAD info would fall out of sync, among other problems.... not very BIM-my.
Regards
Dominic
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for the response. I can get the angle I need for a single still. The real time killer is paths, targets and keyframing and trying to keep my camera lens under control. Then tweaking paths, acceleration, deceleration etc. Good to know someone is aware an overhaul is in order.
Can someone speak to the purpose of these bimg files that get generated during an animation?
Regards,
DavidG
Hi David,
The BIMG files are floating point images much like EXR or HDR they are High Dynamic Range. You want to keep them a round until you are happy with the tone mapped frames then you can delete them. Hard drive space is so cheap this days that even though they take up a lot of space I tend to keep them around till I am pretty darn sure I don't want to tweak them more. We added tools to the Animation Producer so that you can tone map the frames and even add bloom to a set of images.
JF
Rendering for compositing / iterative workflows :
1. Interesting progressive rendering tech from UK firm Shaderlight. Apparently needs lots of RAM, but its a final render not preview. Designed from the ground up to avoid complete re-renders. Vid: pretty impressive that the reflections of the new material are regenerated 'instantly'. This must be pretty good for 'iterative' lastminute.com workflows.
2. Step up from the multi-pass / layer rendering tricks in Max/Maya are 3d compositing apps like Nuke. This clip shows how texture maps and point clouds can be used to generate 3d proxies.
3D pixels and raster particle systems very cool, huge potential.
Jerry thanks for the tip.
Seeing I'm using a bootcamp partion I don't have a ton of extra "local" space. All my data resides on my network server. This huge amount of data was getting sent to my file server and wreaking havoc with my backups process. Plus the speed hit of processing them over the network. Will have to try plugging in an external drive or pushing it to the Mac side of the drive next time.
Aren't most of these large "BIM" projects on a network. Wondering how some of the others here are rendering. Local or from data on the network. Do they storing frames local or on the network?
Once again about learning resources. Here is nice example of simple set of tutorial videos for Vray for Sketchup:
www.cgarchitect.com/.../newsfeed.asp
Now tell me. How much easier it would be for all of you to get familiar wit Luxo renderer in Microstation
if you had this kind of set of tutorial videos for Microstation/Luxo?
This set was made by one man. Wou it be problem for Bentley to prepare similar set of videos for Luxology renderer?
Jozef