I’m the 3D visualiser for our Architectural office. I love sketchup and Ive invested quite a lot of time learning Vray for Sketchup, Ive been using it for around 3 years now, I personally feel that it produces amazing results, its not quite up there with 3DSMax but you know its blooming good.
My boss has come to me today and wants me to start using Lumion instead, the main reason is that he uses ArchiCAD and hes been told that it works better with this program. I find that when I import models from ArchiCAD it creates weird blocks, which effects texture patterns and seem to consume all my computer memory making it super slow. So most the time I rebuild the model back into a clean representation of what Ive been given. My first question is does anyone import from ArchiCAD and do they experience the same problems or is it that the ArchiCAD model is corrupt in the first place?
My second question is does anyone have experience using Lumion? is it better thatn Vray? seems that there are lots of programs about the do similar things in a slightly different way? My third question is are there any other programs that are better than either of these?
Thanks in advance for shedding some light on this subject
You can download an add-on that exports directly from Archicad to Lumion from the Lumion website. You don’t need SketchUp as a go-between.
As to getting things from Archicad to SketchUp, I do it from time to time. It also depends on the quality of the objects you use in Archicad, but usually the result needs a lot of cleanup to be usable in SketchUp, with missing or reversed faces and unwanted triangulation. Also, for some obscure reason (the triangles, perhaps) all edges in the exported SKP files are hidden.
As to rendering applications that work with Archicad, I have long used ArtLantis because of its speed (not the latest version), but if you are not in a big hurry, the built-in renderer (with Cinema 4D engine) is able to produce quite good results.