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High-quality simple renderer wanted: Mac


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Aside from Maya, there doesn't appear to be much in the way of high-quality architectural modelers/renderers that give me the same results as POV-Ray.

With POV, I export to AutoCAD, tweak a bit, then import into Rhino, name groups, then export to POV. I need something that others in the office -- who are not as adept at such manoeuvres -- can get into without extensive training.

Suggestions? 3dcafe doesn't appear to have what I'm after. [Frown]

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Mr. Samurai,

I imagine you're familiar with Strata 3D Pro. It's a fairly easy program to render with that works great on a MAC and can open VW files with relative ease. I hope the people at VW keep up the compatibility between the two...please! Though I think the day is fast approaching where the rendering on VW is so awesome you won't need anything else!! [big Grin]

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Artlantis isn't bad. I'll admit that we don't do much in the way of rendering--- but their VW plugin offers pretty good integration between the two programs. It will output QuickTime VR, which is nice. They have yet to come out with an OSX version so I am curious as to how much development they are still doing.

DesignWorkshop is not a bad 3d modeller for architecture. In addition to having its own rendering engine it will output .rad files for the Radiance Synthetic Imaging System from LBL. You can get very high quality out of Radiance. Radiance has also been built for OSX.

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i have used both Strata and atlantis with mixed results. Strata has the best render engines, their raytrace is beautiful and the controls over animation have much more safistication. But I believe they do not have direct import since VWKS 8.5 and then it was a secret " hold the option key down" in the import dialog to get it. Plus asigning textures and soforth was a big pain. Artlantis is much easier to work with. Archicad uses it for their renderer. The interactive renderer is great to see what textures and shapes look like fast. The ray trace renderer does not seem to have that sparkle as strata has but moving around the model, creating animation paths, way easier, all around a much easlier program to learn and deal with. Plus it has the ablity to create data base files that let you go back into VWKS to change the geometry if you forgot something, without starting over in Artlantis. Very cool and much more productive. Renderworks still seems slow to me, strata was fast as is artlantis. I would seriously opt out of buying renderworks and get Artlantis instead because of its slowness, lack of enviroments, and funky animation path generator. I guess Renderworks 10 is better but i do not have it yet. Plus the techs are very nice french girls in canada. I am a sucker for a french accent any day over a surley tech guy.

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