Posted by Kevin Matthews on December 19, 1999 at 17:53:29:In Reply to: High-quality walkthrus? posted by gary veasy on December 18, 1999 at 21:51:03:
Hi Gary,
First I'd like to clarify the terminology a bit. There are live walkthroughs, and scripted or recorded animations. An architectural animation, which I'm sure is what you're asking about, may or may not use a walkthrough style, but I like to use the terms walkthru and animation to carry the distinction between live and recorded.
DesignWorkshop inherently provides high-quality live walkthroughs with lighting and material textures. It's all there right out of the box.
DesignWorkshop Professional also includes some basic capabilities for creating recorded animations. In DesignWorkshop Professional for Power Macintosh, the scripting capability exists only in the modeling environment, which provides only basic shade and shadow rendering. A somewhat enhanced scripting capability is currently available in DesignWorkshop Professional for Windows 95/98/NT, operating in the fully texture-mapped Lights and Textures rendering environment.
However, for more than occassional short bits of architectural animation, we recommend using a more specialized animation program. DesignWorkshop will work with almost any of the various different animation applications available on Mac, Windows, and/or Unix.
In particular we recommend Artlantis, because it provides a fast and easy way to produce professional-quality architectural animation. It has a fairly similar philosophy to DesignWorkshop, in not trying to do everything known to man, but focusing intensely on one related set of capabilities, and, doing that with an architectural attitude.
Where DW specifically does modeling, rendering, and live walkthrough, Artlantis specifically does rendering and recorded animation, and it does them very well. The DW Pro CD-ROM and our galleries include examples of work down with DW and Artlantis, and we sell bundle packages of DW and Artlantis, because they make a great duo.
It is also true that the rendering sophistication of Artlantis is still not what can be achieved with Radiance. Artlantis, like even most professional rendering software, does not accurately render bounced light, while this is forte for Radiance.
For animating with Radiance, there is a Radiance accessory program called "ranimate", available at RenderCity for members only use from the command line. As we are still building up the lighting and material handling interfaces for Radiance Online for maximum-quality single image rendering, we aren't currently providing any training or support for ranimate.
However, if you're interested in this area, there are a couple of standard sources to get started with. The primary official reference is the ranimate man page.
More detail is provided in The Book, Rendering with Radiance, which devotes Chapter 9 to Radiance animation topics, from concepts to ranimate examples and tricks.
Of course, if user demand asked for, we could delay certain RenderCity still-rendering bells and whistles, and get to animation support a little sooner. Let us know what you think!
Cheers,
K