Here’s a quick recap of MNAUG #7.

David Wilson from Charles Stinson Architects introduced all of us to Artlantis. He did a great job of walking us through a project from ArchiCAD through Artlantis to final tweaking in Photoshop. If anyone wants to see some of the images he presented, contact me. I was impressed with a lot of what David showed us, so I’ll only mention a few things. The model in Artlantis looked awesome. It was a little surreal to be able to see such a polished rendering be rotated and looked at from different views. That was cool. David made working in Artlantis look very easy. I think ArchiCAD knowledge will definitely help all of us newbies. Additionally, it was clear that once you’ve done a few renderings in Artlantis, it’s a simple process to crib shaders (materials), lights, views, backgrounds–everything really–from other Artlantis files or even .jpegs of other Artlantis renderings.

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of doing renderings in Artlantis, and what really sold me personally, was what happened after the rendering was saved as a .psd and exported to Photoshop. Throughout the presentation David often said “I leave that for Photoshop” or “That’s easier to do in Photoshop”. This bothered me. Until we went into Photoshop and I realized Artlantis is intended to be a part of the rendering process, not the conclusion. Artlantis is the workhorse in the middle that connects beginning (ArchiCAD) to end (Photoshop). A rendering from Artlantis enters Photoshop as a .psd file with 4 layers. The first layer is the rendering itself. The second layer is the background. The third layer is the object-ID layer. The fourth layer is the material-ID layer. It’s these last two layers which just blew me away. The ID layers are hidden layers that break the rendering into objects or materials by color.  So by activating the material-ID layer and magic-wanding the color signifying the material you want, you can then switch back to the rendering layer and work exclusively in an area that would otherwise be impossible to isolate. Same thing goes with the object-ID layer. Incredibly awesome. There is so much versatility and control condensed into those 2 layers of color blocks. Whoever thought of that is a genius. I’d like to thank them. It’s reusing an old painting technique in a new way. When starting an oil painting, I was taught to block out areas of color and add detail on top. Slowly the original areas are lost. With Artlantis, those areas are kept, re-purposed, and contain a ton of information that remains valuable. Retaining information for it’s reuse later? Sounds like BIM-thinking all the way through the rendering process.