The best rendering program for animations?

comatose

@unknownuser said:

What is the best rendering program for rendering architectural animations in high quality?

For high quality animations one needs to also address ones hardware, I suggest either using a render farm or getting a whole bunch of slave rigs to enable you to render high quality in as little time as possible.
A 30 second render at 720p (1280x720) would take around 10 hours to complete using 8 threads on an i7 920 (exterior) and about twice as long for interiors.

Now depending on what kind of animation you need that also will determine the application, if it's only a walk-through then you will have many choices, if you need lights to switch on, wheels to turn, water to flow, sky to move, and any other effect, then your choices are greatly reduced.

I like 3D Max for setting up an animation using Vray 4 max, I also like Vue for exterior renders (slow), Twilight is good (supports mover.rb and sketchy-physics) and so is Irender (easy to use)
I hear Artlantis is pretty damn decent also with great controls and options.

Thanks for the information! I am doing like, what do you call it- a walk around the building at birds eye and human eye. and next will be doing interior walk throughs. I am not happy with the animations i can set up in sketchup- are there good plugins i can get for that? also, i will purchase a rendering program soon so what do you recommend ?i would like the program to have good features for creating lights.

cheers

d12dozr

For creating better animations/walkthroughs, you could use the FlightPath (free) plugin or FlightPath2 ($7.00)

For rendering, I'd recommend Twilight as it is relatively inexpensive (99 USD), super easy yet powerful to use, and support in the forum is excellent.

Hope that helps

notareal

@comatose said:

Thanks for the information! I am doing like, what do you call it- a walk around the building at birds eye and human eye. and next will be doing interior walk throughs. I am not happy with the animations i can set up in sketchup- are there good plugins i can get for that? also, i will purchase a rendering program soon so what do you recommend ?i would like the program to have good features for creating lights.

cheers

KT should be able to do such animations, but it's a bit tricky sometimes. Thea Render has much better camera control and animation support already with keyframes and camera&target paths, but you cannot yet set animation inside SU. One needs to use build in tools of the Thea Studio, until Sketchup to Thea exporter do catch up. Also next Thea RV should have a camera lock to z-axis so camera control for walk trough animations will be even better. There is a video tutorial on general use of animation controls available, so you can get a better idea.

thomthom

@solo said:

A 30 second render at 720p (1280x720) would take around 10 hours to complete using 8 threads on an i7 920 (exterior) and about twice as long for interiors.

At what frame-rate? I'm curious to what average render time per frame you estimate.

solo

25 fps.

shura

@unknownuser said:

would like the program to have good features for creating lights

Have a look at the lights in Twilight - I for one use lights a lot and am really happy with TWL.
(don't know much about Thea or Vray though)

comatose

@notareal said:

@comatose said:

Thanks for the information! I am doing like, what do you call it- a walk around the building at birds eye and human eye. and next will be doing interior walk throughs. I am not happy with the animations i can set up in sketchup- are there good plugins i can get for that? also, i will purchase a rendering program soon so what do you recommend ?i would like the program to have good features for creating lights.

cheers

KT should be able to do such animations, but it's a bit tricky sometimes. Thea Render has much better camera control and animation support already with keyframes and camera&target paths, but you cannot yet set animation inside SU. One needs to use build in tools of the Thea Studio, until Sketchup to Thea exporter do catch up. Also next Thea RV should have a camera lock to z-axis so camera control for walk trough animations will be even better. There is a video tutorial on general use of animation controls available, so you can get a better idea.

thanks- i will check it out.

comatose

@d12dozr said:

For creating better animations/walkthroughs, you could use the FlightPath (free) plugin or FlightPath2 ($7.00)

For rendering, I'd recommend Twilight as it is relatively inexpensive (99 USD), super easy yet powerful to use, and support in the forum is excellent.

Hope that helps

Is the $7 plugin much better than the free one?

d12dozr

@comatose said:

Is the $7 plugin much better than the free one?

I've never used either of them so I can only go by the description on each plugin's page, but it appears the $7 one has more options for focusing the camera. Why not just try the free one to see if it does what you need, and upgrade if necessary?

Maybe somebody that has used the scripts could answer better?

comatose

@d12dozr said:

@comatose said:

Is the $7 plugin much better than the free one?

I've never used either of them so I can only go by the description on each plugin's page, but it appears the $7 one has more options for focusing the camera. Why not just try the free one to see if it does what you need, and upgrade if necessary?

Maybe somebody that has used the scripts could answer better?

Yeah, a bit lazy on my part for not reading the details . the free plugin is very limited but better than just creating scenes in sketchup.

notareal

@d12dozr said:

@comatose said:

Is the $7 plugin much better than the free one?

I've never used either of them so I can only go by the description on each plugin's page, but it appears the $7 one has more options for focusing the camera. Why not just try the free one to see if it does what you need, and upgrade if necessary?

Maybe somebody that has used the scripts could answer better?

It's already a while when I used one of free camera patch scripts (sorry cannot remember the script). There was some hard (or impossible) to control accelerations - so I finally did gave up (Kerkythea produced better results). Never tested FlightPath2, but it seems to have crucial camera target options. I think Ecuadorian have played a lot with these... maybe search his posts.