No way to animate to a decent renderer??
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I've decided to create some walk-throughs of several of my arch designs modeled in SU. I use the Maxwell plugin most of the time to render stills directly from SU but we also have the Vray plugin, which I also use the same way, sometimes I use both in the same project. These are both great rendering programs, both capable of doing animations, but I can't come up with a decent work-flow to get a rendering from eitherstarting in SU.
If I look to render in Maxwell (which I don't really want to do because of the rendering time involved), there's no way I know of to get SU to render a sequence of maxwell frames that can be compiled into an animation.
With Vray, it's the same problem, but at least I can export to 3ds max to set up the animation and it's capable of creating video files. But then it's a matter of exporting to 3DS, loosing all the Vray settings and material assignments in the process, and then the materials are not even compatible. There are tons of vismat materials already carefully mapped in any of these scenes and I don't want to spend the time to re-make and remap them for all these projects.
These projects are already set up with materials and lighting, so it would be nice to be able to just go directly to rendering the sequences without having to redo half the tedious work. It seems totally bizarre that it isn't more straight-forward, but maybe there's something simple I'm just missing that will save the day.
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Lumion has a new release. I believe it will do what you want. It has a pricetag but there is a free version for experimenting.
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We have LumenRT which looks similar, and if it was able to produce better renderings would do the trick because materials, lighting, and animation are taken from sketchup.
Lumion looks like a nice rendering software, but I don't see that it has a sketchup plugin or will even import skp files, so I don't see how it's different from anything else. Wouldn't I still have to redo all the materials and lighting?
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Lumion can import collada and fbx files exported from SketchUp. However ineed you need to tweak your materials in Lumion and add lihts there as there's no way of exporting Vray materials that would be recognized there.
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I guess the thing I'm looking for, rather than buying yet more software, is to find a way to get my existing models, all of which are already set up to render directly to Maxwell or Vray, animated.
The nice thing about Maxwell is that it translates SU materials to Maxwell MXM files and the MXS it creates can be opened into Maxwell Studio for further refinements and rendered from there. If Vray created a file I could open in 3DS Max I would be all set, but lo, Chaos seems to like to complicate their software with incompatible material types and a distributed rendering system that defies all logic. I guess they earn their name.
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