Rendering in Artlantis R

Rendering in Artlantis R with radiosity is incredibly quick. Speed is a big deal with this release. A new Selective Display Accelerator (SDA) combined with the OpenGL display booster helps the program speed up the interactivity of scenes by selecting only the most significant object faces to display. You can leave radiosity off and just use ray-tracing and additionally you can decide to conditionally select items for radiosity contributions in the lighting -- for the sky for example.

Once you go to render, a Rendering Parameters palette becomes available via an Options button in the Render Window. Additionally you can select which file format to save your rendered view into. Anti-aliasing, raytracing, radiosity, shadows and transparency all can be fine tuned in the options and reconfigured as a default. (see image 07).

07 - Rendering Options Palette - Rendering Parameters

Final Thoughts and Recommendations

ABVENT France has done an outstanding job with Artlantis R, advancing a well-regarded rendering tool with some highend features while maintaining its noted ease-of-use. It is somewhat unfortunate that Artlantis R doesn't possess at least some animation features considering its price point and the fact that more CAD applications are shipping with integrated rendering and animation capabilities built-in. Yet arguably these built-in rendering tools are not as easy to use and in most cases don't possess the rendering speed of Artlantis R.

08 - Example Radiosity Render

For SketchUp users who want to take their models to new photo-realism levels, Artlantis R is a superb choice for several reasons. (see image 08). Firstly, like SketchUp, Artlantis R is supported on both the Mac OS X and Windows platforms, providing you OS flexibility. Secondly, both applications on Mac OS X have similar interfaces and similar levels of ease-of-use. In other words, if you like working in SketchUp, you are going to find Artlantis R on Mac OS X very enjoyable too. And lastly, Artlantis R truly delivers on a balance between radiosity render speed and quality. --- Anthony Frausto-Robledo, Editor-in-Chief. Published: 19 June 2006.

< previous page | 1 | 2 | 3 |