Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

19 Sep 2001

Architecture rendering contest show many Mac examples

Architosh received word from Mark Burginger about his website and its Digital Architecture Contest. This was a rendering contest cosponsored by Graphisoft and ET Shade of Japan.

Many Macintosh Examples

There are many examples from Macintosh users, using a variety of hardware and software configurations. What is very nice about this contest is that each entrant had to render the same thing, but had artistic license with elements, colors, daylight/night-light and landscaping. What resulted was an excellent comparative sampling of various rendering software and what you can do with it.

How Would We Judge It?

If we were to judge the results ourselves we might have chosen different winners and had different categories. For example, the most realistic rendering in both overall initial impact and in specific elements detail might be a specific category. Another category might be best realistic lighting for both day and night.

And yet again another category might be best results in least amount of time. Each entrant wrote a detailed description (often detailing time taken for each step) of their process.

Best Results - Mac or Windows?

In looking at the results we particularly like the quality of the rendering coming out of ET Shade on Macintosh users Mr. Atsushi Matsumoto & Mr. Rikiya Takahashi (third from top) used in the Interior View shown here. Unlike the interior view of 3DStudio Max user Vu Nguyen—which is also very strong—the ET Shade view is more realistic looking. For instance, compare the way outside light pours into the space and the sense of atmosphere. The radiosity results in this example are excellent.

Other Macintosh results coming out of Lightwave, Cinema4D and Artlantis were less appealing. There were also some ArchiCAD and Electric Image examples coming off the Macintosh.

We think the best overall exterior render was from Vu Nguyen in his night shot. And there were quite a few good Lightscape examples too. Overall there were more best examples coming out of Windows due to the concentration of 3DStudio Max and Lightscape users on that platform. If there were more Mac users using ET Shade and Lightwave we might have seen better results from the Mac side.

To view all examples of contest click here.