Fastest way of Arch-Illustration

[ThEoNeAnDoNlY]

Hello everyone.

I work in a small architectural visualization firm and we work on all sorts of things, from apartment blocks to housing projects.

We've decided that our main focus now should be on improving the speed of our modelling, and I'm here for some help and opinions.

At the moment we use Cinema4D, and illustrator. We take the elevations of said house/building into illustrator, and draw out splines for the walls and then import it all into Cinema4D, align it, and apply Extrude-Nurbs 'modifiers' to the surfaces and then apply tillable textures. Its a pretty fast workflow as there isn't any messing about with vertices etc. Its all pretty smooth.

But like I said, at the moment we're looking at any possible ways to improve this workflow, and generally speed things up.

Now, I personally am 3DS max born and raised, I've used a PC all my life but sadly we use Cinema4D and Macs at work. I'm slowly convincing the lead artist to switch to 3DS max, as I think, it would be faster.

Does anyone have any thoughts on possible improvements? Different software packages to look at? Is 3DS max a better alternative? (I personally think that the way you can drag-draw-create prims in 3ds max is far quicker and more efficient than drawing them in Illustrator, importing them into Cinema4D and then aligning them and applying a modifier.)

Please fire away!

Guy

[needse]

in illustrator you can use something called "live trace" may be quicker than drawing out the spines by hand

[rocneasta]

Originally Posted by needse

in illustrator you can use something called "live trace" may be quicker than drawing out the spines by hand

there's a lot of unneeded verticies this way, so be careful - might be faster but often cleaning up part can take forever.

[ThEoNeAnDoNlY]

Thanks for the replies peeps.

I've not used live trace before, but mentioned it to one of the artists here and he told me that we've looked at it in the past but sadly, as you said it can create shed-loads of messy points and as our plans are usually pretty complex it can end up taking ages to clean up.

Good suggestion though, as I have now learned something new about illustrator!

Keep them coming!

[rocneasta]

i've reread your initial post - before i only responded to needse's advice of illustrator.

in my humble opinion it would be best if you referenced your blueprints in cinema/3dsmax and drew on them, since then you can actually draw either by

shape>lines>extrude>shell (shell is only for wall thickness)
geometry>standard primitives>plane>shell
geometry>aec extended>walls

Now your workflow is ok, but that illustrator is costing you time and it's pointless. Other than that importing from another programme can lead to unwanted information being passed on, even when we're talking vector to vector.

My question is what input of blueprints do you have. AutoCAD (*.dwg), image, sketch or ?

[ThEoNeAnDoNlY]

Aye thats what I'm thinking. I began working 100% in Cinema4d, using image planes with the plans cropped and placed onto as I would for any other modeling project - e.g. a car.

However, in the interest of my peers being able to pick up my work and begin working straight from it, I was getting a bit of pressure to work in the same way as the others until we all change technique together, which is fair enough. (I have extensive SubD modeling experience, whereas my colleague doesn't, however she has more experience modeling using Lathes, Sweeps etc. - Which I don't! So I need to make sure I'm working in a way that she can pick up and continue if I'm tasked onto something else).

However I did notice a definite ease of use when drawing the splines directly in Cinema - but god I'd do anything for 3DS! We'd all work so much faster (I've just found out it isn't available on Macs, so we might have to run bootcamp etc.)

The plans come directly from the Architects, they are basically a one page sheet of Orthographic images, usually Front - Left - Rear - Right. And we work straight from them. I'd show you an example but as I'm sure you'll appreciate, I can't disclose them on the internet!

Has anyone got any experience using the 3DS max 2012 Architecture edition? Are the new Substances quick and easy to use? Is it worth the money?

[rocneasta]

As for Macs, indeed 3ds max doesn't run on Mac OS, but every Mac has installed Bootcamp, and with it you just need to make a new windows partition in which you install 3ds max. Better than parallels since it's a virtual machine software and it uses a lot of RAM.

As for the plans, if the architects send it in one sheep i assume it's PDF. All you need to do is open that PDF in Illustrator and export it as DWG. Then import DWG into 3ds and you bypasses the whole redrawing thing altogether.