Internal Rendering Engine
Choose Internal Rendering Engine from the Engine drop-down menu in the PhotoRendering Settings dialog box (Document > Creative Imaging > PhotoRendering Settings). The controls below concern the internal ARCHICAD rendering engine.
Note: The speed of PhotoRendering is defined most of all by image size, while model complexity affects speed if shadows are used. The PhotoRendering effects define the final quality or character of your rendering.
The Method setting determines how closely the program should adhere to its ultimate imaging capacity.
With the Best button selected, the program calculates the light attributes of each pixel. As the choices decrease in quality, ARCHICAD calculates individual values for every second or third pixel only. The quality increase will affect curved surfaces more than others.
The Flat Shading button results in each shape being roughly approximated by flat surfaces only. Special effects like Transparency, Fog, Emission, Smooth Surfaces, Highlights and Light Decay are unavailable. The Flat Shading option is faster than all the other options in this dialog box, but slower than when 3D Window Settings is set to use Shaded mode.
The contour quality of your renderings is controlled by the Antialiasing settings. Jaggedness of the contour is gradually eliminated as you move from Off to Best.
The series of checkboxes in the Effects section lets you enable a variety of light and surface effects, some of which are initially set in the Options > Element Attributes > Surfaces dialog box.
Specular reflections are taken into consideration and displayed as highlights in your PhotoRenderings when this box is checked.
Note: If Highlights is unchecked, or the Flat Shading method is used, specular reflections are ignored in the rendering.
Check the Emission option if you have chosen, or created, light emitting Surfaces and want this quality to be displayed in the renderings.
Check the Fog option if you have set fog color and intensity in the Sun dialog box (accessible from View > 3D View Options > 3D Projection Settings) and wish to use it in your PhotoRendering.
Transparency: Transparent elements (such as glass) will be rendered as transparent. (If you leave this box unchecked, such elements will be shown as opaque.)
The degree of smoothing is set through the Smooth Surfaces control, with up to one pixel accuracy. Curved surfaces, which are normally approximated by flat planes, are represented by more lifelike surfaces when this option is on.
If Lamp Falloff is not checked, the angle falloff and distance falloff values in the GDL Scripts of Lamps will be handled as being zero. This results in a sharp border between illuminated and dark areas. If it is checked, the values originally given will be used, resulting in a smooth transition between illuminated and dark areas.
Note: Lamps must be enabled at the Light Sources checkboxes for falloff to operate.
If the Textures box is checked, bitmapped pictures referred to in the GDL script of some library parts will appear on the corresponding surfaces.
You can select which Light Sources (Sun, Lamps or both) you want to use to illuminate the model during the PhotoRendering process. You should select at least one of the two choices.
In the Shadow Casting section, you can define which of the available light sources you want to cast shadows in the PhotoRendered picture. Check the High Accuracy box if you notice incorrect results on your PhotoRendered picture, especially missing shadows of relatively small elements. This may occur if you zoom in on a small detail of an otherwise large project in the 3D Window and make a photorendering of that detail.
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If the Use transparency checkbox is checked, ARCHICAD will create different shadows for surfaces with different transparency. The color of the transparent surface will also affect the color of the shadow in the final photorendering. This is also valid for surfaces with Alpha channel, where the Alpha channel is used to define the transparency of the surface.
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Use the slider next to the Texture antialiasing checkbox to set the desired image quality. As this procedure is very time consuming, use it only if you require a superior image quality for printing.
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