AC2C4D.pdf

From ArchiCAD to Cinema4D

(a step by step approach)

Preparation in ArchiCAD

We start and load the example file "Orchard Project". This is pretty complete and large enough to see how much real work is involved.

We open the saved view "Axonometry with site" from the Navigator. This loads the complete model into the 3DView. We use File >

Save As... to export the model into a 3D-format Cinema4D can read. We will actually do the export twice, to talk about a few

differences and to talk about making use of best of both worlds.

We switch to a perspective view and walk around until we find a reasonable spot.

When we render this, we get a rather slow (17 seconds) but reasonable looking rendering:

Export to *.3ds file from ArchiCAD

*.3ds is the format of the old Autodesk 3D Studio R4 for MS DOS (before it was transformed into Discreet 3ds max). This format

contains polygonal geometry, with texture mapping applied and also keeps the camera's and lights.

We opt for following settings:

This makes sure that we have some control over the size of the model and that the scene will be constructed according to the used

materials. If you still want to assign different materials to different objects, this might not be the best option.

ArchiCAD exports the scene as a *.3ds file and also copies all used textures into a folder called "Orchard Project_Textures" (and

saves them strangely enough into the *.bmp format).

Open the *.3ds file in Cinema4D

When we open this file in Cinema4D, we notice a few things:

The view we get is identical to the one in ArchiCAD (that is, if we used a perspective view). This view is saved as a camera.

The Sun from ArchiCAD is transferred as a spotlight with a very narrow beam and very far from the rest of the scene.

The scene contains meshes split by material (and named after the material). For rendering purposes this is OK.

By default, the 3ds-import is scaled by a factor 1 and the "units" in Cinema4D are displayed as meter. Although this seems to

be quite OK, it isn't. When you switch to the different view, you'll notice that the camera is much larger then the rest. This is not

only a visual hindrance, but it makes navigating the scene very difficult.

Orbiting around the scene and assigning lights etc... will look completely out of scale.

A second attempt

We first do some preference settings in Cinema4D:

Edit > General Settings...

We choose Centimeter as Basic Units. This does nothing to the scene, but displays the units in Centimeter. We will soon feel

more at ease.

File > Import/Export Settings... > 3D Studio R4

We choose a scale Factor 100. Although this seems not so logical, it works much better in view manipulation and texture

adjustments.

We also rename the "Orchard Project_Textures"-folder to "tex" in your regular OS file navigator. Cinema4D looks for a subfolder called

"tex" when it loads a file. That way, it can automatically find the textures and can apply them to the materials immediately. If you don't

do this, it'll insist to make a copy of each texture you load into the current project folder, which might not be what you want.

This looks better. The model is there, the texture maps are there and all materials have readable names. Save the scene into the

*.c4d format and perform a rendering. It took about a second to finish.

Well, the least you can say is that it doesn't look very exciting, but we'll work on that. It took 17 seconds in ArchiCAD, so we still can

increase the quality settings.

Small and fast adjustments

On the dialog Render > Render Settings... > General Tab, we can set the Antialiasing on Edge (which is still fast, but removes most

annoying edges). And when we select the Sun in the scene-tree, we can adjust it's settings, to at least give us a hard shadow.

In 4 seconds we get this rendering, which is cleaner but has very ugly and totally black shadows. Resist the urge to increase the

ambient light settings. You do this in Cinema4D on the settings of a light source. This causes very flat lighting, which is absolutely not

what we want.

By setting the shadow density of the sun at 50%, the shadows are less black and the model shows through.

By adding a second spot, to fill in the blacks, we can improve the overal look. It is set at a color of RGB 20% 30% 40%, Brightness of

50% and without shadow. We also enable the "No Specular" option on the Details tab. Still about 4 seconds.

We will improve the lighting a lot by adding a simulated skydome lighting later on.

Export to *.obj from ArchiCAD

We will do the same process but using a different file format: *.obj. This is the old format for the Wavefront application, before Alias

and Wavefront (now simply called Alias) joined forces and created Maya.

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