My leap into 3d floorplans..
 

Good Evening Ladies and Gents,

I am in need of some professional advice. I have to create a floorplan for a cafe, preferably 3d. I have started to work with 3d studio to create the plans, not only does it take a lot of time, but I fear that the render time will be long. If I use a render farm, I'm looking at paying a nice amount ot money to have it processed.

My question is, can anyone reccommend a good piece of software that would work to design a 3d floorplan? Do any of the home-architect programs work for a business layout? Should I keep working with 3d studio?

Any and all input would be helpful.

-SF

*bump*

No one? No one's designed any 3d floorplans? ;)

I'll just keep using 3DSmax until I hear otherwise.

-SF

I've never actually used it, but Chief Architect looks really nice... I've got no idea about speed or ease of use though....

Only problem... $$$... but if I remember correctly, still cheaper than 3DS Max...

http://www.chiefarchitect.com/

Why would you need a render farm to render the scene?

Are you using a 486?

Render times should be fine as long as you don't created incredibly complex images. For instance, walls can be one NURBS plane with no subdivisions. Don't use a 5000 poly plane or a NURBS surface with 100 isoparms.

In Maya, there is a duplicate option called "instancing". This allows you to create many sets of geometry based on one object. If you change the parent object, you change all of the instanced objects. This allows for smaller scene sizes, thereby lowering render times.

I did one project early on in college that was a church, a huge cathedral. I had over 600 pews in it. Uninstanced, the pews created a file size of 800mb's. With instancing the size remained around 200mb, a manageable size.

Sooo, if Max has instancing, use it!

<damn, that was a long, semi-pointless post, sorry!>

Mainly because I have to create somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000-5000 frames for a animation at 640x480 that is too many frames to render on a home p.c. ;)

-SF

If you're not using raytracing or refractions, that still should only take a couple of days at most.

However, if you're going to go for photo-realistim then yeah, you're gonna need a render farm :D