Customer Case Study - Architectural Visualizations by Nigel Gough Illustrations (Revit -> Rhino -> CINEMA-4D)

Nigel Gough Illustrations is a award winning design visualization practice based in Brisbane Australia, providing a diverse range of design presentation skills tailored to the needs of architectural, industrial design, and building development firms.

Nigel Gough was contracted by the architectural firm Gary Garnett & Associates (Australia) to provide visualization services for a large urban design project. The original data was created in Autodesk's Revit. Nigel's toolset for this project included Rhino for re-modeling, CINEMA-4D for rendering & animation, and (as a long time user) Okino's PolyTrans|CAD for the professional data translation between these various 3D programs and file formats.

As quoted from Nigel Gough:

"I have been a long term and dedicated user of McNeel's Rhino modelling software. Many years ago I connected with Okino and their CTO Robert Lansdale, as they had been supplying conversion software to Rhino users since 1995 - I found their PolyTrans software to be an invaluable tool to smooth the pipeline between the 3D models supplied by our clients and Rhino in our office.

Many of our clients these days are doing the initial 3D modelling in-house using Autodesk's Revit then forwarding their 3D models to us for further development, rendering and animation work in our office. Revit no doubt is great documentation software but it has its limitations when it comes to high end visualization. More importantly, in our office, it does not 'play well with others programs' -- file transfers are often problematic and we have struggled over the years to come up with a rock solid transfer method. Results have also varied considerably depending on the client we are dealing with, and the quality of their 3D modelling work.

Support from Okino has been excellent over the years, as we have conducted ongoing experiments in our file transfer approach to tweak our workflow to match continuous changes in various software packages. My discussion with Robert Lansdale had us migrate to Okino's new DWF-3D conversion system which was specifically written as their main conversion pipeline from Autodesk Revit into other 3D programs & file formats (as a side note, a nice optimization for the conversion process is to advise a client to have a choice 3D view selected in Revit prior to doing "Export/ DWF").

For the Gary Garnett & Associates project, the customer provided us with files in a jigsaw fashion, as design work was finalized on various areas. The files were then progressively imported into PolyTrans and converted for use by Rhino where additional site modelling and entourage additions were then done. Specialized animation work was performed in Maxon's CINEMA-4D product. Image post-processing was done in PhotoShop CS.

At the end of the day everyone was happy with the result. An outcome that was made decidedly easier with Okino's PolyTrans and the ongoing support of everyone at Okino."

Click any image to see higher resolution version

Fly-Through Animation

Click on one of these links to view the final fly-through animation: Vimeo or YouTube.

Copyrights

All graphics are Copyright by Gary Garnett & Associates (Australia) and Nigel Gough Illustrations. All Rights Reserved. No images may be reproduced without the explicit permission from Gary Garnett & Associates or Nigel Gough.