Piranesi 3

CADalyst, August, 2004

Informatix Software International

www.informatix.co.uk

Price: $750

Cadalyst has reviewed Piranesi 3 in past years, and it continues to be an important product for visualizers. Piranesi 3 differs from all the other applications included here because it's a post-rendering application in which you apply effects once you render your basic model.

Support for Piranesi is built into an ever-increasing variety of applications. Programs that generate Piranesi's EPIX file format, natively or via plug-ins, include 3ds max, VIZ, ArchiCAD, Architectural Desktop, Art*lantis, Autodesk Building Systems, Cinema 4D R8, form*Z, LightWave, MicroStation, MicroGDS, NavisWorks, RenderWorks, and SketchUp. You can find a list of updated plug-ins and availability on the Informatix Web site.

The Windows version of Piranesi now supports ArchVision's RPC (rich photorealistic content) cutouts. You can choose the viewing angle that you want from the individual RPC file, and shadows are automatically cast. The ability to use RPC images within Piranesi makes it easy to add people and items to your illustrations without increasing the file size too much.

Piranesi includes Vedute, an important tool for anyone working with a modeler or renderer that doesn't directly generate Piranesi EPIX files. Vedute is significantly improved for Piranesi 3 and is available only with Piranesi 3, not as a free download. The Vedute viewer is supplied with all versions of Piranesi on both Windows and Mac and can produce Piranesi EPIX and EPIX panorama images from DXF and AutoCAD 3DS files.

One cool capability is Piranesi's ability to produce the remarkable effect of a Quicktime Panorama that lets you pan or move around inside, for example, a watercolor visualization--certainly a striking and memorable effect. This is possible because Piranesi 3 can paint cubic panoramas, in which a point is surrounded by an imaginary cube. Each face of the cube contains an image with color, depth, and material values. You can then export these views as MOV (movie) files and display them on free players such as Apple's QuickTime. These movie files let you pan up, down, and around a particular spot in real time.

You can use all of the effects with panoramas. Piranesi automatically manages distortions caused by projection to and from the faces of a cube, so rendering a panoramic scene is just as easy as rendering a normal flat image. Two new effects, linear direction fades and cube textures, are introduced for specific use with panoramas.

Informatix has built each new version of Piranesi on the original application and hasn't added features simply for features' sake. This clarity of concept, along with Piranesi's compatibility with a broad range of applications, has made it a very popular visualization tool. Piranesi is designed for those who want to avoid hyper-realistic, sharp-edged visualizations that scream "computer generated."

Piranesi 4 is scheduled to debut in September. According to the company, the new version extends 2D cutout capabilities to 3D models. It also comes with new brushes, filters, and more than 300 new cutout and texture images.