Artlantis 4.5.3

$495, Abvent North America

The first thing you notice about Abvent’sArtlantis is the elegant and simple interface. Logically arranged, it provides access to a wealth of powerful rendering tools. Artlantis is a stand-alone renderer that contains no modeling tools. You must complete modeling in

This room was rendered with Abvent’s Artlantis. (Courtesy of Origa Studio)

Artlantis was among the earliest to export the EPIX file format used by Informatix’s Piranesi (see "Other rendering options" below), and the two applications continue to make a powerful and useful combination of tools.

In another good pairing, SketchUp from @Last Software is now available bundled with Artlantis. SketchUp is a simple but powerful application that creates 3D design concepts quickly and simply.

With Artlantis you can interactively work in 3D, with a real-time preview, using multiple cameras and lights, an expandable shader library, and atmospheric effects. The shader library offers a wealth of material effects that are great for achieving photorealistic images. Artlantis 4.5 introduced powerful new functionalities such as billboards, parallel views, and site insertions. If the included shaders don’t cover all you need, the separately available Artlantis Shaders Collection provides 10 CD-ROMs of shaders specifically created for Artlantis Render, which runs on the Macintosh X or Windows operating system. Each CD-ROM contains more than 100 different shaders as well as a variety of textures and materials.

Artlantis is compatible with ArchiCAD, ZOOM, Amapi, VectorWorks, Star Relay, and Arkey. It imports DXF, IGES, RIB, FACT, VRML, and 3DS files, among others, so you can import and render models from a broad range of CAD packages. Reasonably priced at $495, Artlantis offers a lot of value.