Are flamingo & bongo2 the right tools for architectural rendering and walk-through?

We a just starting an architectural project where the end product will be a rendered walk through of an exhibition. The exhibits will be built in Rhino because they are organic shapes. The building will be imported from archicad via an IFC file to Revit. The exhibits will be static- no moving parts, so I’m not even certain we need bongo2 to create the walk-through. The exhibits and the building will need a fairly realistic material render.

We have never attempted anything like this before, so happy for all feedback- my main questions are:

  1. Should we invest in flamingo, or is neon OK for a fairly realistic architectural material render?
  2. Do we need bongo2 to do the walk-through animation or can it be achieved in Rhino alone? (Walk-through will be about 5-7 mins long covering several storeys of a building and the all the exhibits within so its a pretty big file)
  3. At the moment we imagine the walk-through will be done in Rhino because the materials and textures are there. If we import the rhino models into revit, does this information transfer? i.e.Would it be better to do the walk-through in Revit?
  4. Am I even on the right track here?

Lots of questions, but I am really at a loss where to start, and I can’t find much advice that’s topic specific on the internet

Bongo is the correct tool to manage the animation.

Which renderer to use is a bit more complicated. Animation requires an immense number of renderings. So speed becomes paramount.

For architecture images Vray is very good and would be something I would try. With Vray, there are ways to take shortcuts in the rendering to speed it up. This can help with animations. These shortcuts may require understanding some of the deep settings in Vray, but are quite helpful when trying to get the most speed possible.

Another option is to use the Rhino render preview. While this is not photo-realistic, it is a very fast way to create animations.

There are other render engines for Rhino and depending on your machine, there may be other engines that are very fast.

That would be my recommendation to start.

Thanks Scott, we bought Flamingo and Bongo 2 in the end. Am having a first attempt at animation now- just using rhino render and bong at this stage to generate the renders.