Hardware Raytracing

[jwilhelm]

Just curious, I know there are a couple hardware ray tracing video cards out there that work with 3d studio, anyone have any idea whether any of them will be supporting Accurender in Revit? now that would be worth the investment.

[hand471037]

I don't think so. All of these cards (I've been researching them too) work because Max & Maya allow for use of an external rendering engine. That means they can feed, via an API, the model & material information to a completely different application and have it do the rendering. This allows you to use any rendering engine, as long as someone makes an interface for Max. Even Radiance, the command-line Unix rendering engine I love, has a Max-plugin allowing for it to be used as a rendering engine.

This also allows Max and Maya to feed a render server, a render farm, or a specialized card the information it needs to produce the renderings.

Neither Accurender or Revit has the ability to use external rendering engines at this time, so no, these cards, render farms, and render servers are all out of the question, sadly. Exporting to Viz or Max, however, is & some here (Zoog) are doing just that so that they can use 3rd party rendering engines. Most serous rendering folk these days use some third party rendering engine, like Vray, Brazil, Mental Ray, ect. for they are typically much much better than the built-in rendering engines in Viz, Max & Maya.

Also just FYI while these hardware-based rendering solutions look way cool, and are way fast, from reading the posts from the pro's who do heavy rendering work for a living (that I found while researching the PURE cards to see if we could use them here) they all think that while the cards/hardware is cool, that it's limiting- you can only use their shaders and lights to get the speed benefits, and it's not as flexible as running a render farm. Many of them felt that simply buying & tying together five cheap PC's into a small render farm offered both faster renderings & more flexibility in the end.

What I *really* wish would happen is that Microsoft would catch up to Apple in this area. With OS X, every computer on your network can automatically join together into a big grid to become an on-demand render farm, only using the spare cycles within those machines (so it doesn't hamper the others in the office working on those machines). So if your office was full of Macs, all of them could work together on problems with very minimal setup. Yes, you can do this with software for Max, but with the OS X solution it's built into the OS, works very well on machines that are even in use by someone else, and can help any large multi-threaded process not just one specialized bit of software. It's things like this that really shine within OS X, and why I constantly harp that I'd like to see Revit for OS X, for in several ways it's *years* ahead of where Microsoft is, and this is just one example...

[jarod.tulanowski]

great post Jeffrey you his some key points, I dont like mac's at all, but when it comes to renderings, I cant offer any objections. by they way has anyone rendered anything using the AMD 64 bit plattform yet? does it help us Microsoft junkies haha

[hand471037]

Yeah, if you check out the rendering performance benchmark thread, there are some on there with the AMD systems running Windows 64 betas. It offers pretty good performance, however Revit & Accurender don't make full use of the AMD processor yet.

And as for not liking Macs at all, I'd suggest you take another look. They are completely different now then they used to be, with several very exciting things going on. I say this not because I think you shoud buy a Mac, but because Microsoft's just gonna copy what they are doing anyway with Longhorn (there are already three things I can think of that will be in Longhorn that are direct rip-offs of OS X). You might as well get a look at Microsoft's R & D department now, so you know what to expect in a few years, 'cause that's more or less what Apple is today. ;-)