Showcase For Renderings

[antman]

Cloud render from Revit worked well for me. Turned a 6-hour render into a 15 minute render.

[johncubed209967]

Is anybody using Autodesk Showcase for renderings. I'm scared away from rendering with Revit by reports of hours long or overnight rendering times and a brief exploration with Showcase indicates I can get reasonable results in a much shorter time. I'm wondering if I should invest more time with Showcase or bite the bullet and use Revit. The images will be used as jpegs in a presentation layout.

Any thoughts?

[antman]

Cloud render from Revit worked well for me. Turned a 6-hour render into a 15 minute render.

[MikeJarosz]

Believe it or not, 6 hours represents a major improvement. My first rendering took 72 hours. It wasn't quite right, so I had to fix it and run it all over again.

[antman]

I did this one last July. .-/ Won't be revisiting these settings...

Resolution: 2541x1395
Image Precision (Antialiasing): 10
Maximum Number of Reflections: 2
Maximum Number of Refractions: 2
Blurred Reflections Precision: 2
Blurred Refractions Precision: 2
Enable Soft Shadows (y/n): y
Soft Shadow Precision: 8
Compute Indirect and Sky Illumination (y/n): y
Indirect Illumination Precision: 3
Indirect Illumination Smoothness: 5
Indirect Illumination Bounces: 2
Windows (y/n): n
Doors (y/n): n
Curtain Walls (y/n): n

Artificial Lights: 129

Total Render Time: 13d 15h 43m 17s

[mthurnauer]

Antman,
Not sure what is causing the excessive time. It may be partly based on model size. If you could live with the image being limited to 2000 pixels, you should try it on revit server settings to high. Best is not necessary. In your settings above, the only thing that pops out is the Image precision. A tip that is not just a revit issue, but most any rendering app is that high antialiasing is very time intensive. I have heard it equated to rendering your image at 4x the size of the desired output. You would be better off with lower Antialiasing and slightly larger image size that you could then downsize in a photo editing program. By rendering at 3000px in lieu of 2500 and then sjrinking the image in a photo editing program, the photo editing software will resample the whole image effectively antialiasing it on the back end.

[antman]

That's a good tip to make the image bigger, and decrease the antialiasing. I mostly bumped the settings that high just as a test and a level of quality to compare to so I could find an optimal quality/speed balance. I expected it to take 2 or 3 days... .-) I should revisit the scene and see how a cloud render looks.

[damon.sidel]

This is an honest question: with all the other rendering engines/programs/plug-ins/etc. out there that are better and faster, why are people using the built-in Revit rendering? What advantages do you see that justify waiting hours or in some cases days for a rendering?

[johncubed209967]

Well...I'm newish to Revit (though now a Revit Certified Professional for what that's worth) and I just need some easy to do renderings for my portfolio ie. not having to learn 3Ds Max which I'm not ready for yet as I'm still recovering from the steep learning curve in Revit. And actually I experimented with Revit rendering and, with the use of section boxes to crop out unseen portions of the view, the times weren't that bad Ex. with an image size of 2800x3400 px Draft and Low settings were completed in minutes, high setting completed in an hour. I have to say though that the final output often has the look of those pastey gouache renderings that they used to do in the 1950's and 60's.

So it would be great to find some rendering software that can do striking, contemporary renderings that's easy to learn. What do you recommend?

[damon.sidel]

Personally, I'm a VRay guy, but that means learning 3ds Max, Rhino, or Sketchup and translating your Revit model to those. The translation process, once you have a workflow, is easy in any of those programs. 3ds 2013 with Revit 2013 is the smoothest, since Autodesk has made it possible to link an RVT directly into 3ds, but as you know 3ds is the most complicated to learn.

I've heard good things about Artlantis with Maxwell. There is a Revit plug-in that makes translation easy and Artlantis has a nice interface. The Artlantis render engine is biases, so is quite fast, but then you can bump it up with the Maxwell render engine (built into Artlantis), which is an excellent unbiased render engine.

If you want real-time with a video-game feel, Twinmotion makes an excellent plugin for Revit. Adding landscape elements, entourage, etc is very easy in this program and a lot of fun.

If you are doing this for your portfolio (and can make the argument that you'll get something out of learning another program) I'd encourage using V-Ray (in 3ds ideally, Rhino next, or SketchUp would be third, but OK), though. The investment, time and money, is high, but well worth it. Just my 2 cents. That said of rendering, if you want to be an architect/designer, then you could focus on design and do a lot of Photoshop images, skip the rendering completely.