Rendering farm question

[mark.fritts]

I am looking to understand if there is any use in the Revit community of render farms. I know that Revit currently doesn't support farm rendering, but have any of you set up farms to use other applications (3dsMax as an example) to increase your rendering output? If so, how many machines are in the farm?
Any informaton on this topic would be very helpful.

Mark Fritts
Autodesk

[ron.sanpedro]

Mark, is this question purely about render farms, or about how we use, and would like to use, Rendering in Revit? Because the former feels too focused on the "answer" before the appropriate question is really posed, IMHO.

That said, we currently use a "farm" approach that involves opening a particular file on multiple machines, and each machine renders a view overnight. We do not use 3ds Max because our renderings are exclusively design renderings, and we need to be able to render the design as it changes, and so far no means of getting a model into 3ds is even remotely timely compared to just going to a view in Revit and rendering. Also, 3ds is a totally different UI, workflow and thought process, which effectively requires a dedicated render "expert". We have months that go by with no need for renderings at all, so a dedicated renderer is extraneous, and then a week in which we need a ton of renderings, and a single dedicated renderer is a bottleneck. And at all times the renderings are a design tool, so the person rendering ideally is part of the design team. The only viable answer is to just include rendering as a team based task, in Revit, done by anyone and/or everyone as the situation dictates.
So the short of it is that we will not move to 3ds to get render farm capabilities, because the workflow and 3ds itself are in conflict with other more important goals. We will look at things like Indigo, which seems to be a "native" Revit renderer (no export, material mapping, model fixing workflow to deal with) that also supports easier farm management than 3ds, but would prefer to see the capabilities we need simply added to Revit, rather than in a separate package.
And those capabilities include render farm within Revit directly, and GPU accelerated renderings (including farmed renderings). And simple batch rendering in Revit that isn't a journal based kludge.

But again, none of these are going to make us use 3ds, and likely not any 3rd party external render app, unless the use is as totally 100% seamless as native Revit rendering.

Best,
Gordon

[iru69]

Yes. If it was very easy to set up and use, that would be amazing. We don't currently do anything like that because we can't afford the time or money of using something like Max. We always have a few computers not in use at any given time, and a dozen or so during off-hours.

No offense intended to you personally Mark, but every time someone from Autodesk asks a question like this with an obvious answer, where users have been requesting this for years, it kind of reinforces the perception that Autodesk funnels all the previous user feedback into a black hole. It even made the AUGI Revit top 10 wish list in February 2009 that supposedly was officially submitted to Autodesk. Starting off your post with some sort of acknowledgment that Autodesk already understands that this is a desired feature and is looking for input to specific questions about work-flow, usage scenarios, etc. would help negate the perception that this is just a waste of our time.

:beer:

I am looking to understand if there is any use in the Revit community of render farms.

[UpNorth]

A render farm in Revit would be great. It would need to work well with the ArchVision All Access license server.

[Munkholm]

No offense intended to you personally Mark, but every time someone from Autodesk asks a question like this with an obvious answer, where users have been requesting this for years, it kind of reinforces the perception that Autodesk funnels all the previous user feedback into a black hole. It even made the AUGI Revit top 10 wish list in February 2009 that supposedly was officially submitted to Autodesk. Starting off your post with some sort of acknowledgment that Autodesk already understands that this is a desired feature and is looking for input to specific questions about work-flow, usage scenarios, etc. would help negate the perception that this is just a waste of our time.
:beer:

AMEN ! Factory knows that we need this feature, and have been needing it for years ;-)
Anyone dare to say RAC2012 ?

[mark.fritts]

Gordon,
Thank you for the detailed response. Understanding what customers are doing to work around this limitation is just what I am trying to understand. It is also good to get insight to the frequency and where in the workflow rendering occurs in your office.

Thanks again
Mark

[mark.fritts]

iru69,
Valid point on acknoledgement of this being a highly requested feature. I should have done that up front. As you noted, I am trying to get some additional information about how Revit users work with this limitation. Your comment about the availability of computers not in use gives me some understanding of what the workflow for your office looks like. I appreciate that.

Mark

[Phillip_Miller]

...Anyone dare to say RAC2012 ?

By the OP question I would doubt a render farm ability would be included in RAC2012 :(. I would imagine this would take a bit of effort, and as I assume that 2012 is only 6 months away now it would be a little late to ask this type of question.

Render farm ability would be great though.