Animation Render

[Mike Lister]

We have been considering upgrading our licence so we have benefits of the cloud. We do a lot of animations and wanted to know if you could render animations on the cloud?

Alternatively does anyone know if its possible to set up a Revit renderfarm to help lower our render times?

Many thanks for any responses.

[jeffh]

We have been considering upgrading our licence so we have benefits of the cloud. We do a lot of animations and wanted to know if you could render animations on the cloud?

Alternatively does anyone know if its possible to set up a Revit renderfarm to help lower our render times?

Many thanks for any responses.

Autodesk cloud rendering will not do an animation/walkthrough rendering. It will however render a panorama. So you have one station point and can "look" around the model "standing" in the one position.

Revit does not support any kind of render farm.

You can see a video of how cloud rendering works at this link. Towards the end of the video the panorama rendering is shown.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=17570228

[shenderson]

yes it will generate a panorama but there is no way to export it so anyone else can see it - as far as i know.

[david_peterson]

We simply built a box from scratch for about $1200. 16bg of ram and an i7 overclocked to about 4.5ghz. Much cheaper that buying one already set up. Cut render times about 50%.
I thought the "Cloud" could do everything. That was Adesk's big push. They haven't fixed the program, but apparently they've added something else that they can (and will) charge you for in the future; "Cloud Credits". But from my understanding, currently they don't have a way to track it, so I'd use it as much as you can while it's free.
I'm not sure what you mean but you can't export it. Are you saying that you can send a panorama up to the cloud but you can't get it back as a .jpeg? I guess it's even more useless that I thought. I haven't played with it yet, but it seems asinine to allow you to do it, but not let you use it. I guess Adesk needed to hold a carrot from the stick again.

[shenderson]

oops...just checked again and it looks like they have added a download option to the panorama. that was not there a few months ago when i needed to show a client a panorama.

i've done quite a bit of rendering in the cloud so far and here's a few things to know. 1. the render cloud engine is different than the local engine so your materials will render differently than they do locally. that means you cannot really run test renders locally and then run a final in the cloud. that means when we are charged for render units you will likely burn up your units just getting the materials and lighting dialed in. 2. you cannot tell it to use your local lighting settings on the initial upload. it renders using 'advanced' exposure setting and then you have to re-render using 'native' exposure to see your lighting settings. so you've burned two credits to just see 1 rendering with your lighting settings. 3.the cloud does not seem to recognize 'true north' vs. 'plan north' so getting accurate sun/shadow studies requires a work around. i'm trying to figure that one out right now. this is revit 2012 btw. just now getting my feet wet in 2013 but we do not migrate mid project as a rule.

[Revitaoist]

Yes the materials are different. I was doing an interior pool and was surprised when the water looked totally different. Also you will be limited to the size of your rendering. I was doing a high res rendering to go on a glossy arch D sheet, but could not do it at the resolution needed for a multi-million dollar presentation. As for the original post, no it does no do animations, I do 100 frames a night locally, and stitch them back together in WMM.

[damon.sidel]

It would be nice if Revit could render and the cloud worked, but until then I'm very much in the pick-another-program-to-render camp. We currently use the Revit-to-Max (FBX) or Revit-to-Rhino (DWG ACIS solid) workflow. We happen to use V-Ray with both Max and Rhino, but you could use another render engine. There are also some pretty cool walk-through programs that are becoming sophisticated enough to be worth it. Lumion is an example.

[852878399319790]

Revit does not support any kind of render farm.


I think this is true,never heard cloud render of Revit before.