revit v sketchup for shade studies

[mmarsh]

I am putting together a shade study and just hit a wall. The trees in my revit file are not 3D and when I render them the shadows come out weird - not good for trying to get a reasonably accurate understanding of the shade on your site. I have been told that it is possible to get 3d trees for Revit but am worried that this will gum down my speed to the point of crashing (probably need 200+ trees for this study at a minimum). It already takes my computer about ten minutes to render shadows in one view.
What I was wondering is - instead of reinserting all the new and existing plantings with 3d trees - would it make more sense to export the model to sketch-up and use that program for the study?
Any advice would be great.
Thanks!

[cliff collins]

Revit 2009 uses RPC trees, in the Entourage category. These are developed by Archvision. They are "low-poly" trees, which don't use modeled trunks/branches/leaves, etc. like the old Accurender ones. They are basically a "3D photograph" of a tree--which renders and casts shadows when facing the camera. We have done some pretty good simple shadow studies using Revit. However, this may or may not give you what you are after.

Instead, I would recommend doing this in 3dsMax, and use Mental Ray proxies for
a large amount of trees. You can animate the sun by setting the time of day, move the slider bar to the next keyframe, and render the animation which will show correct lighting and shadows, and give very realistic results.

We recently did a project with over 1200 palm trees alone--there were also hundreds of other trees on the site, which covered an entire square mile. We rendered it in 3dsMax
using proxies--worked like a charm.

I do not wish to comment here on Sketchup.........

Cheers.....

[mmarsh]

Thanks for the reply. We don't actually have that program though. Maybe we should look into it if it's a good option. This whole thing started because revit wasn't rendering the trees smoothly. It go fine for 3 inches, then all the shadows would be cut off, then render for three inches...
Does anyone know why it does this? Do I just need a faster machine to keep it from studdering or is it a problem in the program?