Revit 7 rendering

[dpasa]

Still nothing about rendering with Revit 7... I guess it will be the same :-(

Or is there a hope? I don't expect a complete change, anyway I like the simplicity of Accurender. I 've been using it with AutoCAD for all my renderings and my customers were happy. The problem is that Revit doesn't include the full software.
If someone knows something, please share it with us...

[sfaust]

possibly, but they've already given us a lot of tidbits, I'm sure they don't want to give away everything that's new before it's out. I have no idea if it's changed or not, but I don't think that no one saying anything means that...

[hand471037]

Hey, did you know that a exported DWG from Revit, brought into AutoCAD, will retain it's Accurender data? So if you've got AutoCAD & Accurender already, and want to run the 'full' Accurender (or the new Accurender 4.. is it out yet?) just Export to AutoCAD. You should get at least the lights & materials and such within the DWG. So there's an option, export to AutoCAD and run the full Accurender there.

Also the DWG/DXF that Revit exports contains *all* of the material & light info since 6, it's just that other 3D packages (like VIZ/MAX) can't 'see' it yet. It's only a matter of time before someone makes something for those programs that can see and work with this data. So either Autodesk or a third party should soon make something for VIZ/MAX, with others following behind I'm sure. I've started working on such a tool for the open-source 3D package Blender, so that I can bring a Revit model, materials and all, into it without having to rework it at all.

[SkiSouth]

I've started working on such a tool for the open-source 3D package Blender, so that I can bring a Revit model, materials and all, into it without having to rework it at all.

Don't EVEN want to think about the time you're putting in to that - Man, that's great. Would love to see what you come up with... :-)

[hand471037]

It's just in the beginning stages at this point, unless people experienced in Python want to help out. ;)

Blender is a wonderful little bit of software, capable of quite a bit of ability.

I'll post here as we hit milestones, and once I have the formal project on the Blender source-forge page up.

[BillyGrey]

Hey Jeffrey,

I'm thinking about buying a Blender manual that I saw over at Borders.
I'm wanting to get into nicer high end photo real. I have an older copy of Formz laying about, but I am flipping a coin on which software I am willing to put the time into to learn.

So, since I've seen your post regarding Blender, I was just wondering how it runs as a rendering engine??? (I noticed the book had some chapters on YavRay(sp))

What I'm after is flexibility with materials (third party textures, etc.), lighting,
and import/export functionality. I'm not so hung up on importing X data. I don't mind texturing outside Revit. I will wait patiently until you get your killer app finished, though :)

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Bill

[hand471037]

Blender has three rendering engines that it comes with, it's own Internal, an interactive 'game' mode (that's not really a rendering engine, but you get my meaning), and an External link to Yafray. It's internal one is very similar to the one in MAX, in that it's got ray tracing, decent radiosity, particle effects, toon shaders, and such. The interactive one is very exciting, for you can make stand-alone interactive games/presentations/walkthroughs/ect. The Yafray rendering engine is an open-source Mental-ray-like rendering engine. From my experience so far, the Blender rendering engine is very very fast, the interactive mode is pretty cool but not photo-realistic, and since I've never worked with Mental Ray much Yafray seems comparable, if a little slower (in my personal experience). There are also add-ons available (for free) that let Blender talk with Radiance (one of the reasons I'm using it) and Renderman (which I doubt I'll ever use). Blender can also produce STL and VRML files for rapid prototyping.

Blender is great because it's open source- that means it's free, will always be free, and if you're willing to learn how to do a little programming, can be made into whatever you need (but you don't have to do all the work- for there's lots of other people adding to it and sharing their work too). But this mean you're also on your own, so to speak. There aren't a lot of commercial add-ons (lots of free ones tho), and there isn't some huge company behind it to drive it's development. Which can be both good and bad- good that they don't drive it in a way you don't like (like forcing an upgrade or changing/breaking something that works) but bad that there isn't someone sitting around doing all the boring stuff, or coming up with totally different ideas on how to approach things.

With something like Max, you'd be able to buy lots of commercial add-ons, lots of textures, including some very nice 3D rendering engine PCI cards that can cut a typical rendering down to mear minutes. So that might be your best bet.

I'm learning Blender and making this Revit-to-Blender bridge because of future business ideas I've got more than anything else. If you just want to kick off better renderings from time to time, you might wanna look at Viz, for I can't imagine that there won't soon be a bridge from Revit to that made shortly. And if you were looking to just do professional rendering work for folks, you should go with Max, and get a stand-alone dedicated hardware-based Rendering Engine (the low end ones cost less than a whole computer) so that you're render time is next-to-nothing. Which I still might do, depending on how things go in the near future.

But don't obsess over which software to learn, waiting for the perfect one to come along. Most of the concepts I've learned from doing 3D in AutoCAD and Truespace in the past, and Revit in the present, have transfered across to Blender to some extent. So you should just start on one, and then jump to another if the one you're using is too limiting.

[BillyGrey]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply Jeffrey.

I guess I'm apprehensive for all the usual reasons; investing heavy amounts
of time/money, only to find a solution does not match my style.
I've also heard it said that most any of the "good" rendering prog's can do
just about anything, provided you learn the proggie well. Sooo, since all learning curves are mostly steep with these kinds of prog's., I thought perhaps I'd invest the time into Blender, if it is a good renderer, with the bonus of open source.

Anyway, happy Friday, and again,

Thanks

[GuyR]

Jeffrey, others,

For those playing around with this find attached a python script that extracts the XML for processing from a revit DXF. In this example it just prints out the names of the material definitions it finds. So the next step is processing of each material DOM into your chosen format.

HTH,

Guy