General Rendering Question

[azmz3]

Our office transitioning to RAC2009, slowly, but we are also exploring new programs for high quality renderings, and we are leaning towards 3dS Max Design 2009. we already have one license for the program, and the workflow between the 2 programs is very easy. does anyone have any experience trying to get high-quality renderings directly from Revit. my experience so far is it is very slow, at least on a 32bit machine. anybody else want to share some info, it would appreciated.

[ws]

FWIW I've done what you are doing - purchased 3ds max design 2009 and I have yet to use the latter because the renderings out of Revit 2009 are so good at default settings - or at least good enough for me when under pressure of time (i.e. always ;) ) - and I would need to spend a lot of time learning max design to achieve anything better.

A quad-core machine and Vista 64 /Revit 64 and 8GB ram never takes my renders at even best settings (screen resolution though) more than minutes.

If it's of interest, the attached was 'thrown' together :roll: ;) in a last minute rush (about 2 hours trying various view options and test renders) and the client was ecstatic.

[cliff collins]

It depends greatly on the size/complexity of the project. Smaller/simple jobs can be rendered in Revit with ease. However, for large sites/multiple buildings, and especially complex interior scenes--Revit will not be able to keep up--as it is limited to 4 cores when rendering. Any photorealistic animations are done in Max.

We use both RAC 2009 and 3dsMax Design 2009--with the FBX file format for transferal
of the model from Revit to Max.

Max can use an almost unlimited number of cores--with distributed "bucket" rendering.
You also have much greater control of lighting, cameras and materials in Max.We use a 16 core Boxx machine just for rendering--it can render a scene, which in Revit would take a half an hour, in about 2-3 minutes! So--say you need 1000 frames of animation......do the math!

So--when a Revit rendering is suited to the scope/schedule/budget--use it.

But when the scope/schedule/budget requires more robust tools--use Max.

Just sharing some of our experience on the subject....

Cheers......

[azmz3]

here in an example of something i did in Revit. this scene is 150dpi, 5.5Mb output, a total of 3 lights, and some jpg's applied for material. this took an hour and 15 minutes on my machine. Vista 32bit an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.4GHz w/ 4GB RAM. i am getting a new system, soon, and I will run the same rendering again to gauge the performance of 64bit compared to 32bit. but these time frames would kill us if we had a deadline to get it done by, just using Revit to render everything.

[Munkholm]

The attached file is rendered with Revit 2009, on a 64bit with two quad cores, and 32 gigs of Ram. It´s a rather large project, with 50+ buildings in it, and hundreds of RPC´s.

Rendering time aprox. 1½ hour. (Grass and skye is done in Photoshop after the rendering in Revit)

I´m starting to use Max Design, for larger projects - as the bucket rendering can take advantage of our entire computers/CPU´s - But i´m pretty amazed by the rendering quality in Revit 2009 with Mental Ray.

[Jun Austria]

Out of the box. Revit and 3dsmax Design 2009 are the same in terms of quality. But rendering is faster in 3dsmax.
And it can also be better (in quality not in speed) if you can invest on this...
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_7_xstream/

[dhurtubise]

Jun i would have to slightly disagree with oyu. Even though they are both using MR max has a lot more possibilities then Revit. The speed also becomes a huge issue with Revit. No possiblity to use rendering farm or multiple CPU.
I'm a vray fan :-)

[azmz3]

as far as some basic renderings, Revit and Max are comparable, but when it to comes more complex models and lighting, I think Max would be the way to go, you have the speed over Revit, and the Render Farm capabilities in Max that are not available in Revit and Max's ability to use multi-core processors better than Revit

[Mike Sealander]

Max is the way to go.