Rendering With Viz

[mc1773]

Just wondering if anyone here has tried rendering in Viz at all? I find the vizualisation environment there just a bit friendlier for creating a fly through etc.

Also, Viz will allow animated RPC's, Revit won't cope with these yet will it?

I haven't done anything too high tech yet, and I'm a bit torn as to whether to stick with creating fly-throughs in Revit or exporting the model and then going to viz.

Any thoughts on this?

[jbalding48677]

Autodesk White Paper on working with Viz.

http://www3.autodesk.com/adsk/files/2436357_Revit_VIZ.pdf

[hand471037]

Within our office we do everything we can within Revit because it saves so much time. A huge amount of time is used up in the import-export and mapping of materials when Rendering, which is time that has to be repeated whenever there is a change in the model. It's more time than you might think!

And we've found that our rendering quality has actually improved, for less time is spent maintaining the software and more time can be spent tweaking materials and lighting to get a better rendering. So even tho Accurender isn't a good of a rendering engine as Viz can be, we've found that it's so much easyer to use (within Revit) that we have more time to spend on rendering quality and tweaking, and wind up with better renderings than we were doing with Viz in the first place.

However, when a rendering calls for a higher quality than Accurender can provide, or if we ever got into animations, we would then have to export to another software. I've had good luck with exporting Revit models via DXF to Viz, Truespace, and Radiance formats. However if AutoDesk adds a 3DS export to the next version of Revit, it will help this process greatly, for the DXF exporting doesn't allow to export things grouped by what material they are (only grouped by layer), which 3DS does/would allow. This would save a huge amount of time.

For anything not super-high quality it's Revit for us, for super-high quality we usally either farm it out to someone better suited to the job (can do it cheaper than we can in-house) or we export to a diffrent 3D software (and try not to make any design changes post-export :) )

[jbalding48677]

Interesting Jeffrey, good input.

[beegee]

more time can be spent tweaking materials and lighting to get a better rendering
Hi Jeffrey,

I'm keen to learn more about tweaking materials and lighting to get better renderings out of Accurender within Revit. Any suggestions on the best learning sources for this ?

Maybe its wasting time if Viz is to become Revit's rendering engine in R6 ?? Maybe I should start learning more about Viz ?

Any thoughts ?

[hand471037]

lots and lots of practice. :P

The basics you can really learn in any program. I learned in Truespace, and applied that to Accurender. Viz is great, much more complex materials are available, but it's not any different really. More maps. More layers. But it's still kinda the same thing.

Pic up a good book on rendering and materials. That will teach you a lot. Most of what I learned starting out came from reading 'Inside TrueSpace 4'. I know there are some good books out there on Viz. However (I haven't worked with it yet) I hear that the Viz add-on that's in ADT (and hopefully will find it's way into Revit) isn't that simular to Viz; also Viz (rumor has it) will soon be replaced wholesale with Max- so books on Viz 4 will be soon be cheap, but not terrbly useful ;)

Play enough with it to start to get a good feel for how to control the lighting and materials. Make yourself a VERY simple test scene, something that will render fast, and try a thousand different renderings, changing key settings a little at a time. For example, someone made material guides for Radiance, the 3D software I'm really getting into, that are just a feild of spheres with the material settings stepping up gradually. This reference is a wonderful help when setting up a radiance 'scene' (see attached). I'm not saying that you need to do this to get good with Accurender, but you'll need to set up a practice scene and try a bunch of different things with it to get a good 'feel' for what certain controls result in, image-wise.

But having more time to focus on materials and lighting will make your renderings much better. If most of your time is used up import/export and remapping, then your renderings are gonna look poor, no matter that your exporting to a 'better' software.

Hope this helped.

[beegee]

Jeff,

Yes, thanks, your wise words are a great help.

Hey, that jpeg you posted is a terrific resource. Thats the type of thing I'd like to see for Accurender ( and Viz/Max offspring ). Its gives a clear picture of whats going on, without changing a setting, rerendering, ( thinking, is that better or worse ) repeat process, etc etc.

The books listed on the Accustudio site don't seem particularly useful. I will keep an eye out and post here when I find a good one.

Thanks again.

[Arnel Aguel]

If most of your time is used up import/export and remapping, then your renderings are gonna look poor, no matter that your exporting to a 'better' software.


Hi jeff the one you mentioned above is those good old days. It is not anymore with ADT 3.3 and Viz. In ADT all subcomponents has its own color id assignment and automatic layer assignment which makes it very easy to assign sub-object material in viz. Whatever mapping you have applied to your model in viz will not be affected anymore if you have changes in your model in ADT because your objects in ADT already have the same layer and color id assignment in viz. So if there are changes in your model in ADT all you have to do is just press the button update in viz and your model will already be the same as the latest in ADT and no more remapping to the objects.

This is on top of my wishlist for Revit 6.0 to have this automatic color id and layer assignment.

Hope this helps.