Rendering Backrounds

[wse1]

I am new to RAC2009 rendering and having several problems. So far the renderings have been very disappointing. Maybe someone could give me some pointers.

1. I have produced 1 rendering with the backround set to "few clouds", but when it renders, I only get a grey backround with no sky or clouds. Is there another setting? See attached.

2.I have taken a picture of a street scene that I have converted to a TIFF file. When I inport this file into a drafting view as a backround, the image doesn't show up. Al I get is the box. The rendered 3d image comes in just fine. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?


Thanks Bill

[iankids]

Hi Bill,

Sadly, I think what you have done is pretty much what the rendering is capable of out of the box. Unlike other rendering engines, MentalRay as it is in Revit is not able to insert HDI skies etc and has subtantial problems with a mixture of internal lights and external lights - have a read through some of the posts in the rendering forum.

Some of the members here have produced excellent results with rendering in Revit, but often they have needed Photoshop to tart them up to a good finish.

Although I might get flamed for saying this, I have been thinking for a while that a new flavour of Revit might be worthwhile, all the modelling tools and no rendering whatsoever. Thin down the software making it quicker and easier to run when designing buildings, which is after all, what we do for a living.

Revit LT (?)

Just a thought,
Cheers,

Ian

[dpasa]

Revit and Mental Ray in Revit is not working as it should... Of course almost nothing works as it should in Revit.... (Sorry, I am very ungry with that last release)
If you can afford it, use Max... if not, try something cheaper like Cinema4d or whatever you can think of...
Unfortunately Adesk has minimized the export options so standalone renderers are not easy to work with...
With Revit, you can do exactly what you could with any other renderer ten years ago...

[azmz3]

Rendering, like anything in Revit takes some getting used to. you have to really tweak the settings that are available to you to make your rendering look as it should. I have done some fine renderings in Revit, using only Revit to get what i wanted. it can be done, you have to take your time with it though.

[muttlieb]

1. I have produced 1 rendering with the backround set to "few clouds", but when it renders, I only get a grey backround with no sky or clouds. Is there another setting? See attached.
Is the rendering attached a non-perspective (axonometric) rendering? If so, you will not get the mental ray 'sky'. You can change the sky color by selecting Background Style: Color. If you want the mental ray sky, you need to render a perspective camera view.


2.I have taken a picture of a street scene that I have converted to a TIFF file. When I inport this file into a drafting view as a backround, the image doesn't show up. Al I get is the box. The rendered 3d image comes in just fine. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
If you want a different background image for your rendering, you'll need to add it with an external photo editing software. To do this, you'll need to save your rendering as a tif or png which will save the background as an alpha channel. There is also a method to do this within Revit, but I have not tried. I think it involves re-importing the rendered image into a drafting view, and then dropping in the background image.

[sbrown]

I totally disagree, you can produce professional quality renderings directly in Revit. I did this with NO photoshop. You just have to understand how to create materials, pick the right time of day that shows off your project the best. Here are 2 links to renderings straight out of revit with little or no photoshop.

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=98491
http://www.augi.com/revit/default.asp?page=373

[sjsl]

Please, do the rendering tutorials that come with Revit. They DO help get your arms around it.

[azmz3]

I agree with sbrown on this one, like he showed, high quality renderings can be accomplished in Revit with time tweaking the settings. for backgrounds, you can make a mass then add the image to it as a material, instead of taking it into Photoshop or another photo editing program. When you bring an image into Revit, you wont see it until you render, thats the way it works, you will just see the little box it gives you. if you need to, you can always do quick draft renderings to make sure it is in the correct location and size that you need for the rendering.

[wse1]

Thank you all for the help and ideas.

I now have some hope that Revit can produce at least satifactory renderings. I just have to understand it better.

I have solved my first problem with the sky not showing up. I was trying to render a 3-D view, not a camera view.

As for my second problem, I still can't import a backround Tif file as demonstarted in the free cadclips. I produced the background file by exporting a digital photopraph (jpeg) into a tif format. Is there something more to it?

Thanks, I'm slowly getting there!

[muttlieb]

As for my second problem, I still can't import a backround Tif file as demonstarted in the free cadclips. I produced the background file by exporting a digital photopraph (jpeg) into a tif format. Is there something more to it?
The background image does not need to be tif format, although it would still work. It is important that the rendered image is a tif or png format. Also, make sure the background image is set as 'background' and is 'sent to the back' (on the options bar), otherwise it will mask the rendered image.

[th.209915]

If you try and render with the default "Work" 3D view you get no back ground. You will need to create a new camera view first, then your sky and clouds will appear.


Thanks for the tip on having different backgrounds azmz3. I, too, have been trying to find a way to import an image file as a background instead of generic clouds and sky.

However I really think there should be an option in the "background" selection for an image instead of mucking about and to-ing and fro-ing to get the mass correct. We could do it in 3D studio Viz (10 years ago) and ArchiCAD, so why not Revit???