Render Revit Model with new Twilight Render Engine

[twiceroadsfool]

Looks interesting, but how many people render in Revit. Don't most export it to 3D Studio Max to get a good quality rendering at half the time Revit takes to render it using Mental Ray? I agree that this package might be a quick solution, especially when you meet with clients and need to adjust something on the fly.

Tons of people render in Revit, my entire office included. Because there is high end, and then there is very-close-to-high-end-that-can-render-in-an-hour-or-two.

Were often tweaking stuff til the LAST SECOND in Revit, as were working on design charettes. Then we hit the render button. Heck, sometimes, we even hit the cancel button (or have a discussion about it) based on how far the rendering is, if we think of something we want to change and rerender before the meeting.

Sometimes faster rendering is a non-issue, if the export/import/fiddle session takes longer than the rendering. NOT EVERY rendering takes 8+ hours. revit puts out a fairly respectable image in short order, with MR.


Off topic, im also finding it suspect that so many "brand new users" are suddenly here preachign about this. I really mean no disrepect, and i hope no one finds this offensive, but i cant help but wonder if Twilights Marketing department registered here.

Again, i dont ask to be deconstructive, but if were arguing the pro's and con's or viability of something as an alternative solution (a conversation i think we all enjoy), its a much different conversation if were doing it with people who are out to sell a product. Just my two cents.

[TroyGates]

If you have a system with 8 cores, you probably run 64bit and have lots of memory. Start up 2 sessions of Revit, 1 for rendering and 1 for continued working.

[truevis]

Does post-Accurender Revit still add material definitions in extended entity data in its DWG exports? ...(If I find it, I'll report back.)

Yes, material information gets exported in DXF (and presumably DWG). It's in Xdata. Here is a snippet:

300
<Material id="RevitMaterialDefinition1000" app="REVIT" Background="0" Backlight="1" Sample="0" Tiling="0">^J<LinearUnits unitType="foot" unitScale="1.0"/>^J<ArchitecturalMaterial name="Concrete - Cast-in-Place Lightweight Concrete">^J<ArchTemplateParameters 
300
name="Concrete - Cast-in-Place Lightweight Concrete" classid_A="2008828122" classid_B="14503598">^J</ArchTemplateParameters>^J<ArchMatParameters>^J<ArchDiffuseColor>^J<RGBf r="0.7451" g="0.7451" b="0.7451"/>^J</ArchDiffuseColor>^J<ArchIndexOfRefraction>2.0000</
300
ArchIndexOfRefraction>^J<ArchTransparency>0.0000</ArchTransparency>^J<ArchLuminance>0.0000</ArchLuminance>^J</ArchMatParameters>^J</ArchitecturalMaterial>^J</Material>^J

Thus, the data are there for someone to translate when importing into another rendering system via DWG/DXF.

Going through every element and changing its Layer to ArchitecturalMaterial name from its Xdata wouldn't be too hard in AutoLISP.

[truevis]

...Were often tweaking stuff til the LAST SECOND in Revit, as were working on design charettes. Then we hit the render button. Heck, sometimes, we even hit the cancel button (or have a discussion about it) based on how far the rendering is, if we think of something we want to change and rerender before the meeting...

And that's the best argument for knowing how to render well inside Revit. Practically every time I see a rendering of something I want to change something about it.

A few more features turned on (even ones that were in pre-2009*) would really help. Too bad having a more full-featured renderer in Revit conflicts with sales of other Autodesk products.

* Background images, spherical rendering,...

[trombe]

Tons of people render in Revit, my entire office included. Because there is high end, and then there is very-close-to-high-end-that-can-render-in-an-hour-or-two.

Were often tweaking stuff til the LAST SECOND in Revit, as were working on design charettes. Then we hit the render button. Heck, sometimes, we even hit the cancel button (or have a discussion about it) based on how far the rendering is, if we think of something we want to change and rerender before the meeting.

Sometimes faster rendering is a non-issue, if the export/import/fiddle session takes longer than the rendering. NOT EVERY rendering takes 8+ hours. revit puts out a fairly respectable image in short order, with MR.


Off topic, im also finding it suspect that so many "brand new users" are suddenly here preachign about this. I really mean no disrepect, and i hope no one finds this offensive, but i cant help but wonder if Twilights Marketing department registered here.

Again, i dont ask to be deconstructive, but if were arguing the pro's and con's or viability of something as an alternative solution (a conversation i think we all enjoy), its a much different conversation if were doing it with people who are out to sell a product. Just my two cents.

Yeah, ....
while I am very happy to see new rendering players with Revit plug-ins come onto the market, (Artlantis, nxt Render etc.) Twilight does not look better than Artlantis nor nxt and without meaning to sound derogatory, from these images is a way off MR and its best feature would seem to be the price.

If Fryrender, VRay and Maxwell come on to the Revit plug-in market for instance, the Revit rendering landscape, might look quite different and with real time technologies coming on stream, there has to be pressure on to improve all offerings including MR.
Twilight seems to have an interesting techno offering but I am unconvinced y the galleries as yet.

regards
trombe.

[dmoodydesign]

Tons of people render in Revit, my entire office included. Because there is high end, and then there is very-close-to-high-end-that-can-render-in-an-hour-or-two.

Were often tweaking stuff til the LAST SECOND in Revit, as were working on design charettes. Then we hit the render button. Heck, sometimes, we even hit the cancel button (or have a discussion about it) based on how far the rendering is, if we think of something we want to change and rerender before the meeting.

Sometimes faster rendering is a non-issue, if the export/import/fiddle session takes longer than the rendering. NOT EVERY rendering takes 8+ hours. revit puts out a fairly respectable image in short order, with MR.


Off topic, im also finding it suspect that so many "brand new users" are suddenly here preachign about this. I really mean no disrepect, and i hope no one finds this offensive, but i cant help but wonder if Twilights Marketing department registered here.

Again, i dont ask to be deconstructive, but if were arguing the pro's and con's or viability of something as an alternative solution (a conversation i think we all enjoy), its a much different conversation if were doing it with people who are out to sell a product. Just my two cents.

I have to agree. This whole post reeks of company involvement.

The user posted renders aren't winning me over either. I have produced better ones with one or two materials spec'd in a design development project in just about an hour. For that matter, new users to Revit have done much better in less than a day with rendering in 2010. The only time that I have seen Max used to render instead of Revit was for a competition my last office did. They needed the high quality animation it could produce, but otherwise we never used anything other then Revit. Having the ability to immediately render what we are working on and subsequently change it are a bigger benefit than anything.

[truevis]

I have to agree. This whole post reeks of company involvement.

The user posted renders aren't winning me over either. I have produced better ones with one or two materials spec'd in a design development project in just about an hour...

Hey, I am a beginner with that renderer. It's fun to learn something new.

Reeking of company involvement? Which company? Do you smell a vast conspiracy of $59 renderers?

I think everyone agrees it's better to be able to render inside Revit. If there's a feature that we need but isn't there, we have to do something differently.

Attached is a scene I did last night with an HDR sky probe plus sun. Notice the depth-of-field effect in the foreground.

[mthurnauer]

I like the workflow of rendering inside revit, because if begins to merge rendering for presentation with the production of construction documents. I like the ability to create a material and assign a material tag to it and a keynote. The documents of the design and the renderings will match. The batch rendering issue is big and I will have to give the plug-in a try. The other item with MR that would be a big improvement is greater global control of material properties for rendering. With the increase in computing power, it is possible to create materials that have incredibly accurate properties, such as bi-directional radiance distribution, sub-surface scattering, etc. This may make glossy and semi-gloss surfaces that are fantastic, but you really need to render at very high quality=major time to get pleasing results. Usually these effects do not add much value to a rendering. For example, Lightscape could produce great renderings by having accurate light distribution, but it had none of these complex algorithms. I would like to have global control to turn off these types of effects for all glossy and semi-gloss materials.

[dmoodydesign]

Hey, I am a beginner with that renderer. It's fun to learn something new.

Reeking of company involvement? Which company? Do you smell a vast conspiracy of $59 renderers?

I think everyone agrees it's better to be able to render inside Revit. If there's a feature that we need but isn't there, we have to do something differently.

Attached is a scene I did last night with an HDR sky probe plus sun. Notice the depth-of-field effect in the foreground.

I didn't say conspiracy, but FletchMT sure is pushing hard with his sales pitch. What company would I be talking about anyway?

Plus, in his own words the glory shot isn't even Revit.

I don't recall if that was a Revit model in the example pic.

trombe and twiceroadsfool said the same thing as me and you didn't take offense, so let's not get into it.

[aaronrumple]

And that's the best argument for knowing how to render well inside Revit. Practically every time I see a rendering of something I want to change something about it.

And that's why I render outside Revit. I can incremental region render in 3DS and not have to follow up with photoshop compositing. So when I need to fix a small area - I just update the model and region render over the last image - patches right in. A very big time saver. Not to mention I can often re-use the same irradiance map and light cache. Cuts rendering time more than half not having to reprocess lights.

Sending an update from Revit to 3DS is only a minute or so exercise. My 3300 px wide renderings run 2 hours on average with 20 cores. So for me - processing is the bottle neck - not setup.