Render in AutoCAD

[PaperStreet SoapCO]

For the first time I tried exporting something to AutoCAD in 3D for rendering. Everyone keeps saying how the rendering engine is better there. Well, in my opinion, it is a lot better. So why isn't everyone who has the Revit Architecture Suite taking advantage of this for rendering? Well, it seems like you have to apply the materials all over again - unless there is a way for AutoCAD's accurender engine to recognize the materials from Revit's accurender engine. That would be helpful.

I think, for the simple effort of exporting to 3D .dwg, the increase in render quality in AutoCAD is worth it. Maybe someone with more experience in this area will tell me wrong since I haven't given it a thorough try yet. But from just exporting a building and turning on the sun and shadow in AutoCAD it seems like a big difference in light and shadow quality.

[Andre Baros]

Yes, Mental Ray in AutoCAD is a more powerful (read: faster with more options) rendering engine than the Accurender in Revit and if you have the suite, than you have access to this tool. If you take the time to learn it, you will definitely get better results than straight Revit.

Personally, I don't even have AutoCAD installed anymore. We have one license of the Suite "just-in-case" but haven't installed a version of AutoCAD since 2004. We run everything from Revit to Max to Maxwell mostly because I already know that process and don't want to try to learn rendering in AutoCAD.

For others, it seams to me like it would be worth learning if you don't already have another system in place but have the Suite and want better renderings.

[Max Lloyd]

Hi there,

sounds interesting. So what would be the workflow? Export a 3d dwg, import into acad, then what?

(I have never really worked in 3d in acad, so haven't too much experience) Presumably you would set up a camera view in acad, then set your render settings there? Do any materials get carried across of is material assignment it done purely by layers or objects? (at least if this was the case, you could set up a template file that had pre-determined materials assigned to preset layer names, thus reducing set up time for each following scene)

What about vegetation?

I would be interested to hear.

Kind regards,

Max.

[PaperStreet SoapCO]

I'm not exactly sure as I just tried it for the first time myself. Later tonight I'm going to delve further into and see if I can generate two side by side renderings for comparison. I'll post them and the process once I give it a more thorough try.

I guess the intent of my post was also to see if someone else has already done this successfully.

Like I said in my initial post, if you are concerned with rendering in Revit, the quality that comes out of AutoCAD seems to be worth the effort.

I'll let you know more when I figure out more.

[truevis]

For the first time I tried exporting something to AutoCAD in 3D for rendering. Everyone keeps saying how the rendering engine is better there. Well, in my opinion, it is a lot better. So why isn't everyone who has the Revit Architecture Suite taking advantage of this for rendering? Well, it seems like you have to apply the materials all over again - unless there is a way for AutoCAD's accurender engine to recognize the materials from Revit's accurender engine. That would be helpful.

I think, for the simple effort of exporting to 3D .dwg, the increase in render quality in AutoCAD is worth it. Maybe someone with more experience in this area will tell me wrong since I haven't given it a thorough try yet. But from just exporting a building and turning on the sun and shadow in AutoCAD it seems like a big difference in light and shadow quality.

AccuRender is not included with ACAD. It is a product you buy (or use the demo version) and install to work in ACAD. AccuRender does recognise all render materials from Revit if you point it to the right material libraries.

The renderer that comes built into ACAD is different. I don't think we've seen anything done with it that started in Revit yet.

[Martin P]

We Revit Series (or Autocad Revit Architecture Suite) as it is now known.

I had a couple of days playing around with this myself. We were needing to start producing some much better renderings than we had been and were looking a various options as to the best way to go about that. As you say it is much more powerful, which also means much more complicated...... After a bit of experimenting and calculating - we eventually came to the conclusion that it is much easier for us to export a 3D model - then send it out to a third party to render it. He does it quicker, better and cheaper than we can do it - and it allows us to get on with working on other things, rather than spending the very large amount of time that you have to, to get a rendering to look good.

There is not a quick way to get a good rendering that we can see other than farming it out. A lot of what we were doing with Accurender did not look that good because we expected to be able to do it very quickly. If we took the same time with Accurender as required using Autocad we could probably have had some much better results - not as good quality, but probably much easier to achieve.

So now we just send them on to somebody else - and send his fee to the client. I used to think I enjoyed producing renderings, but have since realised I just found it quite a frustrating process that rarely left me feeling satisfied I had produced the best image I could - I actually do not miss doing it at all, I like not doing it!!!

[Alex Page]

Has anyone worked out whether the 'revit' material names which come through to Autocad are still tied to the model? - If I change there mappings in Autocad, nothing seems to happen