Best Rendering Software

[CadVizion]

I spend a lot of time looking at members post and their renderings. Everyone has there own way of rendering from Revit. I myself use Revit and render with it too. But, I notice that other people get better images using other software.

I use wondering, what software I can learn to help me get a better image? Something that is not hard and will not take years to learn. I prefer one that I can export from Revit straight to it.

[Andre Baros]

I'll place 1 vote for Maxwell Render, with one caveat, I've never tried using it with a file directly from Revit. I typically export the file from Revit, open it in Max where I can take care of materials, plants, and entourage, and then render using Maxwell. I'm not sure of the exact process of going from Revit to Maxwell but I know that people have made it work.

Three reasons for maxwell.
1. Easy to use (if you understand photography a little bit) Maxwell uses all physically correct lights and cameras so if you put in real lighting and set your camera up correctly, you get good results every time.

2. Materials. Ultimately a good rendering with bad materials still looks bad. Maxwell ships with a good base of materials and has a free online library of thousands more. The important part is that the materials are high quality and are easy to adjust to your individual needs.

3. Quality of light. Even if all you do is clay model renderings (all one material) no other renderer has the quality of light that Maxwell has.

4. OK, one more. Flexibility, Maxwell lets you take the unfinished file and see it, print it, photoshop it, without stopping the rendering. It also lets you adjust lighting level AFTER the rendering is finished. Maxwell native file format saves the information for each light separately (if you turn on this option) so you can render once and end up with both a day and a night version of your shot.

The two drawbacks. Speed. Maxwell is very processor intensive, especially for interior scenes which can take hours, sometimes days to finish rendering. That said, I just finished rendering an animation using Maxwell but I used 16 computers to do it. Complexity. Maxwell is easy to get good results, but it opens up a Pandora's box of photo realism where you can get lost forever adjusting things just a little bit more. For example, once your building looks photoreal, the trees you've been using all along start to look pretty dumpy, then once you got good trees your grass looks really flat, etc. Once you take that first step, you in for a long ride because you can't easily cheat in Maxwell, reality in, reality out... garbage in, garbage out.

[tc3dcad60731]

Pardon my ignorance but how do you link up 16 computers for sharing resources unless you are using Unix? Currently Revit will only run on Windows!

[muttlieb]

Pardon my ignorance but how do you link up 16 computers for sharing resources unless you are using Unix? Currently Revit will only run on Windows!

What Andre is describing has nothing to do with Revit. He's describing his use of Maxwell for rendering. Maxwell has a network & cooperative render feature that allows you to use multiple networked pc's/cpu's to work on a single rendering.

[tc3dcad60731]

What Andre is describing has nothing to do with Revit. He's describing his use of Maxwell for rendering. Maxwell has a network & cooperative render feature that allows you to use multiple networked pc's/cpu's to work on a single rendering.

I understand it has nothing to do with Revit. It has been awhile since I have worked with a network in large way and could not figure out how he was sharing resources across the network unless he was using Unix. I guess I will have to read up on this!

[rmejia]

I use wondering, what software I can learn to help me get a better image? Something that is not hard and will not take years to learn. I prefer one that I can export from Revit straight to it.

I am skeptical of the word "best", don't know if there is such a thing as "the best". I am sorry to say that none is simple and probably all will take a lot of commitment to learn to use.

Complexity. Maxwell is easy to get good results, but it opens up a Pandora's box of photo realism where you can get lost forever adjusting things just a little bit more.

I have never tried Maxwell, but I have used Scanline (Radiosity), Mental Ray and V-Ray as the rendering engines for the 3d software, and there is a whole lot of settings where one can get lost forever tweaking numbers and variables... it can be very frustrating at first. I have found no magic settings, and it does take trial and error to know which settings do what to make a render look photorealistic.

I think the choice of software depends on what you want to use it for. Nicer looking study models, or presentation renderings. I made a choice to use Viz, years ago, when I used Autocad because Viz could open dwg. I am really liking working with 3d Renderings so I will be moving to 3ds Max for the next release to get the full set of tools. The file link Viz/Max have is nice for importing a Revit model, and reloading whenever the model is changed. I have problems where the materials are lost in the reload, and sometimes the model explodes into pieces on the reload.

Each 3d software brings it's own rendering engine. Viz comes default with Scanline and Mental Ray. I started it out with scanline and got some decent results, but I was unable to render large scenes. The radiosity calculations would crash the program. So I started looking for alternatives. Mental Ray was an improvement from scanline, but I found little documentation and support for it, and was having a hard time finding solutions to artifact problems I was having in the renderings. I checked out the different sites on the web like:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/
http://www.vismasters.com/gallery.cfm

Eventually I settled for V-Ray as the rendering engine for Viz and so far have no regrets. There is a material site http://www.vray-materials.de/ which is one of the major components of making a rendering look good. Materials, materials, materials! There is also a forum where I have found answers to all my questions and problems http://www.chaosgroup.com/

Viz and VRay do take time, practice and a lot of patience, but in the end, one can get very nice results.

[rmejia]

Several rendering programs have the ability to use more than one machine for rendering. Maxwell, Mental Ray, V-Ray, etc... Viz/Max can be installed on different computers running on windows, to be set up for network rendering.

Distributed rendering is very nice, it's what the big studios do for rendering out those big animation movies. They use a render farms with hundreds of computers. Rendering is very CPU intensive, so the more CPU the faster you will get to see the render. There is a limitation of workstations per license though. I am not sure of the number for Maxwell or Mental Ray; for V-Ray it is 10 computers and practically no limit on CPU's (processors).

[Andre Baros]

FWIW, the maxwell network licensing is 4 computers (unlimited number of cores per computer) per license. The computers can all work on the same image, each work on a separate frame of an animation, and can be a mix of PC, Mac, and linux stations.

I've also tried Max scanline and Radiosity, Mental Ray, and Vray, and Maxwell is by far the easiest to get good results... it just has less settings to adjust.

[tc3dcad60731]

Very interesting on the info for spreading out the rendering! A quick question though on 3Ds Max.....

The tutorials that I have with Revit only talk about setting up the view and then writing out to dwg, then opening that in Max to render the scene better. IF I wanted to export the entire 3d model and open in Max to accomplish a better walkthrough rendering can I do that with MAX or is that not the right program???

[lhanyok]

When you export a 3D dwg from a 3D Revit view (it can be any view - default, axon, perspective), the entire model exports, so you're already getting what you're looking for.