Forums >> Revit Building >> Technical Support >> Walkthrough rendering stops

trombe

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Joined: Sun, Nov 26, 2006
7 Posts

Onething:

Thanks to the good folks at ABVENT for sa great uinterface for Revit.

For my own use, I compared features costs and gallery samples on both of course,   as well as:

VRay, Fryrender, Maxwell, Kerkythea, Yafafray, Podium, Flamingo, Rhino (Penguin, VSF for Rhino) , Indigo, Brazil / Rio, IRender nxt, Blender, Twilight, Artlantis Render / Artantis Studio, LightWorks, LightWave, Art of Illusion, Toxic, Cinema 4D.

Artlantis does not come up to a top group quality wise IMHO  (VRay, Fryrender, Maxwell, modo, Lightwave, Brazil, Kerkythea and of course Cinema 4D)  I left out Maya, Max and Softimage XSi deliberately because I did not want another fairly premium based (read as slightly overblown cost wise) subscription to manage from that manufacturer nor the extensive and ongojng problems that seem to accrue with those products historically but which consistently do not seem to get addressed often enough.

You can get Revit into Maxwell easy enough as it has Maxwell Studio built in as does Artlantis Studio which is real handy . the general overall impression I get form articles and forums, is that Maxwell is sublime for quality as its light engine is the bomb however, that costs heavily  on rendering power and time.

Maxwell of  course is only a rendering engine whereas Artlantis Studio has animation tools.

Fryrender is only a rendering engine also but Fryrender RT, is a real time  engine version and so does VRay have this functionality now.

This looks interesting: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/index.html      (NVidia CUDA implementation)

but the quality still looks a bit flakey  relative to some others.

 Have a check of this as well:     http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=130693&trid=847606066

 For a great shot of encouragement :    http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=21

You have to become a member of this Kerkythea forum to see the image, but I think you will find it well worth the effort. The image was done in 10 minutes on current hardware specs, and is a new iterration of the rendering engine..talk about speed !!!!!!! for quality !!!!!!!

 Anyway, Artlantis looks a bit, unreal.....gaming like....if its not photoreal, then it needs to be fairly compelling given what is around now. I think their best features are easy access to Revit and probably that the Studio version has anmating tools.  You have Max,. so try and talk the boss into VRay RT, or Fryrender RT or Maxwell (or Brazil or C4D of course), or go look at Kerkythea for rendering of static images as these are the cream of the crop by features and quality. I mean, everything plugs into Max and SketchUp Pro.

You should also note that Cinema 4D and modo, have the most amazing interoperability features- C4D even more than modo. They just play so well with all others file formats import and export wise. 

 best

trombe

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hisdirt

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Joined: Sun, Nov 6, 2005
123 Posts

Wow, that a very indepth comparison you have carried out trombe

Have you heard of a small opensource rendering program called Luxrender? It turns out excellent results from the looks of it with a Maxwell style of rendering, only it needs an exporter developed for Revit. With that, it would mean Revit is suddenly able to produce renderings using an unbiased lighting engine, with the ability to pool groups of computers to 'farm out' big jobs. All for free!

I doubt that Autodesk will have made it easy for 3D Revit models to be recognized by other applications, but it would be a very helpful feature.

It seem that you have a need for high quality visualizations,  do you have any examples of images you have managed to get your new rendering program/Revit to produce? I have some samples of Revit models Ive been playing with here:

http://www.box.net/hisdirt 

 Great to see the Kiwis keeping it real on here!

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trombe

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Joined: Sun, Nov 26, 2006
7 Posts

hisdirt,

nice images, good work, can see you are into it. the cathedral has an ambience worth the effort.

 Look, go and check out these images. They are aof a guy's girlfriends motorbike, and he is from Wellington, done in modo.

http://www.luxology.com/gallery/image/

If you select the Cars/Motocycles category to search on, look for the same author to see 3 other images earlier on.

 Now tell me honestly, how you compare this and the other stuff you see there, with what you see from Luxrender. Not being smart just wondered what you think of the work.

 Also, did you know that Indigo render came out of Wellington, supposed to be started by a Welly boy. No Revit plug in as yet but suspect it might yet happen during 2010. It is amusing to see the progres of the CL protocols and the rise of the NVidia CUDA stuff on gpu computing ..this year should be good for some great developments but I am yet to read up on the value or inter-relationships between gpu rendering and cpu rendering in terms of which does what how and when but am keen on some digestible info sources. I posted some 2009 images last week on the gallery of some joinery for a project done in RAC 2009 mainly. Yes I wanted access to better rendering but what you get pointed towards is often 3D Studio for various reasons and I am never going to buy into that as noted earlier.

The problems are mainly that I cannot tie up my single machine (at the moment anyway)  for a day or 3 days, trying to get a render out of Revit. That is insane. I need it for design phases and resource consent and BC  drawings etc etc....eg paying work !!! rendering is not an income stream - its something that clients just expect more and more often or, ...anticipate you can do . To be fair, there is always some money for a little time but not for a day or more rendering. So I try to keep them down to around an hour if possible for finals and way less for trials. This means less time setting up maps and mats in m.r. 

Often the clients are happy with single point HL perspectives now with gradient backkgrounds at last (assume these will make it into elevations and sections  this year ? ? ?) and a lazy couple of sectionals plus a shot of the model on high and 300 dpi, day etc.

The reality is of course, that this quality is really pretty low for what m.r. can do if you have 4 or 5 days to spend, which as above, I just think is plain dumb and quite out of the possible both for reality and for cost and actually, for value. The value is just not there unless you are doing doing high end or commerical work with larger budgets and more people to convince. It wasn't that long ago that a hot glue gun card model would get you invited to the next 50 parties and while the time for that was not great that value in it, was and still is high as it is tangible and has that strongly tactile quality that everyone can metaphorically and otherwise grasp. And they do.

Rendering does not have any of that even with the latest 3D holographic acrylic sheet service. It is all flash harry stuff with the bright lights and glimmer. I actually prefer night shots and/or work that imbues the spaces with an ambience that is not glitz.

Dirt, noise, mist, fog, smoke, condensation, haze, darkness cracks etc. , implied space or meaning rather than BAM, has far more interest and power of seduction and, value for me as I would like to think,  that some of these things are what people I deal with can relate to better. I might be a bit more like a Tom Waits (Nighthawks at the Diner) than a Tom Cruise I guess !

I think this is where Revit falls too far short. Mental ray cannot really provide  the emotion that a lot of people can design into their work even for a single piece of anything - because the current implementation just doesn't have the tools available that the full version of mr does (or any other fully functioning rendering engine does. 

This is why you just have to either suck it up or do something about it. Fortunately, there are a large range of suitable tools to help with this ouitside of the Revit stable. I just want to be able to have access to what most other engines have as a toolset and the animation work is more part experimentation for work and part  work use. I guess I was bored with Revit walkthroughs always bashing my head through the wall !! and wanted something more as do the clients !modo certainly has (like C4D and others) got it all for that !

cheers hisdirt. good luck with the studies and may even see you on the GDP sometime !!

trombe

PS apologise for spelling stuff etc.

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