Forums >> Revit Building >> Technical Support >> Rendering Problem, says its 100% but its not...

benlikespizza

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 Hello Gurus and Revit Users,

I am new to the RevitCity forums, though I've used the downloads extensively.  I am a graduate student working on my thesis, and because of all of the benefits having a virtual bim model would give you, I ended up building my project in revit...

I've got my defense in about 2 weeks, and last night I ran into problems exporting renders... The following is an excerpt out an email I sent my teacher explaining the issue.  This is all after only a semester of revit instruction, so I hope I've explained it well enough to get some feedback.

 As a note, I am rendering each elevation on a different computer at my school's computer lab. These are the average stats on those computer:

Windows XP  __ Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40 GHZ , 2.39GHZ __  3 GB RAM

**EXCERPT FROM EMAIL I SENT MY REVIT TEACHER** 

I believe I've come to a point that I've had to cut myself off and start getting the information out of revit and onto paper, so late last night I began setting up stuff to render. That's when I ran into problems, and I was wondering if you had any tips or experiences that could help me out.My file, including the families I've loaded into it, is about 36mb.  Since you can't render an elevation (there's no render button) I looked online, and created 3d cameras that have no perspective on them, and created "elevations."for each camera I set up the section box and the crop view so that it only would render what I needed it to.What ended up happening the first time was that on each computer, the program would run for about a half hour and then just stop rendering further.  What came out was a "finished" rendering, in that the dialogue said it had reached100%, yet I could clearly see about 60% of the image that was not rendered on the "second pass" higher quality render part.  You know how renders do an initial pass on stuff and then go back and clean it up, well it didn't go backa second time over a good portion of the image.Have you had this happen before?  The image is set with shadows etc., and is set at rendering at HIGH at 150DPI. The size of the uncompressed image on average was about 107mb  I think, and the crop box setting, since these are actually scaled, is  that it's a 1/4" rendering, so the render was either 30 or 60 inches long. (depending on the actual size of the model)What I hope to do is render this scaled elevation render and then export the line drawing with shadows of the exact same image, and then photoshop the two together... the render is just giving me this trouble....In your experience, how do you typically set up a rendering in terms of settings? HIGH, MED, etc and then what DPI?  I'm not sure why the renderings are doing this...Please let me know if you have any pointers or experiences similar to this. Hopefully I've explained enough about this for it to make sense.

*** END EXCERPT ***

 There are no custom materials, and the only families ive loaded of stuff are from the downloads here at revit city.  In each render I did turn off by category furniture and rcp trees....

 I think I've said enough hopefully.  I think I attached an image of the render, alas I was not quick enough to get a screen shot. Help if you can, comment on anything please!

 --Ben

I do indeed like pizza

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benlikespizza

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Tried to reformat the question above but came out the same, so I just deleted the text in this post... sorry...

I also have no idea how i got that smiley thing to show up, hah...Edited on: Thu, May 20, 2010 at 12:29:37 PM

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benlikespizza

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AS A NOTE:

The work around I've just tried is to render regions of each "elevation."  So now instead of 4 computers doing four different elevations, I've got 3 doing 1/3 of 1, and I'll photoshop them together.  It appears to be working (I set them to bake while writing to the forum) and I will let you know how it goes.  It adds another step, and although inconvenient, at least I can get it done.

Regardless, the question posted still stands... anyone have a similar problem to the one i've tried to outline?

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Typhoon

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"Since you can't render an elevation (there's no render button) I looked online, and created 3d cameras that have no perspective on them, and created "elevations." -Well you can in 3D view orient the view to an Elevation View, you don't need to create a camera view to do that... But i never had that kind of problems and I work with 100mb files, well, i work with a Dual-core 2.4ghz and 8Gb of Ram, Windows Vita 64 bits and Ati graphic 1650 512Mb ... maybe a graphic issue, memory issue, try to "clean" the "Temp" files, use CCleaner...

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benlikespizza

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So I tried the render regions of different drawings, it sped up and actually worked in little to no time (comparatively) so I am just going to have to stick to MED quality and 150 dpi settings.  

The problem I am having now is that once it finishes rendering, and I click export, i go through the motions but nothing actually saves... anyone have this issue?

clearly, the revit gods are not with me on this one.... 

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Typhoon

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I Hope and I Wish to LEARN  more, and more, and more.... REVIT

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benlikespizza

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That post actually very interesting, and I think would solve the problem if I was on a bigger machine.  The solution, however, isn't solved because when you render and it goes to 100%, you press close, and then you would go to the render dialog box to either export or save to project, well, the export button goes through the motions but ends up never saving a jpeg (or tif or png) to the desired location... just as that thread mentions, there is no error dialog box. then, if you try to click save to project, so that I could then place on sheet and then export/print as pdf, well, that save to project button doesn't work at all. This is apretty ridiculous bug/problem.  I thought I had the work around by doing the render region...  I am currently re rendering one image over again, on another machine I am going to just close the file and re open and then re-render, and then on another machine I will close revit and then open and re-render and see which of those options go through...

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benlikespizza

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so, to recap:

I have set the computers to each render region of a rendering. there were problems getting to export or save to project on some BUT NOT ALL of the machines.  I attempted to do 3 tests:  TEST 1: simply click render again, and then see if i could export after. FAILED.  TEST 2: close file, not revit, open, then render. FAILED ( i think, too pc's to juggle). TEST 3: close revit, reopen rerender. SUCCESS. fairly obvious result.  TEST 4: restart pc. reopen, rerender. that of course worked as well. SUCCESS. the problem is why the bug exists in general.

 I also opted to restart a number of machines after they failed to export just to be safe about it. Again, these are added frustrating steps.  I had a buddy who has a new laptop try to render my project, and he said he was able to render it fine, I don't know about exporting it. POSSIBLE THOUGHT: the lab computers at school suck and when they max out on memory they just stop rendering. another user had mention that it might be a max memory problem, and I am beginning to agree.

thoughts? 

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benlikespizza

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I finally was able to trigger a warning dialogue box about low usage of memory: I am writing about it from a laptop.  It came up on a render region of a MED quality 150 DPI image uncompressed image size 35.6.... the message reads : "MEMORY USAGE IS APPROACHING THE OPERATING SYSTEM LIMIT. REVIT MIGHT BECOME UNSTABLE." .... it then goes on to say other stuff, such as reducing the DWG and RVT links, the loaded RVT and RFA files  etc.

 This clearly then demonstrates that it is because of the crappy computers I have to run this stuff on at school, and the peak memory usage of them limits or crashes my renderings.  I am not sure entirely how to work around this, but i believe that this must be the issue.  I will admit I have alot of stuff in the file, sso i guess its a big file relative to the machines I am using.

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benlikespizza

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So, to summarize for anyone who still might be following, I ended up doing this render region idea for all of my perspectives, 3D elevations, etc in order to shrink the render region to a size that each computer could handle without crashing.  I did end up getting the official revit critical memory message box a few more times, and i've ended up splitting up those render regions into even smaller render regions (summer session starts next week so there is a computer lab here with nobody in it.... i've been using 5-7 computers all day. so the parts of my project that have alot of glass and shadow I ended up making render regions that were 1/6th the overall size and rendering that 1/3rd of the image on 3 different computers.  thank God for photoshop to get it all together.  \

I also attempted to render on my laptop.  I have a macbook pro i bought last september.  I run windows 7 on parallels on it. revit 2010 isn't so bad on this setup, and i've actually been able to render 1/2 of some of the images as one render region on it, showing that the virtual running on the mac runs better and doesnt crash than the pc xp renders... funny. it just cooks for 45mins -1 hr.

reflections? get better computers when you can, limit families when you can, USE SECTION BOXES FOR ALL VIEWS, and petition revit for better error dialogue boxes within the rendering processes.

thanks to all who commented (what like 2 people)... some good feedback and cross threading.... thanks!

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benlikespizza

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