Revit 2016 - Rendering Engines

Some years ago we went through a changeover from Accurender to Mental Ray as Autodesk focused on Mental Ray as their preferred rendering engine for several of their products. If you didn't know it already Mental Ray belongs to Nvidia. Autodesk has purchased companies, and their products, more recently that allows them to focus on using what is now their own rendering engine; which is being called Raytracer. Don’t confuse it with the Visual Style called Raytrace.

This means we find ourselves in another period of rendering engine transition from Mental Ray to Autodesk Raytracer instead. Revit 2016 has both Mental Ray and Autodesk Raytracer options available to us when we decide to render via our desktop (not using Cloud Rendering).

As I understand it they are motivated to go through this in order to provide what they believe will be simpler yet higher quality and faster rendering options because they will have more control over the engine being used; it’s theirs, not someone else’s. Unfortunately it takes quite some time to plug in and unplug something so intrinsic to how Revit works. I believe that, if things go according to plan, we’ll probably just find the one option (Raytracer) in the next full release of Revit.

Considering the visualization products available today like Revizto, Lumion, Fuzor and Enscape, which all offer a very impressive real time rendering environment as well as integrating well with Revit, I can’t help but wonder if the development team is really in tune with the market. Maybe they have something up their sleeves we just can’t see yet? I hope so. For a very basic comparison I took a model I made recently during a training session and used both rendering engines with just exterior lighting. I used the same location each time, southern CA (where I live).

This is using Mental Ray (3:27 seconds at Medium)

This is using Raytracer (2:53 at medium)

This time I switched to rending the same model and view using the Draft setting. This is using Mental Ray (51 seconds at Draft)

This time using Raytracer (39 seconds at draft)

For each rendering Raytracer was the faster engine. The quality difference between the draft renderings was much more noticeable with Raytracer’s result being cleaner and clearer. Raytracer’s Draft and Medium was much more consistent than for Mental Ray. If rendering is your passion then I encourage you to read Daniel Stine’s article about this new development in Revit. It was published at AECBytes.

A quirky outcome of this transition is how the two engines deal with the Adjust Exposure feature.

With Mental Ray we can render and then click Adjust Exposure and tweak the result, seeing the changes in the image immediately. With Raytracer we can't do that. We CAN use Adjust Exposure first and then render, which makes no sense to me at all. This means we have to render first, make some adjustments to the exposure (which is adjusting blindly), render again to see if it provides a better result...repeat.

It's my understanding that it is what it is...for now...

Fuzor

While attending Autodesk University last week Elaine with NBBJ mentioned a new product she is familiar with called Fuzor. She said I should check it out on the exhibit floor. Wednesday night I stopped by to have a look.

It's a stand-alone software intended to allow real time rendering and simulation of a Revit model. It also "plugs in" to Revit with its own tools on the ribbon. For example you can use View Sync to update Fuzor as you change your view in Revit. You can initiate changes by selecting elements in Fuzor and using the Edit Selection button on the ribbon in Revit.

Open your project, launch Fuzor, wait for it to load the model and you're off. Elaine opened up a project a team in her office has been working on so it was not a small model, nor just one model. Navigation was simple enough. If you've used the walk feature in Revit or the same concept in Navisworks you know enough to get around.

There is no export from Revit. Just open your project in Revit and then run Fuzor (separate application window). The only time you'll spend waiting is the initial load, about the same as waiting for Revit to load the project initially, perhaps a bit faster. Between the real time visualization and no export it's a pretty compelling option. The closest thing I can think of is the Lux module from M-Six's Veo.

The product is only about six months old at this point and about to become available for evaluation. It's being developed by a team based in San Diego, CA. If you are interested they are asking us to send a request via EMAIL. There is a PDF Manual if you'd like to read it. The price if I recall correctly is about $3,500.00 USD. They will be able to support network licensing as well.

Key Feature Summary

• Geometry Updates in Fuzor as soon as Revit data changes
• Select elements in Fuzor first and then edit in Revit
• Load specific levels (they call them layers) from linked files
• Materials changes in Revit update Fuzor immediately
• Camera Synchronization between Revit and Fuzor
• Correct Time of Day Simulation
• Weather Conditions: sunny, storm clouds, rain and rain with wind direction
• Walk and Fly through controls
• Uses Revit lighting data for interior lighting

I've embedded their intro video, follow THIS LINK for five others.

Autodesk 360 Rendering Competition

Nisha with Autodesk wrote to let me know that they've opened a rendering competition, beginning today, to help demonstrate the usefulness of rendering via Autodesk 360. What can you win? They will select three winners and those three will feature exclusively in their Autodesk® 360 newsletter, worldwide distribution, as well as receive prizes like an iPad, a $500 gift card and more!

• When: Oct 21 – Nov 15 2013
• Where: Autodesk 360 Rendering Competition Site
• Who: Anyone, student, rendering artist, designer or small business professional

Here’s your chance to show Autodesk your talent and do what you love doing from now until November 15th, 2013.

Interested? Follow these instructions:

• Create a still image rendering of anything you like: a building model, residential interior or object design.
• Visit Rendering in Autodesk® 360 and sign in to your Autodesk® 360 account.
• Upload your design from Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Autodesk® Revit® or Autodesk® Fusion 360.
• The final render must be done in Autodesk® 360 to qualify.
• Upload up to 5 images at once to enter here: Autodesk 360 Rendering Competition Site

Get a Panorama on Your iOS Device

John Sepannen sent me this information recently. He wanted to get a panorama on his iPhone or iPad and came up with this workflow. His approach does involve 3 other software applications ($) that may or may not be practical for you, or there might be another option to use instead of Autodesk Stitcher.

1.   Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited ($350 single license or 30-day free trial)
2.   iPano app ($2.99) -
3.  Photoshop or equal
4.  Dropbox (or similar used to aid in transferring images to iOS device)

Using iPano allows anyone with an iOS device to view panoramic images (offline).

1.  Rendered view with Autodesk 360
       a. option #1 - render directly to panorama.
       b. option #2 - re-render any fixed camera image as panorama
2.  Download panorama file (right click on web thumbnail).
3.  Open panorama file "photo strip" with Photoshop and cut out (6) separate square image files .
4.  Rename image files based on relative direct of image facing the floor.
       image_u (up)
       image_d (down)
       image_f (front)
       image_b (back)
       image_l (left)
       image_r (right)

Using the Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited software

1.  File: Open: Panorama
       a. select any one of the six images.
       b. Stitcher will then process the six images and create a panorama
2.  Render Panorama as spherical image.
3.  Copy image to Dropbox
4.  On iOS device export image from Dropbox to Photo Library
5.  In iPano app - import image from Photo Library
6.  Save to bookmarks.

He shared a PDF slide deck that explains the process with images and more information if you are interested in pursuing this yourself.

Rendering and Revit MEP

I received an email the other day from a Revit MEP user that would like to render some equipment rooms. The wrinkle is that when systems are assigned to pipe and duct and their related equipment the relatively new feature called Pipe Systems (and Duct Systems) override the appearance of connected equipment.

If the equipment you use has material parameters to define what the equipment should look like then it is possible to show both the materials assigned to pipe and duct systems AND what the equipment should look like. Not all equipment has either materials or material parameters though. You like my 4" blue tile covered boiler??

Then you run into equipment that "Breaks Into", like a valve into pipe. The pump and valve in the image above look different but it's really just because I assigned a solid color override to the material. That works for shaded views but you end up with the system imposing the material on the equipment and accessories when you render.

Ideally it would be nice to have an option to tell Pipe and Duct Systems to respect the material assignments of connected equipment. Guess it's a candidate for future wish granting.

Visualization with Stadia

I recently became aware of a new application called Stadia.

It works like this: Model away in Revit, when you are ready to see something you submit your model to their cloud rendering service. You register your email address with them and you just enter it in the Revit interface. When you press Enter, Revit submits your model information to their cloud.

I believe there is supposed to be a "Bake" button on the panel too, but it hasn't shown up on my UI yet. At least there is an image file for one in the installation folder for Stadia. [I've been informed that I can download an update that will fix it.] After a few minutes you get an email with a link to download the results. Extract the compressed file that arrives, double click on the rendering.exe file and you can wander around your building. Move the mouse to tilt/turn and use the arrow keys to move forward/back/side to side. Pretty simple, once you get the hang of it.

It renders using the materials you've chosen, the lights you've placed...so the closer to what you want it is in your model the better the results. It's a bit closer to Revit's realistic visual style than photo real rendering. Naturally your mileage will vary according to your own sense of success.

In my brief experimentation so far I did find it necessary to put some site surfaces around the exterior of the building. Without such features you "fall" similar to Navisworks when "walking" through your building. Make sure you put a building pad in so the site doesn't go inside your building or you'll end up with dirt/grass inside too. Doors "open" when you approach them. They don't swing open, rather the panel vanishes as you approach, more like Maxwell Smart and doors perhaps. You can walk up and down stairs, also much like Navisworks. My first thought was that they are harnessing the Navis API perhaps but I don't actually know.

I did struggle with navigation initially because it wasn't obvious to me how to do it. I tried to use the scroll wheel to zoom but that just seems to "spin" the view in an awkward manner. I'm not sure why but I really found myself wanting to "zoom" at times instead of "walking" forward or back. My last submission resulted in a 20 MB zip file that I downloaded. It took about 5 minutes to get the email once I submitted the model to Stadia. I'm not sure if the result was actually sent to me faster than that because my email address is aggregated via Google so there may be a little delay involved with that step.

You can watch this video to see a sample (it's on the Stadia site too) of what you get after uploading your work to their "cloud" service.

SMMA Demo from Robert Pogue on Vimeo.

Product Pitch - Mach Studio Pro by Studio GPU

Check out Mach Studio Pro!

So what is Mach Studio Pro? William mentioned it in his blog recently and Steve Bennett mentioned it in his blog in May 2009 after getting to see it and again in November 2009, so you can read their thoughts too. Here's a description from the Studio GPU site.

"Working at the Speed of Thought"
"Real-time interactive workflow and rendering has always been the holy grail of the CGI industry. But crossing this boundary has proven elusive even to those with the highest-end multi processor environments .... Until now.

Here's an image capture of one of several sample videos you can watch.

If you try out or buy the product and want to use it with a Revit model you can download the exporter which will install and provide the export functions within Revit. You can check out the download page HERE.

If you want to check out the tutorial that is available for it then you can download that HERE.

It was very impressive seeing rendering results as soon as I made any change, immediately, no waiting. Revit models do suffer a bit from performance issues similar to Autodesk's Max environment but some careful model exporting can provide a model you can set a scene for quickly and then test out everything else. When you are ready for a final it still takes a fraction of the time for the final than anything else I'm aware of.

Part of the price is the included high end ATI 8750 Video Graphics card.

I've been quietly waiting for a chance to write about this. Last fall I got a chance to see this product up close and work with them to support Revit more directly. They released the exporter for Revit really quietly, so quiet I missed it too.

Time to check them out!

Easy RGB - Paint Color RGB Values

A fellow Revit user, C. Ryan, posted a link to Easy RGB at the Autodesk Newsgroups and I thought it was something I ought to do too. Looks useful for those of you doing rendering/color matching, among other things?