The ability to render an item in any drafting program has been an elusive. Sure, there are Autodesk® VIZ and Autodesk® 3ds Max®. But those aren't drafting programs, are they? They are rendering programs. Yes, I know, AutoCAD® came out with a nice render engine in 2007, but that is a different story. Why? Well because of the fact that:
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You need to configure a viewport to print rendered. What a mess this is. You can never really tell what you are going to get until it's printed. Then the actual viewport eats all of the RAM from your drawing.
Or
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You need to keep re–rendering it.
Both are bad scenarios. If you dump the file to a jpg or bmp…well, we all know how that looks. Being able to actually render something and save that rendering without killing the model is crucial to some projects. Especially in the "How much time did you spend on this job because we haven't really even won the bid yet" phase. Here, I give you the steps for rendering within Autodesk® Revit® Architecture.
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The first step is to create a 3D view
This can be done with the default 3D view or a camera view as well. Camera views, however, can be tricky and we will be covering them in the next article.
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Pan and zoom to a likeable area.
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Go to View > Orient > Save View. You can name it whatever you desire.
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Now that the view is saved, it is time to set up a rendering. On the design toolbar, right click to make sure that the
rendering tab is available.
- Go to the rendering tab
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The first thing to do is to determine the image size. It is measured by pixels. For this rendering lets adjust it to 300 dpi. This is a good half–way point. Any bigger, and you are going to be gazing into the rendering window for quite a while. I liken it to gazing into a campfire.
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Click on the Raytrace button
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If you have not done any renderings, a dialog will pop up. Give it a name and select whether it is an interior or an exterior scene. If a rendering has been performed in this model, slip to the next step.
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Set the resolution to 300 dpi.
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Click the Display Model button.
This will cancel the actual rendering operation.
- Click on the Settings… button.
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If you haven't created a scene, go to the next set of steps. If you have, use the render scene that you created.
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For the name, select the New button.
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Call it whatever you choose.
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Click OK
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Because your scene may be an exterior scene, be sure to select exterior for scene settings.
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For the Radiosity settings at the bottom, select better for the quality.
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For the Raytrace settings, select Best.
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Click OK
We are all set to actually do some rendering. Yes, work needs to be done to tweak our settings, but this is a start, right?
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Click the Region Raytrace… button.
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Pick a window on the screen that you want to render. This takes much less time than letting Revit render the entire model. But depending on the resolution, it can be a lengthy process. Many times, I will set up a separate computer and let the rendering occur on that machine.
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Once the rendering is complete, two choices will become available in the rendering tab. One is the Capture Rendering button.
This allows you to create a new view in your model.
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Another choice that is available is the Export Image.
This will simply allow you to export to your favorite raster format.
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The image can be slightly adjusted in terms of brightness and contrast. I recommend using the settings from Revit. To adjust the image once it is rendered, click the Adjust Image
Once the image has been either saved to a view or exported, you can return to the model by clicking the Display Model button.
This will get rid of the rendered effect and show the view as it was before you rendered it.
Next month we will touch upon the other rendering features that Revit Architecture has to offer.
(Discuss this Article! in the HotNews Discussion Forums.)
Submitted by Eric Wing, who has been in the building, architectural design, and structural engineering field for 15 years and has been managing, teaching, and presenting Autodesk applications for 10 of them. Eric's activities within AUGI include: ATP Director, Survey Manager, ATP instructor, HotNews columnist and AUGIWorld columnist. He can be reached at
atpmanager@augi.com
