Philly Revit User Group - Next meeting about Revit 2009

If you are in the Philadelphia or surrounding areas, please join us at the Philadelphia Revit User Group.

Check out the boards here and attend the next meeting!

http://groups.google.com/group/phillyrevit

 

Rendering tool in Revit 2009

Being one who has always preferred showing renderings over floor plans and spent a fair amount of time generating Accurender renderings in previous versions of Revit, I am thrilled with the transition to Mental Ray in RAC 2009. The whole rendering process has been simplified, for the better in my opinion, as you can see by the sparse designbar options for the "Rendering" tab!  The factory could have just put the lone button under the "View" tab and gotten rid of the tab entirely! Don't be discouraged by it's limited appearance. Enhancements to the Rendering engine, Materials and Exposure adjustments should keep you content.

The first Dialog you see when you click the lone "Render View..." button is this, giving you options for rendering the view or Region of the view, the resolution by screen or print size, lighting options, background options and the "Adjust Exposure" tool which is worth it's weight in gold(can I say that about a dialog?)
The lighting drop-down gives you six options, 3 for exterior and 3 for interior renderings, and each of those consist of Sun only, Sun + Artificial light, and Artificial light only.

The Exposure adjustment tool is a powerful tool and very welcomed tool, giving the ability to make high quality adjustments to 5 different exposure settings. This feature saves a bundle of time usually spent on post-production in Photoshop.

Materials have also had an overhaul. The patterning appears to be exactly the same, but you will note the cleaned-up interface. Gone are the smoothness and glow settings, leaving only transparency in the shading box.

The Render appearance tab is where things are turned up a notch with a respectable library of materials, and material settings, including one I've been wanting for years now, yes, Bump Maps! 
There are also better preview options and more which I will get into later, but I've got to get to the mines! I'll post the rest later.

Loft Blendiness

Playing around today with the massing tools in Revit2009 I had 2 hours to burn and I whipped up a fun little building.  This is a combination of a blend loft and various voids. Which then I skinned with wall types and made floors and etc. It's highly suspect whether this is structurally sound but it was more of an exploration of the new loft blend tool.

A view from the front. The plans that this study model generated were very good and brought to mind the complicated task of documenting a building with such an organic form, and the necessity to establish simple math foundation to the form.

Once I arrived at the general form I was shooting for, I stopped and threw on some materials for a few quick renders to see the results. 
Revit is an amazing tool for doing quick studies such as this. What I'm not showing is the additional data that this model provides such as square feet, volume, quantity take-offs and etc.

iRevit remake and Revit 2009

Welcome to iRevit – We're putting up a whole new site to make it easier to post.
I took the old Revit model I did last year and re-rendered it in Revit 2009 last week with a noticeable difference in speed and quality. The gray image is the Revit 2008 and the Color image is from Revit 2009. Check them out:

Revit 2008 Rendering using radiosity, overlayed hidden line and few materials. (this took 12hours +/-)

The same model rendered quickly in Revit 2009 with the same material and view settings except for the floor. (this took 2 hours)

That's not all you will see from Revit 2009. 
New navigation tools
New massing and form tools
better performance and 
more control over project documentation

We'll be fully back up soon.
Cheers

Bright Lights, Big Fixtures

I posted this tutorial on how to make a working light component family fixture in Revit 2008 last year and since I'm shifting all my blogging over to blogger.com, I figured I would point you to it. It's here: Bright Lights, Big Fixtures