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V-Ray for Revit preview

Many consider V-Ray to be the gold standard for architectural design visualisation. Now, its developers are making the powerful ray trace renderer available inside Revit, with push-button control so it can be used by non-experts

by greg corke

To architectural design visualisation specialists, V-Ray needs no introduction. The powerful, quick ray trace rendering software is a favourite in the architectural CG community.

Chaos Group, its developer, boasts that 92 of the top 100 architecture firms in the world render with V-Ray every day. It’s a bold claim, but we’ve no reason to doubt it. The software has featured in virtually all of the rendering and animation projects we have covered in AEC Magazine over the years.

V-Ray is available as a standalone renderer, but is commonly used as a plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max. It’s designed for rendering experts, with hundreds of different settings that can be tweaked to deliver that perfect image. But now its developers are targeting a completely different type of user with a new plug-in for Revit.

V-Ray for Revit, currently in beta, has been designed from the ground up to be easy to use — push-button simple, if you will. However, unlike many of the renderers that are built into CAD and BIM software, it also gives users access to some of the more advanced controls, albeit in a dumbed-down way.

Plugged into Revit V-Ray for Revit runs as a plug-in directly inside Revit (versions 2014 to 2017), so no import or export is required. It has its own ribbon in the Revit UI, with simple controls for quality, lighting, exposure and resolution. As soon as the render button is hit, the V-Ray frame buffer (rendering window) pops up and the image refines until it is finished.

To render a scene, simply choose a

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camera view from a pull-down list. It is not currently possible to render an active camera view, as the plug-in becomes unavailable. Chaos Group says this issue affects all Revit API applications, including those written by Autodesk, and that it’s currently working with the Revit development team to find a solution. Non-camera orthographic views can be rendered when active.

Scenes can be lit in a number of ways — by artificial lights, dome lights (with an optional HDR environment image) or sun (which gets its location, date and time settings from the Revit sun). Camera exposure can also be adjusted, according to 15 pre-defined settings for interior and exterior environments. These range from ‘well-lit’ and ‘office’ to ‘night’ and ‘low light’. With some of the longer exposures, a little experimentation is needed to get the best results.

Even when the render has started, it is still possible to fine-tune the image. The software provides simple slider controls for adjusting exposure, contrast, hue/ saturation and colour balance in real time. These can be applied during or after the render.

Rendering engines There are two rendering engines built into the software. V-Ray, the standard production engine, delivers the best quality results, while V-Ray RT, a so-called real time engine, is very useful for tweaking settings before committing to a timeconsuming final render.

While the production engine runs solely on Central Processing Units (CPUs), the calculations for the real time engine can also be done on Graphics Processing Unit (GPUs). Chaos Group currently supports Nvidia GPUs through CUDA, but will be adding OpenCL support later. This will allow the software to run with pretty much any GPU, including those from AMD.

The key benefit of V-Ray RT is being able to make changes to the scene in real time, without having to re-start the render. This can be great if you want to play with lighting and exposure settings or explore different materials.

As changes are made, the image will automatically start to re-render in the frame buffer. The speed at which this

1 Core materials can be overidden with diagrammatic materials for a quick conceptual render 2 V-Ray for Revit interior scene 3 Swarm distributed rendering can be invoked simply by ticking a box 4 Once the render button is hit, the frame buffer appears as a separate rendering window

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happens will depend on your hardware, grammatic materials for a quick concep- it seems likely that one will come free with so if this becomes an important part of tual render. every V-Ray for Revit license. Additional your workflow then you may need to con- licenses can be bought in packs or rented sider investing in a more powerful GPU, Distributed rendering to make it easy for firms to scale up comor multiple thereof. V-Ray for Revit also comes with a new pute power for urgent projects.

While V-Ray RT can be used as a pro- distributed rendering technology called Swarm technology will eventually be duction renderer, for best results with Swarm, which is incredibly easy to use available for Rhino, SketchUp, Max and less image noise, Chaos Group recom- (also covered in BOXX review on page Maya with Render Node licenses working mends using the standard V-Ray engine, 48). While Swarm will work with dedi- across all products. which scales well with multi-core CPUs. cated render nodes, it is really designed

Here, there are five quality settings. By to let small workgroups share spare Conclusion default, draft, low, medium and high use compute resources on networked work- From our experiences with a beta release a progressive renderer, which is quicker. stations. It currently works with CPUs of the software, Chaos Group looks to ‘Very high’ uses a bucket renderer, and and CUDA GPUs. OpenCL support (for have done an excellent job of making its while this delivers the best results, ren- AMD GPUs) will come later. specialist rendering technology accessider times can be significantly longer (see The software runs as a background ser- ble to design viz novices. BOXX review on page 48). vice on each machine, and monitors CPU However, rather than stripping every-

More advanced users can change depth and GPU usage in real time. If a machine thing back and delivering a basic push of field — a feature that is not commonly has any spare capacity, then some of this button renderer inside Revit, architects available in built-in renderers like is made available to Swarm. When a user can still get under the hood for more conAutodesk Raytracer. It provides control over camera 4 trol, should they need it. This is one way the software settings, such as focus dis- differentiates itself from the tance, ISO, F number and Autodesk Raytracer built shutter speed, and is great for into Revit. producing more stylised out- With a little experimentaput. Other advanced features tion, it is possible to get some include environment fog, really nice effects. This not which can be used to give the only increases the impact effect of light streaming design viz can have on archithrough a window, and aerial tectural design, but also perspective, which produces helps reduce the reliance on fog in the distance. in-house design viz specialists. This can free up their Materials time for exploring new techIn developing V-Ray for Revit, the primary consideration for the developers was ‘‘ Chaos Group looks to have done an excellent nologies such as VR or realtime game engines. But there is a bigger picthat the rendering process job of making its specialist rendering ture here. With plug-ins also would be non-destructive to the BIM workflow. Naturally, this meant working directly inside Revit, but technology accessible to design viz novices ’’ available for SketchUp, Rhino and 3ds Max, architectural firms can benefit from a streamlined renderit also meant users would not have to goes into a meeting or makes a cup of tea, ing pipeline, from concept through change the material definitions within for example, their machine will automati- design, all the way into marketing. the Revit model. cally offer up all of its compute resources. Finally, if Swarm, the simple to use dis-

By default, when you click render in Conversely, if a user wants to retain full tributed rendering technology, delivers on V-Ray for Revit, the software automati- control over his or her machine, it can be its promise, it could have a major impact on cally converts all of the Revit materials removed from the pool simply by untick- how small architectural firms approach into V-Ray materials — a process that ing a box in the web interface. design viz hardware purchases. V-Ray for takes a matter of seconds. The developers Swarm does not use a render queue, so Revit is only likely to be used part time, so have gone through the process of map- jobs are processed on a first come, first sharing compute resources over a network ping Revit materials to V-Ray materials served basis. However, each user can makes perfect sense — no need to invest in in the best possible way but, if required, control the priority of their job with a powerful hardware for every user. The softusers can also adjust the mapping by slider that dictates the percentage of ware is very easy to setup, and works well tweaking sample size and rotation. available computing power he or she with a dedicated render node (again, cov-

If the user wants to change the materi- would like to use. Of course, to make this ered in BOXX review on page 48). It will be als, say to try out different ideas, use a work, there needs to be good communi- interesting to see how well this translates to material that is not available inside Revit cation within the team, otherwise every- a real-world environment with machines of or simply to get a better effect, any Revit one just sets it to 100%. mixed specifications and varied workloads. material can be mapped to any V-Ray Each Swarm machine requires a V-Ray ■ chaosgroup.com/vray/revit material, texture or colour. In a few Render Node license, regardless of how clicks, all opaque and transparent mate- many CPU cores or GPUs it has. While V-Ray for Revit is due to ship later this year. rials can also be overridden with dia- Chaos Group has not announced pricing, Pricing has not yet been confirmed.

BIM on Ice: Collaborating on Edmonton’s Ice District using Autodesk A360

Before the Ice District became a 25-acre, 2.5 billion-dollar mixed-use sports and entertainment district in downtown Edmonton, Canada, it was a project in the cloud—not in the sky, but on the network. That’s because it was one of the first large-scale projects to be designed using the Autodesk® A360 and Autodesk® Collaboration for Revit® (C4R) cloud-based design and review system.

The cloud-based approach enabled the project’s two major developers, three prime architectural firms (Stantec, Dialog, and HBA), and dozens of consultants to streamline collaboration and review significantly. But according to Aubrey Tucker, Regional BIM Lead for Stantec, the new system also provided challenges. And as one of the first groups to use the cloud-based approach, they had no accepted solutions to fall back on. “Cloud-based collaboration is a totally different way of working for most people,” says Tucker. And while it can be exciting to be on the leading edge with new technology, being the first does require some problem-solving ingenuity.

PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS TO NEW COLLABORATION PROBLEMS

Every firm involved in the project had previous experience with similar mega-projects, so they knew how hard collaboration could be without cloud-based tools. Every week, each firm has to upload their team’s latest Revit model to a borrow elements in the process.” Instead, their protocol dictated that the offender would simply relinquish all elements, sync the file, then inform the file’s owner of what had happened.

central FTP site, then download other teams’ files and import them into Revit. “It’s basically fifty hours of work across the consultant team every week,” says Tucker.

With A360, the teams could share their work in minutes. Clients and other stakeholders could see models whether they had Revit software or not. And review and redlining could happen in the cloud instead of teams having to print and mark up designs by hand. These were all big improvements over the old collaboration process.

But there were some unexpected obstacles, and a learning curve. Three times during the project, the servers where the projects were hosted went down unexpectedly, bringing work to a standstill for up to eight hours at a time. “That was inconvenient, but the efficiency gains more than made up for that lost time,” says Tucker.

New forms of etiquette also had to be developed. “We had to make sure people didn’t publish to A360 too often,” Tucker says. While publishing was easy, it was important to give stakeholders time to review one version before another replaced it.

Plus, A360 has no way to restrict folder access, so any person on the project could open any of the more than 80 models available. The solution? Teams posted contact information on the sync view with each file, so the appropriate BIM manager could be contacted if someone opened a file by accident. “Accidental logins will occur from time to time,” Tucker says. “It’s important that people not panic and abandon an open file and potentially

SETTING PRECEDENTS AND ESTABLISHING PROCESSES

Of the ten projects Tucker currently manages, four are being managed with A360. What makes a project a good fit for A360? Tucker says that the larger a project is, the greater the efficiency gains they achieve with cloud-based collaboration. Distributed teams provide another good reason to go to the cloud. The technical sophistication of the team is another factor—if they’re not savvy about the cloud and don’t understand the basic concepts of central files versus local ones, he says, it can be better to stick with familiar processes.

But in Tucker’s opinion, “we’re just a few years away from everyone using cloud tools. It’s a conversation people need to have: to get the benefits of the cloud, they have to be comfortable with the cloud.”

As more teams move to A360 to manage large projects, it’s possible that the solutions his team devised for the challenges of cloud collaboration will become best practices for those who follow in his footsteps. Only time will tell which become the standard protocols for the industry. In the meantime, Tucker and other BIM managers like him continue to pioneer new processes to facilitate effective collaboration during this period of rapid technological change.

Aubrey Tucker will lead a roundtable panel on the Ice District project at Autodesk University in Las Vegas, November 15-17.

au.autodesk.com/las-vegas/overview