Vray for Revit: What is so Good About it?

Rendering in any program (like Revit or 3D Max and using either the program’s default render engine or plugins like Vray) is a skill that most architects/designers/students/3D enthusiasts want to develop to be able to translate their design ideas into an image, this way, clients can understand more precisely what the project will look like and will allow them to make more informed decisions about it.

To render a project in Revit, we can use either Revit’s default render engine or use a third-party render engine (plug-in). Revit’s default rendering engine, even though it is quite easy to use/setup, has a few drawbacks, like the lack of HDRI support, the absence of a tool/system to create grass (which is quite used in architectural renderings), the lack of rendering passes to composite/enhance the render in an external imaging program or the ability to render on multiple computers to speed up the process, to name a few. The renderings produced by Revit, even without these features, certainly look great, but they need a good amount of work in a post-production program like Photoshop or After Effects to take them to the next level. Third party renderers offer a lot more flexibility and options and the final renders require (in some cases) a lot less post-production work, which makes them better options for rendering our projects.

A few months ago, we had the chance to use Vray for Revit, and even though we were quite familiar with the way Vray works in other programs, like Maya and 3D Max, we read that things were a little bit different in Revit, so we were a little concerned that this could slow down our workflow and our production schedule. In any case, we decided to give it a try and see what happened.

To our surprise, Vray for Revit proved to be quite simple to use. In fact, a lot easier than Vray for Maya or for 3D Max, where we need to configure down to the tiniest detail to get a professional-looking render. Using a few of the tools in the Vray tab and with a few extra clicks on some of the settings, we were able to produce professional looking renders in a matter of minutes. These renders looked, by far, better than the default Revit renders, and we hadn’t even gotten to any of the advanced options or any of the rest of the tools.

Note: If you’d like to know more about the difference between AutoCAD and Revit visit this post HERE

To start off, all the tools of Vray for Revit are available in a special tab on the Ribbon in Revit. On that tab, you can configure the resolution, the quality, the lights, the materials, the exposure and even the settings of the render. Also, you can launch a render from that same Tab. This is quite good, since it speeds up the process by allowing us to stay in the same tab all the time and get our renders finished.

Vray features:

Vray for Revit has more features than Revit’s default render engine, which makes it a lot more powerful and a better option for rendering. Here is a list of some of the extra features that make the renders look a lot nicer:

• HDRI support to create nicer lighting setups for our renders.

• Ability to create grass. Yes, blades of grass through the Vray Fur tool. This enhances the renders and breaks up the horizontal lines of the buildings to provide a more organic look and feel of the renders.

• Support of render passes (or channels as they are called in Vray for Revit). Render passes (channels) are a great way to post-produce our renders. By separating the image into its different channels, we can tweak, in programs like Photoshop, the lighting, reflections, refractions, colors, highlights and many more things. This results in faster turnarounds since we don’t have to launch a new render to make small changes like changing the color of a wall for example.

• ZDepth channel. This allows us to add atmospheric effects to our renders (in Photoshop) based on the distance of the object to the camera. Using the ZDepth channel we can make objects that are farther away look less saturated, less dark or even add mist/fog to give the illusion of dept. This is actually a great feature!

• Adding fog directly to the render without the need of the ZDepth channel. This is certainly a great option, but it is always better to do it in post-production using the ZDepth channel, this way, we can control the amount of fog we add without having to re-render the image several times.

• Creating an infinite ground plane. While this might seem like a very simple option, it really helps to get things moving.

• Swarm. This is actually one of the coolest features of Vray for Revit! Swarm is a distributed rendering system that allows you to use multiple computers to render the image. In order to do this, you have to buy additional render nodes (one for each computer you want to add to the swarm), but it really makes things faster since you are using the power of two or more computers to finish the render in a fraction of the time. The swarm is quite easy to setup and in case you have any issues, Vray for Revit has great customer/technical support. We had an issue with the swarm after windows installed updates in the computer, so we were not able to configure it again ourselves. We emailed technical support and the next day they fixed the issue. The only problem is that they are based in Bulgaria, so the times are a bit odd (especially of you live in the Americas), but as long as you find a time to connect with them, they are really helpful and they will solve the problem quite quickly.

• RPC Proxies to use polygonal geometry created in other programs and using it in Revit pretty much the same way you would do in the other program. As some of you might already know, Revit is not good at interpreting polygonal objects, but RPC Proxies have this issue covered.

• Large library of materials containing the most used architectural materials. This made things faster as well, since we could find the most common materials in it without having to create our own materials or finding our own textures.

These are just some of the features that make Vray for Revit a better option for rendering, and needless to say, an option that makes renders look more photoreal with just a few clicks.

To finish this post, I would also like to talk about a couple of things that hopefully get improved in the next releases of Vray for Revit (as of right now, we are using Vray 3.70.04).

• Ability to render a camera view when that camera view is open. This was a little awkward at first. If the camera view was open, the render button was grayed out. The render button would only come on if the open view was different than a camera view. Once the render button was available, you could select the camera view you wanted to render and then launch the render, but this took a little while to get used to.

• Issue with editing the materials directly in Revit. There seemed to be a problem editing materials within Revit. We could solve this by editing the materials outside Revit, but this was an extra step that we had to do every time we needed to change the properties of a material.

Other than these two issues, the rest of the operation was very smooth and as mentioned before, the results were stunning right off the bat. In the case of Vray for Revit, the additional features outweigh a couple of issues by far, so we were really happy (and impressed) with the plug-in and we certainly recommend it for your future projects.

For more information about Vray for Revit, visit: www.chaosgroup.com