Major problems with rendering

[Andrew P]

I'm having some major rendering problems in Revit (2012). Rendering a draft view takes a little over 4 hours. Rendering with artificial lights on, puts the whole pc to on hold. Exporting to FBX takes about 2 hours (if the computer doesn't crash). And rendering in 3ds max isn't faster either.

Any tips and tricks to speed up the rendering process drastically? I'm using a quad core qx9500 with 8 gigs of ram, so the hardware isn't an issue here.

[Munkholm]

What size is the output? (pixels x pixels)

Have you applied a section box to the Camera Views ?

[cliff collins]

How large a file is it? What's the size/scope of the building? Lots of curtainwall? Linked files?
We need a bit more info to help.

[rkitect]

So I just had this long elaborate reply set up, and like a dummy instead of hitting "Post Quick Reply" I hit the larger, more inviting "Reply to Thread" button. So here's the short version.

It seems like if you're having issues rendering in 3DS then there's a chance it's not model or Revit related. To debug, try rendering one of the sample projects that comes with Revit and see what the results are, should be a very quick render.

Some suggestions on rendering speed without knowing much more about your project:
-Section box out what you don't need to see. Prevents unnecessary lights and geometry from being calculated.
-Check your material image if you are using custom materials. Make sure they aren't like 50mb image files.
-Dimmer switches. Turn off the lights that are in the section box that are not contributing to the lighting of the render.

Check to make sure you don't have something like SETI@Home or Folding@Home turned on

[JCM]

Do you have any 3d dwg imports in the file? (know to cause performance drags) or like Carl said, maybe you have some custom material with a huge file size.

[Andrew P]

File size is only 100Mb. The output is just the default screen resolution. Only 3 OOTB materials were applied, so nothing custom. There are about 70 interior condo files linked in the model. The roof is composed of 300 curtain panels (by face) with 4 nested panels. So, nothing out of the ordinary.

[JCM]

how many lights in the project?, Are you rendering on best?

[Andrew P]

I turned off all lights. With the lights turned on, I'm unable to render in draft mode anyhow. The final render is always done on best with exterior sun light selected. This usually takes about 8 hours depending on the amount of entourage in the scene. But in this case after 8 hours only 15% has been completed.

[cliff collins]

[QUOTE There are about 70 interior condo files linked in the model. The roof is composed of 300 curtain panels (by face) with 4 nested panels. So, nothing out of the ordinary.[/QUOTE]

I suspect the 70 linked files and the curtain panels could be causing some problems......
Are the 70 linked files just interior walls for the units? If so, and it's an exterior rendering,
could you just unload the 70 links?

just a couple of thoughts........good luck!

[JeffreyMcGrew]

Exporting to FBX takes about 2 hours (if the computer doesn't crash).

It really sounds like something in wrong and/or broken if that's the case. Even really really big projects I've worked on haven't taken that sort of time to just export to FBX!

A draft view at a normal resolution should at most take a few minutes (if not seconds!) to render.

Something's really wrong here. Can you tell us more about the project or post it or something? I see about the 70+ links. That too sounds wrong and crazy. Are you linking every room in the condo project? Do you really need to do that? Have you tried binding all the links and then doing a test render to see if that works better?

Whatever it is you're doing, it's either your computer is painfully slow or something is really messed up. Even on our slowest, oldest computer we get better results than you're getting. Heck, even my four year old MacBookPro gets better results that what you're talking about here!