I will preface everything I am about to say by noting that I am no where near a rendering guru - far closer to noob than guru if truth be known.

However, since the release of the new Premium Suite I have been heavily brushing up on all things rendering.

For me at the moment, 3ds Max seems to have a HUGE learning curve - indeed, it seems to be far greater than learning curve of transitioning from Cad to Revit. No doubt it is a heavy weight professional rendering package that is capable, in the right hands, of producing stunning pieces of photrealistic imagery. So I guess, if you have a heavy weight rendering need, it would be right up there as one of the best to choose. Whilst certainly NOT seamless, the transfer of a Revit model (particularly when linked) via fbx file works ok if you are rendering in Max.
Accurender has a Revit addin exporter, but I haven't seen anything produced in accurender which matches the quality of 3ds Max. Artlantis, also has a revit plugin. I seem to remember that it was a pretty serious amount of money to purchase Studio. Lovely results nonetheless.

There may be others out there that I am unaware of, but, other than that, you are on the rocky path of trying to get from Revit to one of the common 3d file types such as wavefront .obj or Collada .dae or such like.

So I guess, the "best" is the one which suits your needs and workflow most closely. A small design firm like mine is going to have completely different needs to the large architectural firms - different client base - different level of resources - different everything!

As rendering is, for the foreseeable future, only going to be a minor part of what I do, the best is the bit of software which will provide for me good quality rendering with the ability to easily change colors and finishes. Time might prove me wrong, but I don't think Max will be the answer for me.

Cheers,

If it's any reassurance Ian I loathed 3ds Max for many years, finding it unstable and its interface chaotic, and used Cinema 4D instead... but have finally accepted that 3ds Max Design has improved a lot in stability in recent versions (although I gave up on 2011) and it can work well with Revit, even if the interface is still a bit clunky.

The pain for me has been in establishing a simple workflow from Revit 2012 to 3ds Max Design 2012 - I only ever have minutes to do a rendering, not hours so it has got to be better than what Revit can produce and faster.

I'm no expert - and I'd be quite happy for someone to point out where this is rubbish , but for me this works at the moment:

- Create a camera view in Revit
- set units in Revit to feet and fractional inches (I'm Metric by default)
- export to fbx
Open 3ds Max Design and check that Customize->Units setup
is set to US Standard and Feet w/Fractional Inches

You can link in your fbx export but just for simplicity I use File->Import (non native)
check that you have the latest fbx download when offered,

It should open in a general perspective View,

To get the 4 panes on screen click the icon extreme bottom right,

To switch between panes right click inside one,

First thing I do is select (icon with arrow over a box) and delete the 'sun' in the sky which will also delete the compass rose thing under the model.

Lighting analysis->Create->Daylight system:
Accept the offer to set up mr Photographic Exposure Control,
click and drag out a new compass rose in a plan view,
when let go of the mouse move it around and you will see the 'sun' moving around,
just drag it up somewhere - height has no effect as far as I know and click to finish,

Click on the 'sun' if not still selected,
click on the 'blue curved tube icon' top right-ish of screen - 2nd in a row of little icons,
click on Setup in the Daylight Parameters and choose your location, time, date etc.

To see your camera view from Revit hit the 'C' key (or right click the '3D View' text top left of each viewport),
likely the view will be more cropped than within Revit - this is because the camera lens is different I think,
you can select the camera in another viewport and that same 'blue bent tube' icon will now show you the camera parameters where you can select different lenses by clicking the buttons and see the effect,

To render a view (make sure the one you want is active by right-clicking in it)
Render->Render Setup (or F10)
Indirect Illumination tab -> enable the checkbox for 'Global Illumination' about half way down
Common Tab -> choose an output size
back up on the main menu,
Rendering->Environment and Effects (or the '8' key)
This is the most important for output using the default Mental Ray renderer:
half way down is the mr Photographic Exposure Control panel
choose a preset or switch to photographic exposure
There is a useful little Render Preview on this panel as well,

If it's looking half decent then bring up the Rendered Frame Window via
the main menu 'Rendering' drop down,

this window allows you to play around with quality sliders,
I usually tick the box for 'reuse Geometry',
hit the Render button and see how it goes.
You can save a rendering by hitting the little disk icon top left of this frame window.

I then play about with the Exposure control first but if unhappy will tweak the sun settings (select sun, blue bent tube icon again) to reduce direct sunlight to less than the default of '1' and 'overdrive' the mr Sky Parameters beyond the default value of '1' (but that's just our very flat British daylight )

That's it...

don't ask me about changing materials - that is mind-boggling
but I do like the iRay rendering option in 3dsMD 2012
(common tab, bottom, choose Renderer),
misses some materials but very fast to get a feel for how it looks,
iRay ignores all those settings I mentioned above and works on the actual sun settings information.

Hope that is some help in figuring out 3ds Max Design anyway

Thanks William,

I am very slooooowly coming to grips with the basics of 3dsMax.

I think, (as of late last night), that I have finally figured out a reasonably straight forward way to replace revit materials - particularly in multimap objects with Max materials.

Hopefully further testing today will mean that I have a usable methodology to get the model into a state where it will export to objects defined by material to an OBJ format successfully.

Cheers,

That's the bit I was struggling with as well - editing the materials within families once the fbx was imported to 3dsMax Design.

However, going back over the suggestion by the ever-helpful JCM in this other thread
http://www.revitforum.org/showthread...dsMax-problems
of using the File Link Manager and grouping by Revit Materials, then changing materials once in 3dsMD is much easier (or should I say, less difficult )

If you file-link the FBX into Max, and group by Material, it does make it a whole lot easier.

There are some scripts in Max you can do that will re-assign everything to use 'standard' Max materials so that when you re-export to something else (like Octane) you can actually have materials too. Max materials are so screwy, such a time waster!

Anyways, back to the original question. I looked at the Indigo for Revit rendering engine, and it looked promising. http://www.indigorenderer.com/revit/

But then I found Octane and I'm not looking back.

thanks Jeffrey, I'll have another look at Octane - it looks good even in beta but having to use obj files and sorting out the materials rather puts me off for the minute.

Jeffrey: do you have a working script doing this for max 2012?

-rpict

I actually find that playing with the materials in Octane is the best part of the process!

It is simply fantastic to tweak colors in a real time render environment. mmmm i'll try this shade - nah don't like it - try something else - put a bump map in - maybe an image file - drop in a HDRI map All dead easy. The rotten part is getting the model from Revit to Octane. Once it is there it is a breeze.

I am still struggling with trying to get to Octane via Max and fbx. Link the fbx in Max and it is much better when rendering in Max. However does not play nicely when trying to apply materials and export to obj. Import the fbx can provide good results for the export but for me is very time consuming to apply the materials - particularly to multimap material objects such as windows or doors. I have tried the scripts which reassign all of the materials to "standard". They do exactly what they say - every instance of every material is converted to a standard material. Naming convention is totally lost on the way. When you export to Octane one ends up with a model having over 200 separate materials with the very useful names of 'wire-11234' etc.
For me at the moment I have reverted to export to dwg and the using sketchup pro for basic materials and export to Octane.

Jeffrey, if you ever have a spare few minutes, I would love to know exactly how you export - link or import - and how you deal with mapping materials to the model in max prior to exporting out.

Cheers,

current process sucks. It's Revit -> FBX -> Max (file link, group by Material) -> export to OBJ (with Blender defaults) -> Import into Blender -> light editing (sometimes normals or UV mapping get screwy) & material definitions & camera setup -> Octane (via the REALLY GOOD Blender plugin).

We're using Blender because we love it and because the Octane plugin allows you to use Octane just as another rendering engine (for the most part).

Future process will be Revit -> OBJ exporter we're trying to create -> Blender -> Octane. But we have no idea how far we are from that. OBJ is an easy to understand format, and we're digging into the API now to get a better understanding of how to write the exporter.