Just a quick post. Last week we had our monthly local Revit user group meeting and the discussion came up about 64-bit PCs.
I won’t go into the crazy geeky technical aspects of 32 vs 64, but the question was whether or not it was worth the investment using Revit on a 64-bit machine.
Unquestionably, yes.
If you are using Revit to do residential work, or something under, say 5,000 sf (I just pulled that number out of my… um… void) then you probably won’t see any gain from the different architecture. With the size of projects we are working on (medium to big) my users who were lucky enough to be in the 64-bit pilot project group would cause me bodily harm if I took their machines away from them.
Less waiting and fewer hiccups with workshared models is the key. The group with the 64-bit PCs reported zero out of memory type issues when trying to save to central or other memory intensive processes. The poor 32-bit users… well, we had to gently nudge Revit to save sometimes.
I don’t have hard numbers about am0unt of time saved, but frankly I think that’s not important. The users felt better about it and a happier model maker is a more productive model maker.
We don’t do much rendering, but doing our renderings on the 64-bit PCs is insanely faster than the others. Not a huge selling point for us, but it might be for you.
Any new workstations we buy are 64-bit. Now we just have to get out of this recession so I can buy some more workstations…
Saw this at Autodesk University two years ago at their opening demo… I’m sorry, I meant “revival”. It has recently popped up on Autodesk Labs, and I hope hope hope that it doesn’t die a slow Labs death and never really see the light of day.
Project Newport (which to those of us living near Philip Morris sounds like a top secret cigarette attack) is being touted as a game engine for designers. Which frankly, would be awesome.
No, I don’t want to make myself a root beer float and pull out the lime chips and sit on my couch in the middle of the night and shoot zombies in one of our designs. Or do I?
Being able to leverage modern “gaming” processing hooks on video cards for real time visualization type rendering would be amazing and such a boon. Right now, if we want real time 3d viewing of our Revit model, it’s in Shading With Edges and looks like a cartoon. If we want some nice materials on there, it’s wait 5 to 30 minutes for this image to render.
And if nothing else, if this works like it’s touted I might help me kill Sketchup in my firm. That’s too harsh. Not kill. But significantly maim.
Hopefully, Newport will happen and it will bridge these two. I’m not expecting photo realistic real time rendering, but if I can see my building and it looks as good as a modern video game on my PC, that would go SO far to get our design intent to owners.
And if I can export it and navigate through it on an XBox360… how cool would that be? I’m just saying…
So I thought I would take a stab at the rendering side of things for an easy Sunday morning. It’s Super Bowl day and I am an idiot, so I give you…
THE SUPER BOWL
Where are the chips?
The materials dialog has gotten an upgrade from 2008, and it is using the same back-end as Max now. So if you are familiar with Max, it should be a piece of cake. I am not familiar with Max, beyond a courteous “hello” to each other as we pass in the hall.
Modeling the bowl was easy. Since this was a quick test, I just made a generic model in-place family. A simple revolve of a hand sketched shape, and the bowl was done.
Then it was onto the material. I found a nice cheap looking white plastic and used that as the base. I started a new material based on the plastic, and modified the RENDER APPEARANCE of the new material.
I added the IMAGE FILE of my recently downloaded logo (thanks, Google Images!) Started to look OK. But it needed some depth.
I then took the original file into Photoshop and took a stab at making a bump map. A bump map is imply a black and white graphic that will add “depth” to the rendered material. Black means low and white means high. Grays are the in betweens.
I added this to the FINISH BUMP of the material, noting that there is also a BUMP PATTERN listed below it, with the same potential settings. The help file was a little vague on what the differences were, so that is something to add to the research list.
I applied that material to my bowl and did a render.
Something was clearly wrong. There is no ways I would have eaten my Saturday morning cartoon cereal out of a bowl with upside-down S logos. Revit was applying the material in one quick swipe over the entire bowl, starting at the outside and “draping” it over the whole thing. I had upside-down “S’es”. Or, “S’s”. Um… The “S” was upside-down.
Luckily, the materials dialog box allows for rotation. Obviously, if I were to simply rotate the material, then the outside would be upside-down, and that would be wrong as well. I created another material and rotated the IMAGE FILE and FINISH BUMP. I cheated a little and opened the in-place family and simply did a paint bucket of the material on the inside face of the bowl (the rest had been applied by and instance parameter).
The whole process took about 15 minutes. I seriously think that it took me longer to write this post.
I’ve always like the render engine in Revit ’09. It comes across with very nice results without much tweakage. I definitely would put some more TLC into this thing if it were going to go in front of a client (we don’t have that many clients requesting comic book inspired table settings), but it’s nice to know that the basic steps for creating and modifying materials are not that difficult. We have been trying to make sure all our default template materials have the corret rendering information assigned to them. That way, the designers can click a few buttons and get a very reasonable rendering to make design decisions with.
I’ve always said that there is a voodoo artistry needed for an excellentrendering, and that is still completely true; lighting, materials, camera angles… these all need to be massaged and then massaged again until the final product. But it’s nice to know that Revit makes it very easy for a good rendering to be done without much work
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