I get a lot of questions from users regarding rendering in Revit and Autodesk 3ds Max Design. Both products have the same renderer (mental ray 3.7), so people want to know, when should I render in Revit and when should I render in 3ds Max? Since it's the same renderer, why not only render in Revit?
Essentially, you should use mental ray Rendering in Revit while you are in the design process, to validate your work. To see if what you think you are designing is actually what you've created, the Revit rendering will do a good job of showing you the materials and lighting and give you a sense of the space.
However, when you are rendering for client presentation or municipal approval process, it's a good idea to move the file to 3ds Max Design and continue your renderings there. While the quality is identical between the two products, the rendering speed and available controls will lead you to 3ds Max everytime. 3ds Max clocks in at up to 10 times faster speeds when rendering the same files.
When mental ray starts a render it first goes through a translation process which turns the entire scene into a mental ray specific file. This is called the Geometry Cache in 3ds Max, and once you have calculated this, you can choose to reuse it, so that you don't have to recalculate it each time you render. After calculating the Geometry Cache, you can also calculate and reuse the Final Gather Map. Most important is that you can do this independently from the rendering. If you are working on a big scene with limited memory, this is a life-saver, and this is not available to Revit users, only 3DS Max will give you this option.
The other critical thing that Max provides over Revit is the ability to scale your render time by using more processors through network rendering. Revit doesn't support the concept of a render farm, 3DS Max does.You can cut your render time in half by using a second processor, the more computers that share the work of the rendering, the faster it goes. Use 10 computers and render in 1/10 of the time. And it doesn't cost anything extra, you can install 3ds Max free of charge on additional machines for renderfarm use. 3ds Max has a feature called Split Scanline, part of network rendering, which allows you to render a large resolution image in bits and pieces over many different computers. When its finished it automatically stitches the parts into a seamless single image. Revit doesn't have anything like this.
We recently did a rendering in Revit at the very best quality setting. It took over 4 days to get the rendering finished. Do you have this kind of time? I didn't think so. The same file on a single computer with 3ds Max renders in about 10 hours. If I use a render farm with 10 machines, I could render this in about an hour. Something to think about.
Featured Posts