Augi World - July/August 2008 - (Page 15) Media exposure Once you have created a rendered image, the options at the bottom of the rendering dialog come into play. You can adjust the Exposure with controls for Bright/Dark, Highlights, Mid Tones, Shadows, Color, and Saturation. Sounds like a hair treatment… “Can I get my tips frosted?” Seriously, these controls are more advanced than before. You can save the rendered image to a view in the Project Browser, and you can export directly from the rendering dialog. “Show the model” toggles with “Show the rendering” once you have an image in the view. Figure 4: Let there be lights! Revit has been a terrific one-stop application for creating, visualizing, and documenting building designs. tab lets you select the render basis for your material from the Render Appearance Library by clicking Replace. You do not edit the selected Render Appearance or save out to the library; this is a welcome simplification. Once you click OK in the Render Appearance Library dialog and return to the Render Appearance tab, you can change properties of the selected material render appearance within the project. The controls for various material render appearances are quite sophisticated. Concrete, for instance, has properties for Sealant (Epoxy or Acrylic?) and Weathering. Lucy in the sky The Background properties of the new rendering interface are much simpler than before, and this is where I have my only complaint about the changes for Revit 2009. You can add a haze value across the entire image, with no adjustment for the horizon line. You no longer manage the appearance of sky and clouds; rather, you simply select off a list. The options are fixed, and they do not include either color gradations or an image. You will see big changes inside the Materials dialog, which is a big part of accurate rendering. On the Graphics tab, you can have the Render Appearance (more on that very soon) set the Shading color. This corresponds to a previous control with slightly different language. Living in the material world The proof is in the picture Figure 6: The Render Appearance library. Figure 5: The sky’s the limit for background. Personally, I don’t mind no longer specifying sheet clouds or 3D clouds and their intensity. No option to create a color wash behind a rendering is a slight step down the ladder from previous capabilities. Not being able to place an image behind a rendering is a significant lack compared to what users had before. Granted that it’s been quite a programming effort to put Autodesk’s mentalray rendering engine inside Revit, but it can’t be that hard to add a background image option, and I hope this happens for next year’s release. Revit has been a terrific one-stop application for creating, visualizing, and documenting building designs. There is no reason to force designers into PhotoShop or another application simply to put a camera image in a rendering. J u l /A u g 2 0 0 8 The new designation for material render appearance is just that: Render Appearance. The Render Appearance You no longer specify a Section Box reference that will govern the physical limits of your rendering or tell the renderer to ignore the back of things in the view. You can turn on the Section Box for the rendered view and edit that so that the render engine will not work on remote objects and lights unnecessarily. Once you have made your settings and actually create a rendering, I think you will be pleased with the results. The mentalray renderer makes sharp images even at low quality settings, and works quickly. You can look at a bouncing rectangle rather than a sweeping line if you want to watch the process. Chris Fox is the Revit editor for AUGIWorld, and has written numerous articles on Revit Architecture, Revit Structure and Revit MEP. He has written Autodesk Official Training Courseware for Revit Architecture and Revit Structure and Introducing and Implementing Revit Architecture 2009, published by Autodesk Press. Chris recently moved from the US to Australia, and is leading training classes in Revit through corporate, university, and technical school contacts there. You can reach him at lcfox@archimagecad.com. 15 Figure 7: Material render properties are improved.
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