Note: A newer Revit Documentation was added Sep 12, 2008. You should read it for information about the latest version.
Please note before proceeding that AccuRender nXt for Revit is in an early “Alpha” phase of development. It should be used with caution. Backup any files that you care about since file corruption is a possibility. Please practice safe alpha testing.
This is a very early prototype, so don’t expect too much and try to be in a friendly mood when testing. On the other hand, you should be able to produce some modest but exciting renderings very quickly. The lighting and overall quality should be an obvious improvement over Revit 2008’s built-in renderer.
What we’re looking for here some basic technology validation. Your feedback will help us determine whether to press forward with this application. Developing plug-ins for Revit, while not particularly difficult, is currently a frustrating activity due to the many limitations of the Revit Software Development Kit (SDK). Some of the things we’ve already run into are outlined below.
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To run the renderer, select AccuRender->Control Panel form the menu, select a perspective view from the popdown list, and push Start. You decide when to Stop the rendering—it will continue refining the picture until you stop it. Try rendering a small to medium sized model first—before you throw something very large at it.
There is a Save button for saving images, as well as “tone operator” controls for Brightness, Burn and Saturation.
The Lighting and Material choices are extremely limited at the moment. Most of these limitations are mine and will be easy to remove by adding features. Some may be more difficult (e.g., I do not know if the Revit sun information is available to plug-ins.)
The Lighting menu item has two choices, Studio and Exterior. Studio, the default, lights with an invisible hdr file for the sky. The hdr file information is currently hard-coded, you cannot change it. Exterior uses a sun and visible analytical sky. The sun angle is also hard-coded—it does not respect the Revit sun settings and cannot, currently, be changed.
Materials are set by default to use any of the old AccuRender materials which you have assigned in Revit. If it can’t find an AR material, it will use the Revit base material color. Unchecking both of these will result in a gray “foamcore-like” model.
The resolution is currently hard-coded to ~300000 pixels.
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Limitations imposed by the Revit SDK
The view information that Revit provides for plug-ins is limited and barely workable. Here are some of the know issues:
- There is not enough information to render orthographic views. You must set up perspectives using the Camera tool. Unfortunately, once you pop into a perspective view, Revit will kindly gray out the AccuRender menu. Therefore, you must launch the Control Panel from a non-perspective view and set the view you wish to render from the popdown list in the Control Panel.
- The zoom information is not provided, you nXt can only render to the boundaries of the crop box.
- Some field of view information is not provided. Modifications made to the field of view or lens length of the camera using Dynamically Modify View (F8) will not be reflected in the nXt rendering. You can modify the field of view by shrinking or expanding the crop box using the grips provided.