Distributed Rendering

[Anonymous]

Reviving this age old topic:

Is it possible to render still images in Revit on multiple pc's?  I have multiple office licenses, and when people are out, I would like to utilize those licenses to speed up individual renderings.

Note, NOT talking about a plugin or third party software, or the cloud.  Not talking about animations or multiple renders.

The reason for doing this:

1. Time and available computing power resources that are being wasted in the office.

2. Revit renders your materials completely differently in the cloud, which makes tweaking your renderings extremely difficult.

3. Uploading to the cloud takes time and is an unknown variable based on how many people are rendering around the world on Autodesks Servers.

4. Everytime I do a high end render with credits on the cloud it costs me my daily latte. so it's doubly wasteful. (as if you didn't already pay an insane subscription fee).

[barthbradley]

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@Anonymouswrote:

Reviving this age old topic:

Is it possible to render still images in Revit on multiple pc's?  I have multiple office licenses, and when people are out, I would like to utilize those licenses to speed up individual renderings.

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What's the issue is then?  Sounds like this is a viable solution for you.  

[Anonymous]

My problem is I'm no IT guy.  Question was is that possible?

I've heard of distributed rendering - but thought you have to have a separate software to link all the PCs and actually do the distributing and retrieval of the information from a single render.

I guess I'm looking for advice from anyone who has done this before.

[barthbradley]

Sorry. I missed the "Distributed Rendering" part. Read your body only. Actually, it's a great question.  I'll stick around. May learn something. 

[Viveka_CD · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous

If you are looking to render views - still images you can do so by rendering each view in a different machine/ user ID and track it/ stitch it together from a common office folder or do a jpeg to pdf conversion and bind the pdfs

Is that what you are trying to achieve?

Regards,

[loboarch · Accepted solution]

Revit has no way to do distributed rendering into a local "render farm". The cloud rending solution that you already mentioned is the closest thing.

I suppose there could potentially be a 3rd party add on that might do that, but I strongly suspect this is not the case. I really have never heard of render farming out of Revit even before rendering on the cloud was a "thing".

If you have 3ds MAX installed on the machinces you are not using you could setup a render farm using Backburner. This assumes you have a subscription to AEC collection and not just Revit (or seperate subscriptions to 3ds MAX. This might also fall into the 3rd Party bucket, but you can pretty easily get a Revit model to 3ds MAX for rendering. Backburner can NOT be used with Revit.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-s...  

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff,

It's been awhile, but I used to bother you all the time with the Revit Feedback link back in 2010 - 2014 or so.

You've got it exactly:  I want to use the processing power of multiple PCs to process images quickly.  The beauty of the material appearance and lighting settings is that they are so fluid and simple to use now it allows near realtime tweaking of renderings - it makes no sense to shoot all that information out onto to the cloud or into another software such as 3DS and have it reinterpret all of your material properties.  I've used kerkythea, vray, 3DS, and am working on Unreal Engine currently.  All of them are extremely complex rendering softwares for video games and CGI movies, not to mention the disadvantage of having to export from revit and reapply all your lighting and materials.

Revit could end up being the simplest to use renderer out there, if only they actually let people render with it instead of handcuffing the software just to try to make a buck or two.

Who can we talk to in order to make this happen.

[loboarch]

Well to get to 3ds MAX from Revit you do not need to export, reapply material, redo lighting.  All of that should come right over.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2019/ENU/3DSMa...

So the use of 3ds MAX is pretty easy.

I did think about how you might do distributed rendering in Revit, you could create duplicates of the view you wanted to render and then adjust the crop to "section off" parts of the view. Then open the file on multiple machines and open the duplicated views that are looking at different parts of the sectioned view, and then render. The you would have to stitch them all back together with photo editing software. Probably more trouble that it is worth, but it could be done this way, it is just horribly manual.

As for who you need to talk to to make distributed rendering in Revit possible. Take a look at the idea station. You could suggest it there.  That goes directly to Product Managers and the development team.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/idb-p/302