Preferred Render Engine / Workflow for Revit?

[Keith_Wilkinson]

Not a question that requires a specific answer - more a topic for discussion... 

We're currently looking at our render workflow with Revit - currently we're linking to Max and rendering there however there is some interest in Lumion 3D as well as VRay for Revit.

Rather than make a knee jerk response I'd like to start weighing this up systematically to see which renderer offers the best balance between things like ease of use, quality, speed, cost etc.  As an example I've looked briefly at Corona in Max but all the materials needs to be converted and ideally we would very much like to use the materials we've set up in Revit.  Corona does come with a conversion script but the result would need tweaking and we wouldn't want to have to do this every time.

So I'm just wondering what others are doing for this - what packages are you using and what are the pros and cons?

(if this isn't a permissible subject to discuss happy for this to be taken down, I can ask elsewhere if necessary).

[nathan.chapman]

For ease of use i would say lumion3D is a great tool.  My last firms Arch/designers thought it was the best tool in the world.  Its very friendly with Revit and Sketchup and what i liked about it is that eventually Revit model would have to be separated for rendering so this was a great transition.  Adding all those materials in the working Revit model just didn't make sense.  I really like the Revits rendering engine and think it produces some really nice images.  3Ds Max was used by some but is a piece of software that requires a deep understanding to get things to look good.  Produces some of the best images but also takes the longest.  Max was the most hardware intensive software we had in the company followed by Lumion3D then Revit.  So if you're looking at it in this perspective, Revit is a great option.  Just my thoughts.

[Keith_Wilkinson]

I've yet to see anything come out of Lumion that has any real quality to it.  Even the stuff on their website isn't great... 😞

[vinbarg]

hello keith, i am using revit with 3dmax/corona, workflow is great and also visuals are so good. If you need any help with project u ae working on , let me know. 🙂 

[Keith_Wilkinson]

I'm good thanks.

[Alfredo_Medina]

I can recommend Enscape. With Enscape, even I can do renderings now, something I had never liked to do. It works parallel to Revit, in its own window, and it renders without having to export (and lose association with) the Revit model.

[Keith_Wilkinson]

Yes, we have also invested in Enscape - we started with Revit Live but have found Enscape much faster and far more versatile - our users love it.