White lines on 3d views in PDF or Image export?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I've noticed a strange graphics issue lately where any 3D view that is exported as an image or printed to PDF has several vertical white gaps (roughtly 1-2px wide) across the entire image. These appear in shaded and realistic views, and regardless of the quality output settings or image type. It also happens on all of our computers, regardless of graphics cards. While it does not happen on every image (seems to be more frequent in images with more geometry showing or a higher variety of materials), it is consistent on the images it does happen with.

This issue is making many of our 3d views virtually unsuable without annoyingly removing the lines one by one in Photoshop.

Attached is an example. Has anyone else seen this issue?

Thanks!

[JADAstudio]

I've seen something similar, perhaps. We occasionally get PDFs that look like they have been rendered in pieces and stiched together, only the pieces don't exactly line up. The offset is not always visible and is off by at most one pixel, sometimes less than one pixel (see attached). We don't use shaded views that often 😞 so it hasn't been worth troubleshooting.

[Anonymous]

Seems like the same issue. It seems to happen only when shadows or ambient shadows are enabled. Once those are disabled, the images comes out clean. We frequently use ambient shadows with hidden line views to help add depth without darkening the image, and the same is true. Shadows and ambient are the culprits so far as I can tell.

Sadly two of the key aspects to making Revit 3d views not so awful-looking.

Hope this helps anyone else with these issues!

[Anonymous]

First, to put your mind at ease, there is nothing wrong with your version of Revit or your computer or your eyes. As far as i can tell this is a property (side effect) of the PDF rendering engine that Revit uses. If you bring one of those PDFs into Illustrator and look into the layers panel you will see that the whole image is actually composed of a number of square tiles. What you are seeing on your screen are the borders of those tiles. Removing those lines in Photoshop is not the easiest workflow. You can however remove the frames surrounding the tiles in Illustrator with a lot less effort.

All of this is really annoying and unnecessary. I have submitted this to Autodesk as a bug but have not heard from them in a long time.

cheers,

-tomek

[bill_gilliss]

I've reported it as well. What a pain. It doesn't seem to matter which visual style or virtual PDF printer is used, either.

My best workaround for final presentations is to export the ambient-shadowed view to JPG (no problems there) and then insert and scale the JPG as needed on a sheet. If you keep the filename of the exported image the same as you update the model and re-export, you can then use Manage > Manage Images > Reload to update the sheet without having to re-insert and re-scale the images.

Otherwise, I live with the white lines for preliminary plots to be sure I'm keeping current as design proceeds.

[ToanDN]

Right click on the 3d view and choose save as image to project. It will be saved to a different view under Rendering category in the project browser tree. Place that view on sheet to print.

[bill_gilliss]

Ah. I'd missed that. Nice. (Select the viewport's name in Project Browser, not the viewport itself.)

One major drawback of this approach in production, however, is that it doesn't let you give a re-rendered view the same name as the original and thereby update the view and the sheet automatically. To keep using the same name, like "AERIAL VIEW FROM NORTHWEST," you first need to delete the old rendering from Project Browser and then save, place, and scale the new one. So, whether you export to JPG or save internally, either way you still need to remember to update all the images on your sheets before publishing, This can take a LOT of time on a large project.

Still needs to be fixed.

[DanGarnier]

Thank you @Anonymous! At least that helps me realize what is the problem. I set the transparency to 100 of the elements casting too many shadows and that helped get rid of the white lines... Now I just have to figure out how to cast artificial shadows. ha!

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much @ToanDN
This works perfectly!!

[stephenTNU44]

This is good, but defeats the purpose of active viewports. I guess they really haven't figured out a way to seamlessly stich together these panels in a post production process before the PDF is created? Seems like something AI would be good for...