Thursday, September 21, 2017

Revit Light Fixture Tips for Rendering

Yesterday I did a webinar for ArchVision which focused on lighting and materials in Revit Renderings and also touched on the third-party add-in for Revit, Enscape.

Here is a link to both rendering webinars hosted by ArchVision:


Below are a few points I touched on in that presentation...


Hardware and RFO Revit BenchmarkIn this presentation, I used an NVIDIA Quadro P6000 I have been testing. Stay tuned for more on this! At the beginning and in the Q&A section, we talked about the new RevitForum.Org Revit Bencmark test. Read more about that here: RFO Benchmark; Revit and Hardware Speed Test.

New RPC Content
Although I was told this did not need to be a sales pitch for RPC or ArchVision products, I use their subscription-based entourage all the time. So I am happy to share cool stuff. Everything in the next three images, except the building elements, are RPC content. The place settings, Coke and condiments are part of a new, soon to be released, group of "restaurant" RPC content!





Initial Color
        – Not defined in IES file.
        – Mainly affects rendering, not lighting calculations.
        – This color is based on the lamp itself


Below, you can see a few examples of how the light temperature affects the scene. The last iamge in this group is from Enscape. It does not appear to respond to changes in color temperature. I need to look into this more... BTW, the default setting in a new Revit family is close the a Halogen lamp, which is not good - be sure to change that (see third image below).

Color Filter
        – Not defined in IES file.
        – Mainly affects rendering, not lighting calculations.
        – This color is based on an added lens or gel (not the lamp)


Initial Intensity
        – Revit does not set this properly based on selected IES file
        – ElumTools sets this based on IES file
        – Incorrect setting affects renderings


The images below are from a light fixture test project. This is a good way to see how a light works in isolation. It can be difficult to know if a light family is working properly in a scene when there are other artificial light sources and even daylight.
Download the light-box test project: click here to download
The first image highlights a problem I wrote about recently; click here for that post. The second image shows a proper rendering when the Advanced Lighting and Materials are set in Revit. The third image shows the Initial Intensity is the full amount of light from a single fixture; this recessed light was changes to 50'-0" long (it was 8'-0") long. The last image shows two 4'-0" fixtures, which is what would be installed in reality.



Here is a link to the stereo panorama I created using the Autodesk A360 Cloud Rendering engine: Light Box Test Project Stereo Panorama. It is interesting, that in these isolated test, the cloud results have the best results in my opinion.


Finally, here is a link to a post, highlighting some of the things I covered in the previous webinar; Over 450 of My Closest Friends; ArchVision Webinar a Success!

I hope you enjoy(ed) the webinar!