Thursday, June 21, 2018

A Quick Look at Revit 2019 Advanced Materials

Revit 2019 supports new PBR shaders, refereed to as Advanced Materials. There are a few dozen created as "formal materials" in the provided materials library, which means there is identity data, graphics data (i.e. shaded color and fill patterns) and an appearance asset. The latter being the main ingredient for a material to be considered "advanced". For fun, the image below contains all of them. There are several other material assets created as well, but not shown in this post.

In this post I highlight a few of these new materials, mainly using Enscape.


Before getting into whats cool about the advanced materials, I want to share a comparison between rendering within Revit and using Enscape.
The image above is from Enscape and took about 2 minutes to save to a file. The image below is from Revit's render engine, which took about 2 hours. The Revit image has a slightly higher resolution, as Ensacpe is limited to a maximum of 8192 x 8192. The Revit PNG is 70MB and Enscape PNG is 40MB.


I am sure there are many things that contribute to the time and quality differences, but one of them has to do with the resources the two programs use. Enscape mainly leverages the GPU (NVIDIA) on the graphics card as shown in the next iamge. Also, notice the GPU memory is nearly 8GB, which may be due to the advanced materials or that I had previously used Revit rendering (I have not done any extra testing on this).


Revit, on the other hand, uses the CPU (Intel) for processing. It does use all the cores at 100% as shown in the next image, but the GPU is barely touched.


Here is the same two images above, zoomed in on one material. Enscape on the left and Revit on the right. They are booth fairly close, but one took 2 minutes and  the other 2 hours!


FYI: The rest of the images are from Enscape (click to enlarge).

Here is that same concrete sidewalk material with a little more context. It is a very nice material indeed!


The next two are a beautiful tile material... watch for this material in an upcoming Enscape blog post;)



I love this wood flooring material as well... note that all the furniture is also using the new advanced Revit 2019 materials.




Here is a video where I randomly wonder around the sample project we created to review these new materials:) This is a screen capture navigation Enscape in real-time:)




For BIM Chapters updates, follow @DanStine_MN on Twitter