Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Revit's Original Rendering Engine, examples and UI

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, My Ancient Renderings from the 90's, the original rendering engine built into Revit was the same one I used in the 90's... called Accurender. Comparing the Revit renderings to the ones in yesterday's post, you can see they are basically the same quality.

All the images in this post are from the very first Revit book I wrote, which has a 2003 copyright. I started the manuscript using Revit 4.5 and then updated before being printed for Revit 5.0. For a little more on this, read Carol Bartz and Phil Bernstein Signed my First Revit Book.



Additionally...

Aaron Maller even got in the game yesterday and shared some of his "terrible" renderings:)


Now for a little trip down the 'Revit UI' memory lane... The command to start a rendering is shown here; Raytrace... Before the Ribbon, the tools where stacked like this on the side of the screen.


A couple of interesting warnings we really don't have to worry about any more... thanks to modern apps like Enscape.



Notice the various rendering settings. I really liked (seriously) the Plant Season option, which changed the synthetically-generated trees.


This dialog is similar to the current "Default City List"option in Revit 2019 (see below).


Here is today's version (Revit 2019)... did you know this was an option? I did, of course, but I never use it.





We still have this functionality with only a few tweaks, as shown below.


Revit 2019 version...


Check out this awesome materials library...


And the material editor...



The Type Selector was originally on the Options Bar, not in the Properties Palette... and we still have the same sample RPC content:)


Back then, the Instance Properties (aka Properties Palette) could not remain open... when opened, it had to be closed before doing any additional work in the model. It could not be docked and left open. Also, notice there was a sneak peak at the Type Properties, but you still had to click the Edit / New (aka Edit Type) dialog to access that info.


Too much fun...

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