• July 19

At first use Revit, then try…

3D Max… then V-ray or Mental Ray!

You might have seen Dan Jürgens and Zac Arato’s post on www.nzdan.com?

They recently discussed this topic – “Visualise Revit conceptual designs fast with 3ds Max, mental ray and V-Ray” at the Revit Technology Conference in Sydney.

Image: Dan Jurgens & Zac Arato as on www.nzdan.com

Zac Arato is a part of Atomic 3D, an Australian based visualisation firm; and Dan Jürgens from Bates Smart Architects.

Find more about them by reading this tutorial they’ve set up. It uses a real life project to demonstrate the use of Revit for concept designs and then the process of furthering your renders in 3D Max, using V-ray and Mental Ray.

I suppose the same principals could apply if you’re using Sketchup.

Link through to Dan’s blog post here and the pdf here.





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  1. Philip Nel August 12th

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    Hi there – I’m the 3d guy at Urban Edge Architects and have an issue with Revit to Maxdesign 2011 dwg exporting – My normal workflow is as follows:
    Model in Revit, assign random colours to different elements, export as a polymesh to dwg, open max (file link) and use the command “select by material” to select various elements and substitute the revit material with my own vray material..this worked beautifully in the 2010 versions

    Now (2011 versions) if I link to the exported dwg, I only see maybe 1 or 2 revit materials, the rest are mia..this means I can’t select the various elements according to materials, so there goes my workflow!
    I don’t use the fbx option, but as a last resort I also tried to export this way – no joy!
    Am a missing something obvious?


  2. Nic B August 12th

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    Hey Philip – We generally work with the exported polymesh file directly and go through a cleanup process. We are at the end of the process and the model is 99.9% completed so we take the opportunity to optimise and clean the model at this point (even remodel some of the geometry).

    If all else fails and there are missing textures co-ords etc, we use the FBX export rather as this is the new native export from Autodesk.

    Are you using the latest version of Revit as well? I know Max 2011 has issues with RPC’s.

    But give the Fbx a try (the files are stupidly large – but are pretty comprehensive) – I’ll ask Chris to chime in as well.


  3. Nic B August 12th

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    You could also ask the question on http://www.cgarchitect.com/forums <- they are wiser than me! :)


  4. Philip August 13th

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    Thanks Nic for the quick reply – Both max and revit are 2011 release – I installed the 2010-07-21 hotfix, so I’ll give it another try..RPC’s? what’s that?

    (hehehe..don’t use it..looks Sh*t..)


About Author

Nic B

I'm the 3D overlord at Burn. I handle the business and client side of our 3D company.