V-Ray for Revit QuickStart Guides - Introduction and Materials

 Introduction

In this QuickStart tutorial we are going to look at the basic functionality of V-Ray for Revit, as well as going through the process of setting up and rendering a scene.

Tutorial Steps

1) Open basic sample scene
Usually located in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\(Revit Version)\Samples

2) Open the V-ray for Revit toolbar on the Ribbon





3) Set up draft options for rendering
Let’s render the living room view. First we need to set it up to do a quick draft rendering. To do this, let’s change the Current View to “Living Room”, set the Quality to “Draft”, set the Resolution to Crop Box to 96 DPI, leave the Artificial Lights off, leave the Environment to V-Ray Sun and the Exposure Value to 14.






4) Start an RT rendering by clicking on Render V-Ray RT
V-Ray RT is now running. Since RT is the real time ray tracing mode, certain settings can be modified while the render is going which will update in the rendering without having to start over.



5) Making adjustments to your RT Render
Let’s adjust the date and time to get a little more light in the scene. V-Ray for Revit takes the sun location from the location of the sun from the camera. The easiest way to change this is by going to the camera’s Render Settings. Then if you select the button next to Sun Settings, the Sun Settings dialogue appears.





You can now adjust the location, date, and time; and when changes are applied, they are updated in the rendering. Go ahead and leave the location in Boston and change the date to 12/21/10 and the time to 1:00 PM. Close the Sun Settings and Render Settings dialogues.


Next, let’s adjust the exposure a little. Make sure you are not in a camera view, and select the Exposure button to adjust the exposure for the current view.

Any changes you make to the exposure will be immediately reflect the ongoing RT rendering. 13 is a good setting to use without going too bright.




Now that we have the lighting and exposure where we want, let’s move on to the following render. Stop the RT rendering by clicking on the red stop sign in the top right corner of the window. Close the V-RayRender Finished dialogue. This dialogue is used to save a completed rendering, but since this was just a draft, we do not need to save it.

6) Preparing the Final Render
The only thing we have left to do is set up the quality and resolution to better reflect a final rendering. For this example, let’s set the quality to High and change the resolution to the 150 DPI setting.




Now to render the final image, use the Render with V-Ray button which uses the standard production renderer. While you can achieve final results using the RT renderer, it typically can take much longer to have a fully cleaned up image.

By default, the standard renderer will go through two pre-passes before going through the final pass. The first is the light cache pass, which progressively fills points in the entire image.



The second is the irradiance map, where buckets will bounce around the image filling it in one rectangle at a time. The final render pass for High quality uses a progressive pass. This allows the user to stop the rendering early at any point in a time crunch. Otherwise, you can let it stop itself once it reaches a point it deems to be complete.




As soon as you finish the rendering, you can fine tune your image in the Show Corrections Control panel by click it's button in the bottom left corner of the frame buffer.  This give you various post processing tools at your disposal such as the Exposure, White Balance, Hue/Saturation, etc.