in house Arch Viz Artist support group

[Devin Johnston]

7 hours ago, Tom Bussey said:

No one using Revit Links in max then? Feel like it works pretty well if slow. VG and filters in Revit to remove all the crap before import. 

I use the Max file linking to Revit all the time and for the most part it works like a dream, you need to make sure your material assignments are 100% in Revit or you will have lots of problems in Max.  File linking is the only way to go and it's worth spending some time to figure out a workflow because it will save you so much time in the end.   

[Francisco Penaloza]

in my experience, Yes file linking works as intended between 3D Max and REVIT. Needless to say sometimes I have more successes exporting to Lumion than opening the same REVIT model inside 3D Max.

But that a side, I think all our workflows and projects are different, and my main point of  no believing in BIM-topia as Autodesk talk about is that many architects or designers uses REVIT not with the intent to do nice images. For them is a tool to do many other things, so they don't need to careful in modeling some objects or areas of the buildings, other part can be solved with a line here and there, and materials, that can be ignored.  That combined with a separated structural engineering company linked model and some electrical consultant, plus topo just because, and maybe landscaping person. You end up with a Giga monster that it just can't works with 3D Max live link workflow. unless of course the final quality of your render won't be better than what you could create inside REVIT.

As mentioned one of the solution is up to you to learn REVIT and prep the model before you export or link to 3Ds Max, but that is not the answer to all the problems. At the end of the day the answer is just manual labor that, its been getting better or less painful with the years but it is always a struggle because the goal of many people working on the same model is very different from each other.  Of course YMWV depending of type of project you do.

[Francisco Penaloza]

BTW this is the type of conversation I miss in this forum guys.

Thanks for your input! Cheers.

[Devin Johnston]

It really comes down to the relationship between the people modeling and the Viz team, in some companies there is a real team environment where everyone is working together to make the project successful.  In that kind of environment the modeling people will be motivated to go out of their way to make sure the Viz people get what the need, this is the way it should be.  In other companies where the people modeling are separate and apart from the Viz people there is no since of teamwork and your lucky to get a model at all much less one that's been created with visualization in mind.  This mentality truly comes from the top down and good luck trying to convince your coworkers that they need to step it up if management doesn't agree.

[Jose Negrete]

I had been exporting Revit models to .FBX with the twinmotion plugin until recently as it seems that the newer version of that plugin exports only twinmotion format now. The benefit for me was the materials were converted to standard in the .FBX using that plugin. I've tried linking Revit to 3DS Max years ago and it worked but I would end up breaking the link at some point anyway so I stopped using it.

+1 to Francisco's suggestion to learn Revit so you may do some edits there before exporting out. Sometimes it's convenient to do model edits there or even filter things out before exporting/linking. 

[Scott Schroeder]

Devin is 100% correct in that if whoever is controlling the BIM teams in the studio, if their main focus is creating documents in Revit then you probably won't get decent models to work from. In some ironic way though, Enscape has increased our quality of models ten-fold as more and more design teams are at least walking around their files almost on a daily basis.

You can now directly import Revit into Max rather than link. You get quite a few more options as well including not only to combine by category or family, but to take it further to combine by category/family and material to get even cleaner selections if materials have been applied. The optimize tools also do a pretty good job if getting you a bit cleaner geometry on import. I've pretty much moved over from linking to this workflow.

[Francisco Penaloza]

How this link option deal with REVIT files stored in Autodesk Cloud? Does this link load XRef files??

I remember trying this link on version 2019 and it always crashed 3DMax when the file was on the clouds and it didn't imported structural because they were Xref files.

I am running now 3D Max 2021 so far but I haven't tried his link method, since all our REVIT files now are in Autodesk cloud

 

[Tom Bussey]

No idea about Cloud stuff, but XRefs in Revit (Revit Links to give them their official moniker?) Work fine, if it's hidden in VG in Revit, and doesn't show in the 3D view, then it won't import. You still have to be judicious about what you import though.

Do cloud files still make a local copy on your hard drive? You could link that, and then use the save over option next time you open an updated model. Would mean opening each new version in Revit first, but that's probably not bad practice just incase someone's added a new link that's now visible in your export view.

[Scott Schroeder]

Not sure about the link option, but the import Revit option sort of works with BIM360 files. Because the BIM360 file is stored in your local collaboration cache, when importing it can't find any linked files from the original Revit. This is partly due to the file being stored in the collaboration cache as mentioned and links can't be found because it is not looking in the right directory.

To get around this, if you actually download the Revit file from the BIM360 documentation area, then you'll be able to import and find the proper links. 

[Francisco Penaloza]

13 minutes ago, VelvetElvis said:

Not sure about the link option, but the import Revit option sort of works with BIM360 files. Because the BIM360 file is stored in your local collaboration cache, when importing it can't find any linked files from the original Revit. This is partly due to the file being stored in the collaboration cache as mentioned and links can't be found because it is not looking in the right directory.

To get around this, if you actually download the Revit file from the BIM360 documentation area, then you'll be able to import and find the proper links. 

Thanks, that is what I thought I should do.

[Tim Holmes]

Hi Guys:

IM in a little different situation -- I am trying to find a spot as a visualizer -- I work in blender -- and mostly do homes, I'd really like to work remote (Im stuck home with covid this week) but if I could find a local studio looking for a visualizer, I'd be open to that as well -- 

I replied to this thread mostly b/c I could use a few friends to talk to (no, I wont bug guys to help me get a job) 

Tim

West Rim Digital Media

[Karin Skaug]

This is my experience as an in-house visualizer. I have been working as a visualizer in Norway for 16 years and things have been changing a lot. The first years, I was doing "magic" and everybody was amazed to see any kind of 3d- images of their project. Then Revit came along and people realised it actually wasn't magic and started making their own illustrations, leaving the complicated stuff to me.  I switched my workflow from FormZ to 3dsmax/V-Ray to keep ahead of the rest. Then Enscape came along and it seemed just plain stupid not to use it. I switched my workflow to Sketchup/Enscape and so far everyone is happy with things as they evolve. Now everyone here is surrounded by magic every day.
The single fact that you actually see what you do is enough for me to never go back to any offline render.

SketchUp does not have... a lot of things, but most of the time I never used the advanced stuff anyway. Enscape does also not have a lot of things, but in the beginning, when I compared, I was not able to get better renderings out of V-ray that I did out of Enscape. My work isn't at the high end of high end, it's just as good as it can get within the constraints we have. We normally can't charge more than two days work per image in my region.
Competition work is different, but we don't do a lot of them anymore.  People won't work for free anymore, so it gets too expensive.
Covid hasn't really impacted any of our projects, so it's mostly  business as usual, ...now in realtime. (The exception beeing VR - I haven't touched the VR goggles since the Covid outbreak)

Well, that was my 2p... :-)