Rendering in Revit: Beginner to PRO Revit Tutorial

In this video, we're going to be talking about rendering in Revit. It's going to be one of those beginner to pro tutorials, which means that we're going to be starting from all of the basics and then build all the way up to the advanced settings and options. I'm going to be showing you how to render locally on your computer and also how to utilize cloud rendering. Let's go. Now, speaking of renderings, one of the main things that you can do to improve your renderings is have a large surroundings around your model. And that conveniently brings us to today's video sponsor, which is Placemaker. Placemaker is a Revit plugin that allows you to generate any site on Earth inside of Revit. And also there is a SketchUp version, too. It allows you to get data from different sources, and it actually turns this into Revit geometry. This means that we get high quality aerial images from different sources up to seven centimeters in resolution. We can load in terrain data and turn it into Revit topography. We can load in buildings, roads, paths, and railways. Even trees are available. And everything is built upon topography inside of Revit. I actually have a full video where I talk about Placemaker. If you want to try it out for yourself, I'm going to be including a link in the description of this video and then also up in the cards above, so you can test it out for yourself. So now, without any further ado, let's jump straight into Revit. And here we are in Revit, and I'm just going to be using this model as a reference. I actually have a video on how to create this, so you can check it out on my YouTube channel. Now, let's talk about cloud rendering versus rendering locally. So if I go here to the View tab, we have the Presentation panel. And the first option here is Render. And then we also have Cloud Rendering. So the main difference is when you're rendering on your machine or locally, this means that you can't really do anything else apart from while waiting for the render to be completed. That's a downside. However, the upside of that is you can actually set it up really quickly. So that means that if you just want to run a quick test or something like that, you can do it really quickly on your computer, and then you can move from there. So if you're just contesting out certain materials or something like that, it's really useful. And then once you're done with all of those tests, you can use cloud rendering for your final rendering, and then you can continue working on perhaps annotation or something like that while that rendering is being done on cloud. Now, when it comes to rendering in Revit LT, you only have cloud rendering in Revit LT. So in Revit LT, we can only use cloud rendering, and that's just something to keep in mind if you're using this version of Revit. Okay, so first, I'm just going to be showing you how to render locally. And before we go to the menu, I just want to show you one thing that I like to do previously, and that is to set the view to realistic display option. And the reason for this is here, you can see any obvious mistakes when it comes to materials. So, for example, if this foundation was made out of glass, I would see that here, and then I could make a change. And once we see we don't really have any obvious mistakes, then we can click on render or use the RR shortcut, and that's going to bring up the rendering menu. Now, the first option that we have here is going to be quality. So for quality, it goes from draft and then all the way up to best. We also have custom, and we have this edit button. So if I click on edit, it's going to actually open up the rendering quality settings. And here you can see the settings for each one. So for draft, that means simplified light and material accuracy. And for the render duration is set to by level. And here it's set to one. Then for medium, it's just the upper level here. For high, it's going to get advanced precise materials and shadows. And then for best, it's just going to get even more than that. And then finally, here you have custom. Now, when you set this to custom, you can actually set this up manually. And when it comes to rendering duration, you can actually set it to render by time, which is really cool. So if you just have two minutes, you can set it to two minutes, and you're going to get the best of what your computer can do in two minutes. And then we also have until satisfactory, which means basically you don't get end of your rendering. It's going to look like this. So you're just going to let it render. And then once you're happy with the way it looks, just click stop. You stop that rendering, and you're done with that version. Now, in this case, I'm actually just going to set this to perhaps draft for now, and then click OK. Let's bring it here to draft. Now, moving forward here, we have the output settings. So the output settings is just going to control the resolution or the size of your image. Now, this is really important. I see a lot of people making a mistake here where they set up their rendering, and it looks pixelated. And then they go back here to quality, and they set it to best or something like that, because they don't want to get those pixelated views. It's not an issue of quality. Quality is only going to perhaps refer to the shadows, how realistic they are, the reflections, the light, things like that. The resolution is the thing that's going to control how pixelated your image is. So for that, first, you actually want to exit out of this. You want to select the outer crop of your 3D view. Then you want to go here to size crop. And here you first want to see is the width and height of this set correctly. So if this is supposed to print at, I don't know, 200 millimeter width, well, this isn't going to work. So you would just set this to scale, and then you would say 200 and apply. And now this is going to be larger. Also, when you go back to the rendering dialog here, you can set it to screen, which is going to be used for well screens. If it's going to be something that's viewed online, perfectly fine. However, in most cases, when you print, you actually want to set this to printer. And then here you can see the width, and it's actually going to be about 1200 pixels. But that's only for 150 DPI. For anything that's going to look good, go with 300 or even 600 DPI. I prefer 300. It's the best of both worlds between having a large image and also a high resolution image. So it's not going to be too much in terms of size. However, it is going to get you a lot of pixels. So that's good. So anyways, this is what that means. Now, moving forward, we have the lighting. So for the scheme, basically, this means what you're trying to achieve with this. You may have some lights inside as I do over here. See, we have those ceiling lights. So is this going to be exterior sun only? Do you want sun and artificial, which means the sun plus the lights or exterior artificial only, so only the lights without the sun. So that would be a night rendering. And then we have the same thing for interior rendering as well. Then we have the sun setting. So that's the same dialogue as you would have here. It's just available here. So you can set it up however you like. Now, if you want this to be accurate in terms of, let's say, location. So this is at a specific location. Then you can say, okay, so at summer solstice. And here you have the date and time. It's going to look like that. And then for winter, it's going to look like that. So you can create, let's say, four renderings for four different times of the year. And then you can show that to your client just to see how the different renderings at different times would look in this case. Just because this is a simple test rendering. Let's just go with lighting and click. Okay. And then finally, here we have the artificial lights. So here you can turn on and off the lights. You can dim them by going with the value smaller than one. So like 0.5 or something like that. And you can turn them on and off if you want. Moving forward, we have the background. So here you have some sky options, depending on how many clouds you want to see. Then we have color. If you want to have just one color, perhaps you want that. I don't know. You can add an image. So you perhaps have a sky image or a background image of some sort. I don't like this just because the way that it integrates that image with the model usually doesn't look very nice. So I prefer the transparent option. So this will create a PNG image. So transparent background, you bring it into Photoshop or some other image processing software, and there you can add a nice background. You don't have to delete the background because it's not there anyways. Then we have the image. So here it says adjust exposure. Now, these settings, you can play around with them. I actually prefer not to touch them because unlike all of these settings here, the adjust exposure is something that you can actually play around with after the rendering is done. So you can complete the rendering, and then you can play around with these. So it doesn't really make sense to play around with them at this time. And then for the draft rendering, so that means kind of a test rendering, you can go like this, set it to draft, and then render and just see what Revit brings up. So I can just try that. And that would look like this. Or alternatively, I can say, okay, here I actually want to have perhaps very few clouds. Here it says the change has been made. And then instead of creating a new draft rendering, I just want to see when I set this to, let's say, high, I want to see how the reflections will look, because that's really what the high rendering settings does for me. So what I'll do is I'll do a region. So instead of rendering the full thing, I can just render like a small sliver of this image, something like this. And then I can say, okay, I only want to render this. So let's render. And then it's well, it's just going to render that. And then once it's done, I can see here, okay, the reflections, they look really nice. I see the tree here. The chain looks good. So I can then go. And here, if I go to display, it can say, show the model or show the rendering. See, I can toggle between those. Let's go back to show the model. I'm just going to turn off the region. And now it's time to render at this high quality. So let's hit render and see how long that takes. So in about five minutes, this is what they get. And as you can see, if I Zoom in, the quality is really high. So even if we print this at like 20, 30 centimeters width, I think it would look really, really good. Okay. So now for the exposure, I can go here to adjust exposure, and then I can make it brighter or darker, however I like. Same thing goes here with the highlights. So I can make those brighter. So just kind of the highlights of the image. Then we have the shadows. I usually like to create to turn those a bit lighter. Then we have the saturation. We can make it a bit more intense, for example. And then for the white point, I'm just going to make it a bit warmer. Yeah, perfect. So you can play around with these. You can reset them if you want, and then just click. Okay. Now for actual kind of saving of the image, you can either save it to project by clicking here. So then you can say, okay, so this is 3D view. Let's call it. I don't know. Just new rendering. Click. Okay. And now this is going to create a new tab here on the project browser called renderings see here. And then here we have this new rendering. So that's one option. The second is to save to your computer so you can save it as a JPEG or a PNG or bitmap file. So you can save it wherever you want. So let's save it here on desktop. I'm just going to leave the name as is and hit save. So that's going to save it externally outside of Revit. So that basically covers your rendering inside of Revit. Now let's talk about cloud rendering. So for cloud rendering, and if you just Zoom in and out, it's going to go back to the original for cloud rendering. You want to, of course, first set the rendering settings. Now, if you're working in Revit LD, you don't really have this render dialogue. So what you need to do is you need to just go to your 3D view. Go here to the view properties and find camera and find rendering settings here. And then here you can just set up the lighting and the background and so on. So once you set all of this up, then you would go here to cloud rendering. You click on render in cloud. RD is the shortcut. It's going to give you this menu. You click continue. Then we have to pick up some settings or set up some settings. So we can either render all 3D views or just check the ones we want to render. Then we go to the output type. So here let's go with still image render quality. Let's go with standard size. Let's go with large. And then for the exposure, I'm just going to leave it at advanced. You can check this if you want to get an email notification when it's done. I don't really want to. So I'm just going to click start rendering, and it's going to start rendering. And now that process is done in the background. As you can see, it's rendered online, and I can continue working. So I can say, okay, so I'm just going to go to my level one. And now because it's already rendering, I can continue. I don't know, annotating this project or something like that. Okay. So once the rendering is done, so as you can see, it's still loading here. But once it's done, it's going to be available here in the render gallery. So I'm just going to open that up, and let's wait for that rendering. And this is what's going on in the render gallery. As you can see, it's still rendering. However, we can already see the image, at least at this point. And what you'll notice is that these renderings here, they're going to look a little bit better than rendering in Revit. At least in my experience, you can tell me what you think or what experience you had in the past. And now it's done. Yeah. As you can see, it looks really, really nice. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. Now, here we do have some settings. So we have some post processing, and then we can play around again with the exposure value. We have some presets. So if we want to try Vivid, it's going to look like that and so on. So you can play around with these a little bit. I'm not going to bother too much. But Yeah, that's what we have. And then you can go here to download. You can download it as these file formats. So let's download this one as PNG. So I'm just going to. Yeah, it's downloading here on my computer. And there we go. So that's how you do rendering in cloud. Now, for cloud rendering, we actually have many different rendering types, which we can play around with. If this is something that you're interested in, please let me know in the comments because I am interested in these topics, and perhaps I will make a video on this. So anyways, if you want to get access to this Revit project file, you can find it on my Patreon page, which I'm going to include a link to up in the cards above and then also down in the description of this video. Thank you for watching, guys. Make sure to check out my website, BalkanArctic.com for more Revit courses. There I have over 120 hours of content, and I'm adding more each week. Make sure to subscribe for more videos. And also I've added a video over there that might interest you as well.