Interscale Content Hub – High-quality renders are useful for client presentations, marketing materials and helping you make design decisions. But, how to render in Revit?
In the competitive Australian AEC market, having the ability to produce stunning visuals can put your firm on the map.
What’s more, as the industry moves towards digital workflows, rendering is becoming a key tool for sharing ideas and communicating across different project teams.
With all that in mind, let’s talk about how to render in Revit.
Revit Rendering Settings
Render Setup Dialog
The Render Setup Dialog in Revit is where you get started on creating a rendered image.
This setup dialog is located on the View tab. It allows you to set up important things like lighting, resolution, and quality.
Lighting is one of the most basic but important things to get right when you’re rendering. So, Revit gives you the option of using natural sunlight or artificial lights.
You’ll need to tweak both light settings depending on the time of day and your location.
If you’re using Revit in Australia, it’s a good idea to set the correct geographic location so you can get accurate solar studies and realistic sunlight simulations.
By putting in the location, you can make sure your renderings show shadows and lighting based on what’s really going on at the site.
It’s also important to get the resolution and quality settings right. The higher the resolution, the clearer the image, but it also takes more time and computing power.
And do not forget to start with a draft quality setting so you can test and adjust your render settings.
As you get the settings just right, you can increase the resolution to get more detailed and higher-quality images.
As a starting point, you might want to take a look at “What is Autodesk Revit Used for? Here’s How Revit Elevate Your Projects.”
Camera Settings
The camera settings in Revit are what decide the perspective and framing of your rendered image.
Changing things like the field of view (FOV), depth of field and focal length can help you capture your design in the way you want.
A wider FOV can capture more of the scene, but it might distort things a bit, so it’s important to find a balance that covers what you need without affecting the quality of the image.
Another key setting is depth of field, which controls the focus range of your image.
You can use a shallow depth of field to highlight specific elements by blurring the background, which is great for emphasising detailed design aspects.
This setting can help you create a more artistic and focused render, drawing attention to the key areas of your project.
Render Regions
This feature is ideal for testing settings on a small section of your model before committing to a full render.
You can use the region tool to draw a boundary around the area you want to render.
This approach is great for saving time and computing resources, especially during the initial setup and testing phases.
For instance, if you’re working on a big architectural project, you might want to render a particular room or façade to get the materials and lighting just right without having to render the whole model.
Once you’re happy with the settings in the selected region, you can apply them to the full model for a complete render.
For your other reference, kindly read “How to Update Revit Without a Headache? Let’s Fast Forward to 2024!“
Advanced Rendering Techniques in Revit
Advanced rendering techniques can help you create images with a lot more realism and impact.
These techniques include things like material customisation, artificial lighting and cloud rendering.
One of the best ways to make your renders in Revit look more realistic is to customise the materials.
The material editor in Revit lets you tweak things like texture, reflectivity, and transparency.
For example, high-quality textures can turn a simple wall into a detailed and realistic surface that looks like real-world materials.
To give you an idea of what I mean, think about a project where you’re rendering a modern office building.
If you tweak the glass materials to make them reflect and refract light in the right way, you can get a realistic look to show off the building’s design features.
Yes, Revit has different types of light sources, like spotlights, ambient lights, and task lights, which you can adjust in terms of brightness and colour.
The right lighting setup can also give your rendered images a great mood and atmosphere.
As an example, in a residential interior render, using warm-toned ambient lights can create a cosy and inviting atmosphere.
Then there’s cloud rendering, which is a pretty powerful feature offered by Autodesk. This is especially useful for complex projects where you need to use a lot of processing power.
This cloud rendering lets you use cloud-based processors to create high-quality images without overloading your local machine.
If you need more references, we suggest going straight to the source. So, you can take a look at the tutorial on creating render images and the one on rendering views from Autodesk.
Post-Processing Rendered Images
Once your images have been rendered, you can use post-processing to make them even better.
This is where you can make any final adjustments to things like exposure, contrast and colour balance to get the best results.
Revit has tools you can use to tweak the exposure settings, which can help to brighten up your renders and make the details stand out.
You can tweak these settings after the first render to get really precise control over lighting and shadows.
If you want to get a bit more advanced with post-processing, you can use external software like Adobe Photoshop.
You can export your rendered image from Revit and then add in some extra touches like sharpening, colour correction and effects.
This can really improve the quality of your final images, making them look more professional and impactful.
Another great feature of Revit is TwinMotion. If you want to get the full overview, you can check out this video.
What is the Revit Management Support System?
As an Autodesk Gold Partner in the Australian AEC industry, we know Revit inside out and we can help you maximise its potential. How?
So, we’ve put together a range of services to help your firms get Revit up and running smoothly and make sure you get the value you’re looking for.
Our BIM management services are all about finding the right solution for you, whether you’re just starting with Revit or looking to make your existing workflows even better.
We know we’ve got a lot to offer. And it’s understandable if you find it a little confusing.
So we’d really appreciate it if you could take a look at what we do for our clients and see for yourself.
By all means, feel free to browse our Interscale BIM Management Support Service page.
Of course, we’d also be happy to run through a few more tweaks with you if you need to make a few more changes.
How about we grab a coffee and have a meeting sometime soon? We’re here for you 24/7, whenever you need us.
In Closing
Get to grips with the settings, try out some advanced methods and polish your images after rendering to get results that look realistic.
These skills will really help you show off your work to clients and stakeholders.
At the end of the day, learning how to render in Revit is a great asset for any project in this competitive market.
