Discover how to perform a rendering of a model using Autodesk's rendering feature in Navisworks, culminating in a beautiful, fully lit 3D model. This process involves adjusting lighting, choosing rendering settings, and strategically managing the rendering process to achieve the best possible model.
Key Insights
- The rendering process in Navisworks involves utilizing Autodesk's rendering feature, which allows the user to specify the length of the rendering process. The longer the process, the more lighting calculations occur, resulting in a higher-quality rendering.
- The rendering settings offer varying degrees of quality to choose from, such as low, medium, or high. These settings refer to the amount of time allocated for the rendering, with options ranging from a "coffee break" (10-15 minutes) to an "overnight rendering" (12-24 hours).
- During the rendering process, adjustments can be made to improve the model's appearance. For example, adding new point lights or temporarily hiding elements to modify the scene. However, any changes require a restart of the rendering process, making it essential to save progress regularly.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video we'll be looking at how to actually run a rendering of the model that we've been working on, and we'll be using the BIM361-Complete model that's located in Lesson 4. Where we left off, we were adding some lighting to this model, and I've added some lights to the inside, and then I added a quick point light to the outside of my building, right about there, and that's allowing me to see a nice warm glow on the outside. We're going to use Autodesk's rendering feature.
So first of all, let's go to the ray trace menu, and we'll see that our Autodesk rendering settings will pop up. Ray tracing will allow us to specify how long we want to wait to have our rendering done. The longer we wait, of course, the more lighting calculations that it can do, and the better rendering we will end up with.
It's going to take a very, very long time if we use a full render setting, but we have some presets that we can use. Low, medium, and high, depending on the power of your computer, you'll want to use any one of these three. They give us some plain English names for some of the other renderings.
Coffee break, that's 10 to 15 minutes. Lunch break, half hour to an hour. Overnight rendering, which is 12 to 24 hours.
But I find that medium gets us a good preview of what we would be able to see if we were to leave this overnight. When you have that set, you'll want to make a larger scene and get to a place where you can see your model. If you use a larger scene, then you can export a larger rendering.
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And let's see how this turns out. So to render, you just hit the ray trace button, and then your scene will change to a different mode. You'll see that it'll start to process, and then it will flash with the first lighting calculation.
And then as we wait, it'll do continuous lighting calculations against the materials. And before too long, we should see what our final medium quality will be. You'll notice as your computer is rendering that you have a series of levels.
We've told it medium is 10 levels. So right now it's halfway through the first level. At this point, if you see any flaws that you'd like to fix, it's the perfect time to pause your model and to change any of those things.
What I'm seeing is that I really like this side of the building, but I would like to see more windows lit up. If I hit stop, it'll go back to my regular full render mode, and that'll give me some time to create some new point lights. And I want to place some right inside.
A little trick that I'm going to use is to select all of the windows from each level and temporarily hide them. That way when I create a light, I can just stay on the outside of the building and see how it's actually allowing me to place on the ceiling inside to create another point light down on the lower levels. And then once I'm happy with the way that that looks, or the way I think it's going to look, my windows, unhide them, and get back to a rendering position.
When I hit the ray trace button, you'll see that now it's going to go to five levels instead of 10. And you'll see that the rendering is going to be much faster. I just realized now that I did not turn my windows back on, but that's okay because the low quality rendering is not going to be the way that I want to view this final rendering.
So I'm going to select each one, and I'm going to stop the rendering so it doesn't do the calculations over again, and then move it back to medium quality and hit render. And I'm going to skip forward in time to the end of this rendering. And after about 12 minutes of rendering, I'm quite satisfied with the way that this looks.
If I were to leave it, it probably wouldn't change too much more. Now if you want to export the image that you've rendered, you can hit the image export button. And then in the lesson folder we can, we'll just say one, and then if we navigate in Explorer to that image, then we will see our rendered ray traced model.
At this point it can be taken into Photoshop, you can put a ground in it, and we can put some sky in it. And if you need to get back to edit any of your information, you'll have to hit stop. As soon as you hit stop though, you will have lost your rendered or your calculated lighting, so you'd have to start the process all over again to get it back.
So make sure that every time you hit pause, you'll save an image just in case you need it for the future. So make sure you save your model. That concludes this video.
I hope you enjoyed. I'll see you in the next one.