Revit Building 8 is HERE!

Autodesk Revit Building 8 is now officially here!!! The download version is now available!

Revit 8 and The Freedom Tower Get Press

Building Design & Construction Magazine has a great article featuring Revit and the Freedom Tower this month! Thanks to Mike Jarosz of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for posting the link on AUGI

Computer-Aided Green Design

Jim Gleeson has authored a great article on the use of Revit in the context of "Green Architecture"



http://www.architectureweek.com/2005/0413/tools_1-1.html

Viz 2006 is now shipping!

Looks like Viz 2006 is now shipping to subscription customers!

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050419/sftu087.html?.v=7

Revit OpEd Hires new "reporter"

Good for a chuckle or two.....

OpEd

Light it up!

Have you ever rendered a night scene with revit and wished the lights would "glow", or rendered an interior scene and wished to "soften" the light in the space? Unfortunately it is not really possible to get volumetric effects like this with Revit's implementation of accurender. But all is not lost, you can easily fake this effect in the photo manipulation software of your choice!

Here is revit rendering I did a few years ago, it looks OK, but it would be great if we could give it some “life”.

Adding a glow to the lights and lit windows helps a lot.

Better right? It lends some warmth to the image. Now lets see how to do it. Please note that I am using Photoshop 6 for this tutorial but this should work in almost any version of Photoshop, paint shop pro, or possibly Photoshop elements. As long as your software supports transfer modes this should work.

Step 1: Create the glow layer.
Start with you raw rendered image, duplicate the “background” layer and name it “Glow”.


Step 2: Adjust the levels of the glow layer.
With the glow layer selected, go up to the pull down menus and select Image Adjust Levels or simply press “crtl + L” Now comes the subjective part, adjust the sliders until your image pretty much only shows the secular highlights, by that I mean only the brightest parts (ie the lights)

Here is what my level settings were:


And here is what the image looks like:


Not very nice right, but just wait.

Step 3: Blur to taste.
Next apply a gaussian blur to the glow layer. Do this by selecting Filter Blur Guassian Blur… from the pull down menu. Adjust the radius to you liking, personally I typically use a blur radius of 4 pixels.

Ok here is what the image looks like now, still not much. We’ll fix that in the last step.


Step 4: Set the glow layers transfer mode to Screen.
I won’t into detail about image transfer modes here, but you should learn what the do, as they are very powerful. In our case simply set the transfer mode from Normal to Screen for the glow layer by using the pull down menu on the layer tab.
Optionally, you can adjust the opacity of the glow layer to make the effect more subtle, or even edit color balance slightly to change the color of the glow.

Thats about it! Here is my final image.

1-2-3 Revit

If you haven’t seen them, Rick Rundle of Autodesk has a great series of revit articles on catalyst.com. Topics range from an explanation of parametric modeling to successful revit implementation. Take a look when you have a chance: 1-2-3 Revit

Nvidia releases update to MAXtreme Driver

Yesterday, Nvidia released an update to MAXtreme Driver that is compatible with Viz2005. I just installed Version 7.00.03 today and it seems to work well with viz. Please note that you must have an Nvidia Qaudro based workstaion card for this driver to work.

Cool Class

Architectural Design, Visualization and Presentation - Cal State University


Found this link on CGArchitect today. It looks like an interesting class for anyone wanting to improve thier architectural visualization and presentation skills. Best of all they are using Revit and 3dsMax.

Here are the details:

Class: Architurectural Design, Visualization and Presentation with CAD & 3ds max 7
Date: Monday – Friday May 16 - 20Time: 9:30 - 5:30. Subject to change based on the needs of the teacher and students.
Cost: $1495.00. Check, cash, and credit cards are accepted.
Certificate: YES
Location: Advanced Media Production at Cal State Long Beach. Parking included.
Lab Time: YES. 10 hours included and times must be approved by AMP staff.
Teacher: Roger Cusson, Former Discreet Learning Product Manager, Discreet Training Specialist, Caddie Award winner
Registration: Call Pia Maffei directly at 800-929-8155 or 951-587-8245.

Description: This instructor lead class is a mix of instructor led theoretical content reinforced by practical hands on exercises. Should time permit students will develop their own architectural models and presentations. This style gives the students the confidence to complete their own presentations once they leave the classroom. You learn the following:
· The 3ds max User Interface, and the Architectural CAD software of choice, in this course we will use AutoCAD and Revit.
· Developing Architectural Models in CAD
· Importing and / or linking of CAD Models into 3ds max, through DWG and or 3ds formats
· Creating Materials for Architectural Scenes
· Advanced lighting such as radiosity and Still Image Rendering suitable for Print and Web
· Creating animation in Architectural Presentations, walk throughs, fly arounds and moving elements

Autodesk Media & Entertainment Ships Combustion 4

Autodesk Media & Entertainment (formally Discreet) is now shipping Auotdesk Combustion 4, an update to my favorite 3d compositing, motion graphics and vector paint tool! I plan on posting tips and tricks for using Combustion in architectural visualization, so stay tuned!

Welcome the the REVITlution!

Hi, and welcome to my blog! I've always wanted to start one of these for Revit, so here it is!