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Forums >> Revit Building >> Technical Support >> Rendering Walkthroughs
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Joined: Tue, Jul 25, 2006
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Can anyone give me any advice on computer requirements for rendering walkthroughs?
From what I understand, in order to get a smooth walkthrough, you have to render at 24-30 fps. If you set the number of frames to 400-600 the walkthrough zooms by, but if you set it at 4000-6000 it's suppossed to be much smoother. Anyway it's taking me 16 hrs. to render a 400 frame scene at 5 fps.
Please let me know your ideas on speeding up this process a little bit (i.e. computer req., program parameters, etc.)
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Joined: Mon, Sep 27, 2004
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I don't know if it neccessarily speeds up the process, but when I render walkthroughs of that length I break them up into smaller components (i.e. frames 1-50, 51-100, 101-150, and so on) and then piece them together in a video editing program (I use Windows Movie Maker which was just a program that came with my computer not one I purchased). This process worked much better for me and seemed to take less time. Plus I had issues with letting the computer render for 16hrs. I would have to leave it rendering overnight at the office and then when I came back in the morning it had encountered an error and I had nothing. I think the issue was doing it all at once on my machine made my computer run low on virtual memory and eventually it would quit.
Also with Windows Movie Maker you can really add some neat features. You can add a title page, still images and even audio. It can make for a really nice presentation tool with a title page, still images and then the walkthrough itself.
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Another thing you can do when rendering walkthroughs is when you click export, then walkthrough, choose it to export the frames as jpegs, then even when you send it over night and or the computer crashes you have those jpegs which you can piece together in the video editing software. It will automaticaly save them as they finish. Wehn you bring the jpegs into the video editing software, just size them down to one frame. It still comes out just as smooth as if you export the whole thing as an avi.
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I also agree that rendering (I presume you mean using Accurender) is best done as a sequence of numbered stills (select jpg or Tif instead of AVI for you file type). Stitching them together afterwards is simple using any or a variety of products (we use Adobe Premiere currently but I have used Image Ready and other programs in the past). If you render the file in segments, the software will recalculate lighting and Radiosity settings for each segment which could lead to changes in lighting levels where none should occur (Mr. Spot mentioned this a while ago). Also when you are exporting and using an avi the speed settings (fps) does not affect the time it takes to render the images. The only time this comes into play is when it is playing the file back.
HTH.
** Edit: When exporting as sequenced still images you can also set up actions in Photoshop (or other programs I presume) to crop all the images to the same size, and elminate the frame counter in the upper left corner.
Post edited on 2006-09-27 17:14:26
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If speed is more important that quality reduce down the size of the render quality to say 72dpi
open your walkthrough view
select the crop region frame
properties
render image size.
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what i did was did one floor , rendered it then did the second floor and piced them togheter in Movie Maker
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FYI, movie maker is poor and clumsy to use and gives you very little options.
Try VirtualDub, its free and a great program for fixing walkthoughs.
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where can you get this program?
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http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/virtualdub/VirtualDub-1.6.16.zip?use_mirror=surfnet
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thanks for the link. now what all can i do in this program?
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Virtual dub is great for combining jpgs rendered in revit to make the avi.
When you export a walkthrough from revit you have the option of exporting to AVI or JPG. Jpg well export out to individual frames. Which is great if there is a chance some sections will change and may need to be re-rendered. Saving you the hassle of having to do the whole lot again.
You'll also find quite often for large AVI files exported from revit you will not be able to get any program to play them. This is because once the file gets over a certain size revit corrupts the index to the AVI. Virtual dub can repair this by opening the AVI file with it and doing a save as.
You can also compress the AVI to any installed codec on your machine, however I haven't had much success with this and this is where i tend to use Move Maker to take the final AVI files and compress to a WMV file or add music etc. On average a 2GB uncompressed AVI file will compress to about a 20MB WMV file using high quality settings. The advantage of a WMV file is you can send to anyone and they'll be able to play it without having to download missing codecs.
HTH.
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Chris.
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Quote Mr. Spot: " You can also compress the AVI to any installed codec on your machine, however I haven't had much success" Any success on this? any codec that you did tried before so that I can give it a try as well? I did a append AVI of about 25 phases of revit walkthru for my last study model and it come up around 1G in file size. quality is fair good compare to mover maker but the file size is too big especially when we want to insert into powerpoint for presentation, it was not that smooth compare when we run it in any movie player.
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I've started using Camtasia Studio. Its a nifty little program and it compresses 2G AVI files down to 40MB without to much compromise on quality and it gives you lots of handy little tools such as adding watermarks to your movie, annotations or screen captures... Previous to this I'd get everything setup in VirtualDub and leave it as uncompressed, then use MovieMaker once I have it the way i like to compress it to a more manageable size. HTH.
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Newbie on this subject. How do you render a walkthrough? Do you have to render each frame individually or is there a way to render it as it is "walking through"? Can't find any info in the help section. Using 9.1.
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In the rendering menu, there is the walkthrough command. Activate while in a plan view and you can set the path and fiddle with camera angles, heights, directions, etc. Play around with it and there is always the help file to assist,(type "walkthrough" in the index).
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