“Does Revit rendering time always that long?” He looked at me with his desperate eyes.
“ I render my model one day before I went to presentation, but it didn’t finish when I need it…” He continued his murmur.
It was about 5 years ago. Revit still uses AccuRender at that time. And yes, it took very long time to create just a descent result.
It doesn’t take a long time anymore
I believe he will be very happy if he read this. If you already knew Project Neon, then you will be happy too to know that it supports Revit file now!
Project Neon is an online rendering service from Autodesk. You can upload your AutoCAD (and now Revit!) model and let their servers render it for you. At the moment, they use 8 machines, 4 cores each to do the job. So yes, it’s very fast compared to your machine.
You don’t have to create your own render farm just to get the work done. You don’t even need to purchase high performance computer to do rendering. Leave it to Project Neon.
How to do it in Revit?
Rendering your Revit model on Project Neon is unbelievably easier than AutoCAD. You can download a plugin on Project Neon website then install it.
The plugin will add one more tab on your ribbon: web services. You can upload your opened file and choose which views to render.
You can see the detailed demonstration on YouTube here.
When I tried to render the provided samples, it only took a few minutes to render 4 views!
Walkthrough Animation
If you’re wondering if it supports walkthrough rendering, then that make two of us.
One thing that a bit disappointing is, it doesn’t support creating walkthrough animation yet. Probably because it still a technology preview. I expect that they will provide it one day.
Availability
According to the labs blog, Project Neon is available as technology preview until 27 September 2011. I’m not sure how Autodesk will provide it to their customers after that date. It may be still free, only available for subscription customers, or probably using other pricing schemes.
Now that it’s still available for free, go ahead and try it. Torture the servers!
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