Rendering Pro of the Week – Bach Hua

For our first installment of the Autodesk 360 “Rendering Pro of the Week”, we’re featuring Bach Hua, a recent Art in Architecture graduate from the University of Canberra in Australia.

Using the rendering feature in Autodesk 360, Hua says, “Cloud rendering has saved me a lot of time. Before I discovered cloud rendering, rendering one image took me more than 3 days, not to mention that it used most of my computer resources.”

But now Hua has developed a careful design workflow in Revit, using the speed of cloud rendering to quickly check and iterate on his designs until they come out just the way he wants them.

For this featured rendering, “2 Doors Cinema” Hua was assigned a project in which he had to design two cinemas (one with 200 seats and one with 100 seats), an outdoor cinema, a cafeteria and candy bar, a DVD store, office and administration areas, outside car parking, a public square, and a childcare center.

The project site was located in between the commercial and residential sides of the city of Canberra—the meeting point of the urban city-planning grid. The site has an odd triangular edge which presented a huge challenge. Hua had to figure out how to fit the design in the site within the urban context of the city.

Despite the challenges, Hua stated, “This was the best project I ever had.”

So, what are the secrets to Hua’s stunning renderings? Lucky for us, he gave us a breakdown of the steps in his process:

1. To get that photorealistic effect, Hua went straight to the site where his project was located, stood at the spot that he had marked on the site drawing, and took many photos at different angles.
2. He then saved the photos as PNG’s and went into Revit, using the camera view to get a perspective drawing. “I placed the camera in Revit at the same location where I took the site photos, adjusting the eye and target elevations for best fit,” he said.
3. Next, he exported the perspective drawings to images and laid them up over the site photo to make sure everything was at the right angle. He also used the sun setting in the Rendering Dialog to set the project location for his design and placed the sun at the level of the camera’s perspective. For his background image, he set the site photo that best fit with the Revit camera perspective.
4. For the final step, he hit that special “render in cloud” option. To make sure everything was right, he chose to render at low quality first. When the rendering process finished, he went to the Autodesk 360 Rendering Cloud to check the rendered image. Once he made sure everything was right, he adjusted the exposure and did a last quick render using the “best quality” setting. 

“Cloud rendering has been the key tool in achieving photo realistic effects in my renderings,” Hua says. “The quality from cloud rendering is just as good as the quality you’d get from normal rendering, but the process is a thousand times faster!”

Additionally, this faster rendering allows for designers like Hua to quickly check their camera angles and distances to rearrange their camera views and adjust their exposures, seeing the results right away.

Want to try it for yourself? Sign up for cloud credits to make cloud rendering a reality for you, then add your renderings to the public gallery!

Want more resources for making stunning renderings? Check out the Rendering in A360 User Forum here.