Revit Cloud Rendering improvements

We are happy to announce the significant improvements made to the Autodesk Revit Cloud Rendering, which have been released on Dec 9th, 2018. 

The new version of our cloud rendering engine improves on quality and fixes old issues. As many old projects might have been tuned to look right with the old version of the engine, you will notice that new rendering will look different.

As the new version is more strictly photoreal and relies on correct inputs (especially materials settings), some adjustment to old projects might be necessary to get the best results.

We suggest using the new Revit material types (especially for mirrors, metals, and glazing) and to follow the guidelines reported below whenever possible.

 

Feature Improvement

1. Quality improvements with new rendering engine

• There are significant improvements in quality in some scenes, both standard and final. A newly added denoising algorithm can often produce noise-free renderings in cases where the previous algorithm would show noise even in "final" quality.

Standard Quality Before	Standard Quality After

 

2. Materials Appearance Consistency with Revit in-product

• The cloud renderer used to have a different implementation of legacy materials (which originate from Mental Ray) than the in-product Revit renderer. This is now fixed, and both in-product and cloud are based on the same shader codebase. Any remaining mismatches are likely to be due to data translation issues, not shader differences; please report them as bugs.

Before	After	In Product

 

• If the new physically based Revit materials are used instead (Revit 2019 or later)， local and cloud rendering should always match.
• Documentation about the new physically based materials is available here:
  • Full documentation
  • Introductory document

 

3. Lights enhancement

• The previous rendering engine had a corner darkening issue. In new renderings, this problem is fixed.

Before	After

 

• The previous rendering engine had problems with area lighting close to other surface, causing light splotches. This problem is gone now.

Before	After

• Note, several bugs have been fixed in the cloud renderer that have not yet been ported back to Revit. This will still lead to some differences and will be fixed in a later version of Revit. Until then, the cloud result should be treated as correct.

 

4. Water Wave Height

• Old water materials will have an incorrect Wave Height because their settings were unitless. Exaggerated water surface can be easily fixed editing the material. There is no specific rule on how much the Wave Height value should be lowered. Set it to what looks right for your scene.

Default wave height	Reduced wave height

 

5. Scenes with no lights

• Rendering a scene with no lights (closed room with no artificial lights) now renders a black image instead of flat colors.

Before	After

 

6. Panoramas

• Panoramas no longer support the solid color background option, but you can download a panorama image with Alpha channel and add the desired solid color background in an image editing application.

 

7. Emissive decals

• In the meantime, emissive images like monitors can be achieved using the new Revit physically based opaque material. This guarantees that they are physically accurate and much more realistic.

Before	After	With Opaque emissive material

8. IES web orientation

• We fixed an issue that was causing IES webs to be rotated in the wrong direction. Be aware that re-rendering old files you might get different lighting.

 

9. Missing textures behavior

• Missing textures will now be replaced by a black color instead of white. The Revit exporter, before uploading the processed scene for rendering, warns you about the textures that were not found. Make sure you check the list and understand that materials using those textures will not be able to use them.
• When rendering locally, the missing texture behavior might differ.

 

10. Performance

• The new service will show a significant increase in performance for rendering jobs with many frames (especially solar study, stereo panorama). These frames are now distributed to separate cloud nodes for rendering, instead of rendering sequentially on a single node.

 

11. New Post Processing tool

• A new image post-processing widget replaces Exposure Adjustment and adds several features.

Old UI	New UI

• A few preset curves are provided, providing a simple way to switch between looks: linear, neutral, mild and vivid. A custom curve can still be chosen, by manually setting the highlights, midtones and shadows parameters from the previous version of the widget.

Linear	Neutral	Mild	Vivid

 

• A new bloom effect is very useful to achieve additional realism, by simulating low-frequency light leaking between pixels, an effect common in real cameras and human eyes. The true brightness of over-exposed areas (e.g. windows, light sources and specular highlights) can be made more obvious using this effect.

 

• Color correction and color preservation can now be turned on and off explicitly. Keeping them off is recommended and often looks better unless a specific look is desired.
• We have also improved the look of the automatic (“Advanced”) exposure.

 

12. Viewer changes for multi-frames renderings

• When view the in-progress rendering of multi-frames rendering like Solar Study and Turntable rendering, the viewer supports to show progressive rendering for each frame.

Old UI	New UI

 

13. Download menu for solar study

• New option to enable download of Solar study as video.

Old UI	New UI

 

Limitations and Best Practices

 

14. Overlapping geometry

• If you see circular artifacts on surfaces, it’s probably because there is overlapping geometry. Make sure your walls, ceilings, floors, glazing is not duplicated or intersecting. When overlapping geometry occurs, the renderer can’t consistently pick the material of one or the other surface.

 

15. Coincident lights geometry

• Placing a light shape coincident to a light fixture geometry can cause artifacts or missing light emission or visibility. Make sure you separate the light a bit to avoid this issue.
• Other issues could arise if the light is put behind a translucent, frosted, or semi-transparent material, as the renderer will have a hard time resolving paths to the light. Place the light in front and use a lightly emissive material for the shade behind it.

 

16. Point lights visible in reflections

• If you use point lights throughout your scene to add a certain amount of ambient light, those lights will appear in reflections on mirrors and glass surfaces.
• We suggest removing those lights and add real lights, as the renderer is strictly photoreal. After rendering you can adjust the exposure to bring up the mid-tones and brighten up the scene.

Before	After

 

17. Panorama and Stereo Panorama rendering

• The progressive rendering preview will not show all frames always. It will show the frames that are in progress or completed. If the advanced exposure has been set, the progressive preview will have different exposure with final one.

Progressive Preview

One side of the cube rendering is still in progress, while the other two are complete.

 

Progressive Preview (Advanced exposure)	Final (Advanced exposure)
Each side of the cube rendering has a slightly different exposure.	In the final rendering, the exposure is unified.

 

 

Comments

[C A A T]

Brilliant - this is progress! Thank you!

[JS]

This is great! Looking forward to test it out.

[Angie Mauricio]

Excelente!

[Rodrigo]

Great! Can´t wait to try it.

[Pabloski]

This is great,
I wonder what type of rendering engine produces this new renderings. Mental Ray or V-ray?
Autodesk you are awesome!

[CRISTIAN PEREZ]

hola tengo una duda cuando inteto renderizar en la nube no me lo permite

[salah]

great news!!!

[Chris]

I have been waiting for one render for 30 minutes and the quality was very poor. Previously, it took me 15 minutes and the rendering was good. Are the changes still being improved

[Jorge]

I tried rendering in HQ today and the quality is bad. The previous version of cloud rendering was much better.

[WILLIAM T DOBSON]

great improvements!

[Xiaoqing Zhuang]

There is some provisioning issue that causes the long queue time. We are working on the fixing. For the bad quality, could we work with you to take look? The advanced exposure has been changed that may cause some badness.
My email is [email protected]. Feel free to contact me for the issue.
thanks

[Ryan Hughes]

Thought I was losing my mind when re-rendering views I did on 12/7 again today (12/10). The lighting color is way off--super green/blue for views that were coming out a pleasing warmish yellow before. The control seem more limited, and as others have noted, the time to render has increased dramatically. The improvements described above all sound good, but at least at first blush, the added time and way-off colorization aren't thrilling to me (and having to click through to "custom" to access some of the control sliders is not intuitive). Hoping some of these issues get addressed.

[Ryan Hughes]

Old Cloud Rendering: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GTRT--0-vOVfTwWjOydWXS63jCILuvJe

New Cloud Rendering (w/ ghastly color): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eIODj3_SJbzilQHP7BZkmmqx8auaPP48

[Xiaoqing Zhuang]

Hi Ryan, thanks a lot for feedback on the new rendering service and sharing the images.
Regarding to lighting color difference, it is due to the change of the glazing implementation. The old cloud renderer was allowing non-physical settings. The new one will not support certain settings that result in non physically based material behaviors. The old Glazing materials will frequently render differently, especially if Tint is used. If they have Revit 2019 it would be better to switch to the new Glazing materials which will allow some degree of freedom from physic correctness, but still render predictably. Feel free to contact me directly if you need help to improve it.
Regarding to the rendering time, we have a bug in the our provisioning system. We are working on fixing. Once it is fixed, it should be faster than old cloud rendering service.

[G]

I am so so disappointed of the changes. Colors, quality, waiting time. Can't believe the rendering I did few days ago looks much better than the ones after changes. It is so dissapointing. It completly lost it purpose. I am not going to spend anymore on such a quality.

I wish we could go back... very much

[Danielle]

Onde clico pra voltar ao que era antes? A renderização está horrível.

[martin]

PANO LINKS NOT WORKING
ever since the update the links for the pano views no longer work just a grey screen.

why is this ?

[Lina]

The panorama link isn’t working on all the phones ?

[Fernando]

The render quality after the update is awful. Now my renders have a leopard-like skin texture and a grainy texture. I'm rendering with Final Quality and Large image size. Here is a sample of what my render looks like on Dec/7 compared to Dec/11:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Ef-lXkNAnD7i9G9MlhfvzoW_qxjuyvE/view?usp=sharing

[Ryan Hughes]

Hi Xiaoqing,

Thanks for the responses. Glad to know the rendering-time issue will be fixed. You confirmed my suspicions RE the glass causing the harsh blue-green tint. I am in Revit 2018, and don't have access to 2019. I can try to mess with the default Revit 2018 "Glass" material properties to address my issues, but would certainly welcome any feedback/ input as to how to go about fixing this in Revit 2018.

On a positive note, I do notice a number of the improvements listed above when comparing the rendering from this week to last week, so it seems you're on the right track.

Thanks!

Ryan

[Xiaoqing Zhuang]

Hi G, Fernando, Lina, Martin, apologize for all inconvenience with new release. The long queue time has been solved already. We are happy to work with you to solve your issues. Could you provide your contact to me ([email protected]) so that we can work with you to fix the issue and improve the situation.
Hi Ryan, thanks for the feedback. We will take look at the the default Revit 2018 "Glass" material properties to check the fixing. We will continue to improve this. Feel free to let us know if something is not right and inconvenient.
thanks

[Jennifer]

The rendering quality of glass has seriously decreased. I was very satisfied with the quality prior to the update. Now everytime I render glass, no matter how much I change the properties it doesn't even resemble glass, just noise and a dull color.

[Tripti Prasad]

Hello. I am in the end stages of a rendering that we have been producing for a couple of weeks now and we need it to be ready to show to our investor. I just needed to make a couple of minor changes today and when I went to render, I realized that everything has changed. Although I look forward to working with the new positive features of the new system, I need access to the old system so I can finish the current rendering I am working on. We do not have the time to readjust all the materials to look back how they used to look in the old system. Please let me know if you are able to help.

[Roberto]

@Fernando The pattern is a result of the old materials having odd hardcoded patterns that are not playing well with the new renderer (they were created for the long dead mental ray). The issue is the material, not the renderer, and we will take a look and see if it's possible to minimize them. In the meantime, if you are using Revit 2019 switch to the new materials, or convert to Generic if you are on older Revit versions.

[Roberto]

@Jennifer The old glass materials might have been looking nice, but they were completely wrong and unrealistic. Switch to the new glass or glazing materials if you are on Revit 2019, or to the solid glass if you are not. The noise issue is a known issue and we are going to address it.