Revit to 3ds Max through FBX

Recently I looked into the FBX linking tool which has just been introduced in 3ds Max 2011. I ran into problems immediately when I went to link a file which had artificial lights.

It appeared that in the 64 bit version of 3ds Max Design that there was a single toggle that was off in the shipping version to import artificial lights. Simple fix just turn it on. That led to other questions. Suppose you are working on a Revit file and import your artificial lights. You will probably need to refine your lights in 3ds Max to do such things like add soft shadows. If you then make a change in Revit and reimport the scene with lights you lose your changes that you made in 3ds Max.

This can be quite anoying if all you wanted to do is move a floor lamp from one location to another. Would be great if you could retain the information you changed in 3ds Max and only import the changed location of the lamp.

New Portfolio Images

Image of a Modeling Project In Progress

Revit Family of a Wall Unit

Rendering of A Hotel Washroom

Courtyard Rendering

Model of an Office Building Used in Photomontage Rendering

New to 3D... ??

I started a course today with a group of students learning 3D for the first time. Since they are in an AutoCAD drafting program, I'm teaching them AutoCAD 3D. I took a few moments to explain to them some of the different Autodesk products that work in 3D for various industries.

3ds Max, Revit, Civil 3D, AutoCAD Architecture, Inventor, Navisworks. I'm just scratching the surface, some of the most popular and more heard about programs. Boy these students have a long way to go....

Revit Architecture Book

Recently, I had the urge to get back into learning Revit, and decided I would grab a book and review the basics. So I decided to purchase "Commercial Design Using Revit Architecture 2010" by Daniel John Stine.

I have had some positive experience using a similar book he wrote in a Beginners AutoCAD course for Architects, so I thought it would be interesting to see his approach to Revit.

Overall, I would give the book about a 7/10. I like the project approach of his books, basically stepping you though one project from start to finish. There were a few gaps that would have been good to adress, and it would have been good to have chosen a building that may have added a few twists and turns.

I know Revit fairly well and I'd like to get more indepth with the software so the book did leave me feeling a bit disappointed. I think though this book is more meant for raw beginners where the book serves the audience quite well.

Arch Viz book now available

Well it seems like I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.. :-). The 2nd Edition of the book "Realistic Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max and mental ray" is now available.

The book was co-authored by myself and Jamie Cardoso. It features sections on the basics of mental ray, and project based sections where you develop materials and lighting for real scenes. These scenes include; an interior of a living room, a photomontage of an exterior of a building, an interior atrium, and a harbor.

You can order the book in the US on online sites like Amazon.

Here are a few more images from the book, which are based on the projects you work through in the chapters.

New Arch Viz Book

The 2nd Edition of the Realistic Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max and mental ray is now in production at Focal Press. The book has been rewritten almost from the ground up, with 2 entirely new scenes depicting renderings of an atrium, and a building exterior photomontaged into a photo of the building site.

Plenty of new techniques are depicted in the scenes which were carried over from the 1st edition.

There is also an entirely new Introductory section which explains concepts of using mental ray with 3ds Max & 3ds Max Design.

You can preorder the book at several online retailers including amazon.com

I'll post more images in the next few weeks.

cheers
rec

Project Dragonfly

I stumbled upon something new from Autodesk in all places, Facebook. The Autodesk group pointed me to the Project Dragonfly site. It's a Web based residential design modeller where you can create a plan and 3D model of a house or apartment. Sort of remins me of a cross between those 99$ 3D Home style products and creating a house in "The Sims".

You work based on a room basis, starting with basic shaped rooms and then modifying them with new room elements, Then add door and windows and then built-in elements furnishings, and materials.

It's really a toy at this point at this point, and there are plenty of features missing, but I like it's simplicity, reasonable intuitiveness and the direction of being able to model a design online. You could very easily share this design with others. Then there is the ability to output to .DWG and .RVT formats, interesting. I'd like to see where Project Dragonfly goes...

Revit Market Contest Deadline

Revit Market Contest Deadline Coming Up! March 31

If you have original Revit families (ones you’ve created yourself), you can put them up for sale at Revit Market, then use them in a project and enter the contest. Not only do you get a chance to win $2500, but you can get cash from ongoing sales of your families.

Revit Contest: www.turbosquid.com/Revit-Contest
Revit Market: www.turbosquid.com/Revit
Press Release about the contest: http://www.turbosquid.com/revit-family-contest

Revit Family - Online course

Recently, I jumped into creating Revit families. Unfortunately, throughout my use of the program thus far, creating families was this "do I really want to go there" kind of issue. I've never seen a family created live in a demonstration. Sensing complexity, I avoided creating them completely.

Finally, I dug into them and what I found was amazingly easy. So I thought I would help people get started, and I created my own online course in creating Revit families.


With the urging of my friend at TurboSquid, I've made this available on their site. Go to the Revit Market on their site and search for "Roger Cusson" and you should find it easily.

TurboSquid Revit Marketplace

Well the folks at TurboSquid finally did it, they have launched a market dedicated to Revit families. If you have worked with Revit at a superficial level you will probably think of family libraries of one of the mysteries of the software. If you have been fortunate enough to have received some good training, you will probably know some of the basics of creating families and know how much time can be invested in creating a good Revit family.

On the heels of all of TurboSquid's success in the visualization space they are now launching a beta version of a combined visualization and BIM site for Revit. Some of the families are render ready, others are for quantity takeoffs and creating a Building Information Model.

Creating Revit Families

Lately, I have been getting into creating Revit families. It's mostly been driven by personal interest in Revit and the co-incidence that TurboSquid is developing a market place for Revit families. My long time friend Michele Bousquet has been working there and it seems like TurboSquid is going to branch out from static 3D models into this new generation of parametric Modeling meant for AEC and BIM.

Here are a few of my efforts. Getting into creating parametric families has not been as difficult as I had imagined.




I'm hoping to put together a short crash course soon for those who would like to get into this as well.

Tree Storm

Trees Plugins for 3ds Max. I have no idea how many of them are out there but there seems to be tons. There are the standard foliage objects, and the 2 plugins who have demo versions shipping In the box.

Typically the problem with foliage is the amount of geometry which it adds to a typical scene. Well Tree Storm is no exception, but rendering times do not seem to be adversely affected. After some experimentation I was able to place about 100 trees in an empty scene, and render it with mental ray on my test system in about 3 minutes.

Recently, some of my students in my CGSociety course introduced me to trees created by Onyx. So I contacted them and they were kind enough to send me a version which I could evaluate. Well at first I was not sure I liked them, but after closer inspection and examination they are working great.

At the heart of the program is the Adjust Polygons dialog which allows you to adjust the number of polygons that an individual tree will use. Those who are familiar with adjusting foliage in 3ds Max should not take long to get familiar with this dialog.

Now the trick to get mental ray to play nice with this plugin was to use instances extensively when cloning the trees. Take 3 or 4 unique trees, instance them, use rotation and scale to give some diversity and your memory requirements go down. Therefore more trees.

I think you'll agree the results look great.

Architectural Interior Space Rendering

I've been working on some courseware for Autodesk and just thought I'd post an image which I created for the project.

The space (Walls, Doors, etc.) was created in Revit and linked into 3ds Max 2009. Equipment and accessories were modeled in 3ds Max. Rendering used mental ray with ProMaterials and Arch & Design materials.

Cool Blog on mr and VRay

One of my friends and collegues pointed me recently to a rather cool blog site on mental ray and VRay rendering. Thought I would share this with my readers.

http://3dsmaxrendering.blogspot.com/

have fun and enjoy..

cheers
rec

Revit City

As I was seaching for some Revit families from manufacturers last week, I came across the Revit City web site. Now I had heard a bit about this site (both good and bad) and thought it would be a good time to look into what could be obtained from it. So here goes...

There was a lot of material on the site, and even though I have not had to use the CSI standards category for a while, the site had the same look and feel to it. Organized into familiar categories, I went looking for windows. Seems like you can never have enough window types in Revit.

There are some very interesting Revit families to create windows on the site, and I think its commendable that things have come this far with what is a free site fed by community members. The first image is an image of an impressive window with ornamental trim. It does though act more like a traditional AutoCAD block rather than a family. It has two sizes which you can't adjust though parameters, and only the depth of the window was adjustable, and that did not work 100% either.

A couple more examples of windows which again work fine when inserted into your project. But when you search for parameters to change or when you change them things do go ary.

I think that these attempts are good, and that if you take them as they are, (things you have obtained for free) they are great. Play with them on projects you are doing as tests for Revit. When you get into the serious projects you need professionally made families.

Next post, I'll have a look at the Anderson window families. Unitl then, cheers.

SWEET...!!! - Sweets Online 3D Catalogue.

Well this is pretty cool, Sweets Catalogue has an online edition which features 60 manufacturer's products in a 3D collection which can be viewed using the Google Sketchup Viewer.

After installing the Sketchup Viewer, you download .skp file to your local drive and view them or use them in a building model.



















Models range from Windows and Doors to Fridges and Stoves.

It's a great start to be able to view manufacturers products online in 3D. Revit offers even more possibilities. Revit families are the equivalent these 3d elements in the sketchup catalogue but with so much more. Imagine being able to import a model from a manufacturer, and being able to generate a high quality render in Revit's new mental ray engine. Pretty pictures aside, when you populate a building project in Revit with a manufacturer's products you can generate quantity takeoffs from the Revit project into easy to use schedules.

In order to make this the most useful all manufacturers need to get onboard with producing Revit libraries. So an entire project can be populated with information direct from the manufacurer. Sweets would be a great leader in this effort.

HDRI Images

More and more people are asking questions about HDRI images. HDRI or High Dynamic Range Images are photographic files which are capable of storing information at different exposures. Whenever you have reflections and /or want to use an image to light a scene in 3ds Max HRDI will improve the quality of your scene.

I'm no expert in taking these images, but I know it can be complicated, so I did stumble across the other day an excellent image database. Like many model sites this site contains many HDRI images which you can purchase for a fee.

A sample image is provided free.

http://www.3sixo.net/index.php

Have a look, I think you will like it.

cheers
rec

CGSociety Arch Viz Course

In May of this year I started an Architectural Visualization course with CGSociety (http://www.cgsociety.org/). This beginner / intermediate course is delivered online to students interested in learning architectural visualization with 3ds Max and mental ray. The class closes this July 13th, and is has been a long ride, what with preparing all my classes and keeping up with student work. It has been interesting to me to see this type of format of online course, as I have had several experiences with delivering online (or distance) learning before.

There are so many forms of online learning, that the mind does truly boggle. when you include distance learning and what is referred to as blended learning the methods of creating a course increase exponentially. Used to be, get a classroom, get an instructor, bring in students, conduct class. Simple, but often extremely expensive.

I've always contended that the best form of learning happens, when you have that problem while you work. You lean back in your chair and ask your buddy sitting next to you, "hey, Amer, how do you do that thingy with the gizmo?" and get a quick explanation. You try it, maybe show it to your bud again, get a thumbs up, maybe a few tweaks etc. What happened there? Just-in-time learning? A teachable moment? Direct knowledge transfer from master to apprentice? Coaching? People teaching each other? Answer: probably all of the above...

I figure the more learning online can approach the above ideal learning scenarios the better. One of the things I really like about the CGSociety course has been the ability of students to ask me questions directly, they occasionally send me files which they are having problems with and I'll try to deconstruct and fix them, letting them know how I did it.

By far the best thing about the class has been the interaction between the students. Each student gets a work thread every week, where they post images of things they are doing. Everyone else can see their work, my responses, and post comments as well. These threads are so active that sometimes there are 5-6 posts before I even get to see the original student's post. Students at intermediate levels are brings a vast amount of knowledge to the course. Many are expert in other software, and want to learn 3ds Max. It humbles me to see all the knowledge in my class. All the better for the students though, it is like there are 10 teachers instead of just one.

I heard it once said tht the best university is one which has a library and a coffee shop. Well I guess CGSociety has accomplished just that. Cheers to them.

When the course wraps up I'll see if I can get some of my students work posted

cheers
rec

Revit 2009 to 3ds Max 2009 Curriculum

One of the projects which I had the pleasure to work on recently, was for the Autodesk Media and Entertainment division's education department. The project entailed writing a short tutorial on the process involved in rendering a Revit 3D model in 3ds Max.

Now it's been several releases since you have been able to take a Revit Model, export it to DWG, and then Link / Import it into 3ds Max. In 2009, a new method of exporting and importing has been introduced using an FBX file.

The greatest advantage in using FBX is the amount of information which is now transfered from Revit to 3ds Max. Revit 2009 now has the mental ray rendering engine incorporated within it, and when you start the rendering procss in Revit, by assigning lights and materials, this information then gets transfered to 3ds Max....!!! ............SWEET............!!!

Through FBX, Revit metadata also gets transfered. Like the Revit Family, Category and Level. which you can use in 3ds Max to organize your models.

Through this improvement in Revit rendering technology, Autodesk appears to be recommending to designers to take their models and renderings as far as possible in Revit, and when ready transfer to 3ds Max for final renderings. Unfortunately, one of the things which is lacking at the moment is a complete resource of Revit components and families. Rendering elements like furniture and speciality Revit families like windows and doors typically are built from scratch by companies adopting Revit. This makes for a long and expensive implementation of the software.

Some help is available, as in the Revit content site,

http://revit.autodesk.com/library/html/index.html

Much more is needed.

Allways looking foward to better tools.
cheers
rec

Catching up on the Blog

Well folks it has been a while since I wrote, so catchup time. What have I been up to I'll get into a few posts in the next few days. As allways there are some really cool developments in Architecture, 3D Visualization, and the BIM industry. I'll separate these posts so they all don't merge into one massive post.

Well I'm ready to write so here we go...

cheers
rec