The Art of Rendering: 10 Reasons Why You Need V-Ray for Your Next Revit Model

It happened relatively quietly in the fall of 2016, but could well be regarded as one of the year’s most significant releases in recent memory for the architectural visualization industry. When it comes to the synthesis of Revit and V-Ray, the phrase “better late than never” has never been more apt — particularly for bloggers such as Jeffrey A. Pinheiro, creator of popular blog The Revit Kid.com.

“Well, well, well … It’s about time!” exclaimed Pinheiro in a celebratory post in November. “I have been publishing content about how V-Ray should make a plug-in for Revit for well over five years. After a soft announcement two years ago, ChaosGroup has gone through a long alpha and beta period before finally releasing V-Ray for Revit!”

Yes, at long last, architecture’s most ubiquitous BIM application has coupled up with one of the profession’s most loved rendering plug-ins. While a beta release was launched for testing back in 2015, the full version is now available and offers up a compelling blend of practicality and flair for designers. Here, we run through just a few of the features destined to make V-Ray an increasingly integral part of architects’ work-flows on Revit in the coming years:

Design-Friendly Interface

Those behind V-Ray reckon they have struck the right balance between quality and speed, with an intuitive dialog box and straightforward render presets. The platform offers a “draft mode” for quickly working through concepts, with the ability to quickly switch to high-quality output for presentations.

Interactive Rendering

Integrating Revit with V-Ray has enabled a greater ability to render as you design, allowing you to alter lighting and material settings and see the results almost instantaneously.

Physically Based Lighting

IES and HDR image–based lighting is designed to be quicker to implement and more accurate than ever, with integrated support for Revit Sun and Sky.

Real-World Cameras

One of the most compelling features on offer is the ability to simulate the subtleties of photographic camera images, with settings for exposure, focus, optical vignetting and VFB lens effects allowing your visualizations to approach photorealistic perfection.

Physical Materials

Now you can automatically convert Revit materials to V-Ray’s physically correct format and fine-tune their properties using the rendering plug-in’s material editor.

Diagrammatic Materials

Perhaps our favorite feature of all is the ability to quickly create diagrammatic visualizations that look like drawings or even scale models, offering an alternative, less-literal method of presenting conceptual images to clients.

Section Boxes

V-Ray for Revit raises the prospect of some seriously good-looking sections with full support for Revit’s native section boxes.

Denoiser

The built-in denoiser automatically removes artifacts and noise, cutting rendering times by harnessing the power of GPU-accelerated denoising. The positive effects are nicely communicated in the video above.

Aerial Perspective

In conjunction with the real-world cameras, impressive effects can be applied to aerial images including environment fog, giving distant perspectives great depth and atmospheric qualities.

Virtual Reality

Built-in options for capturing stereoscopic views enable users to check over their designs at 1:1 scale using virtual reality headsets such as Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift and HTC VIVE.

V-Ray Swarm

Incredibly fast rendering speeds can be achieved by using V-Ray’s swarm distributed rendering tool, harnessing the power of all available desktops and render nodes to produce a single, high-resolution image.