For a variety of reasons I won’t delve into, this past week we found myself without access to my Revit & Navisworks licenses… aside from answering emails, workflow documentation and re-organizing my office space, I decided the Gilbane’s west coast VDC group should give 3D Studio Max Design & a home-grown render farm a shot.

Using the 30 day trials, we managed to put together some basic models, teach ourselves the Backburner Server/Manager/Monitor nomenclature, and scavenge up some computers to steal CPU cycles from.

Long story short? We were able to render a 1,200 frame animation in about 4.5 hours while having a zero loss of productivity on our main workstations.

One of our VDC Technical Specialists made a great presentation at the Phoenix Revit User Group on our workflows and lessons learned.

Part 1: Revit à FBX à 3DS Max Design 2012

Part 2: Render Farm Setup

Addendum: DIY kick-butt render node for $500

(image courtesy slashfilm)

I recently got this question posed to me by someone in my comments section, and I've heard it before... so I figured, why not create a little tutorial on it.

The question:

"I am a student at Texas A&M and am getting very frustrated at the quality of my render 4d videos. If you have found a way to make them look good I would be very interested in any tips you might have.

Thanks for the help"

Since the animations are all the same, I figured I'd answer it using a 1,713 frame animation I did inside Navisworks.  (It took slightly less than 24 hours for the images to all export)

The tutorial:

The Finished Product: