By GMcDowellJr
#365078
On, what I consider, an average size Revit model (some 500,000 faces according to my SketchUp export... probably a few more now) it takes more than 15 minutes to export and start rendering. That seems pretty long especially when compared to the few seconds it takes from SketchUp.

Is this to be expected or is my model unusual in some way?
By raduc
#365095
GMcDowellJr wrote:On, what I consider, an average size Revit model (some 500,000 faces according to my SketchUp export... probably a few more now) it takes more than 15 minutes to export and start rendering. That seems pretty long especially when compared to the few seconds it takes from SketchUp.

Is this to be expected or is my model unusual in some way?
We tested the exporter on the sample scenes from Revit and we get somewhere between 7-10 seconds for the beginner sample and 42 - 44 seconds for the advanced one (on a i7 with 3.4 Ghz)
About 95% of the time spent exporting a scene goes into finding the right material for a surface because the Revit API gives us some very inconsistent UVs so we have to export to FBX, and because the FBX sdk doesn't give us any data for the materials, we have to map the Revit materials to the FBX model.

You can improve export times if you can reduce the amount of materials on your objects, especially family instances, best case scenario is having more objects with a single material on them because that doesn't require any extra calculations. There's also some improvement that you will be able to notice as you use the plugin because .NET speeds up execution of frequently used programs by caching some stuff.

Other than that it helps to have a powerful processor, in this case the frequency at which the processor runs is more important because we can't use multi-threading in the export process as Revit crashes when you try to make a call to the api from another thread.
By GMcDowellJr
#365122
raduc wrote:We tested the exporter on the sample scenes from Revit and we get somewhere between 7-10 seconds for the beginner sample and 42 - 44 seconds for the advanced one (on a i7 with 3.4 Ghz)
The advanced sample scene is only about 14mb... the project I'm working is closer to 72mb... and that's just for the model, if I add in all the sheets and views needed in a set of half done working documents we're double that.

I'll try assigning an MXM to all the materials and see if that doesn't improve things.

edit: I used the default.mxm that comes with Maxwell for all materials in the scene and it made no appreciable difference.
By Delineator
#365125
I can't even export the advanced sample scene, it just gives an error.

Image

Haven't had a chance to try it out on actual projects.
By thaBadfish
#365126
I took an actual project, assigned all the materials new .mxm materials, and tried both "Render" and "Export MXS". Neither works - I get the same error pictured above after waiting a long time to export. I can render simple scenes just find, but not luck yet with a larger project. Going to work on further optimizing my Revit materials before assigning .mxm materials and see if that helps. As it stands I have redundant materials (for instance I have around 7 stainless steel revit materials all assigned the same SST .mxm material).
By GMcDowellJr
#365127
Just a guess but is your install of Revit fully up to date? I don't know if that's the issue because I'm pretty sure I'm not but its something to check until you hear from NL.
By raduc
#365134
GMcDowellJr wrote:Just a guess but is your install of Revit fully up to date? I don't know if that's the issue because I'm pretty sure I'm not but its something to check until you hear from NL.
No, the problem was with some of the stairs and railings, we found it and fixed it, it will be available in the next build
By GMcDowellJr
#367868
A follow up on the lengthy export times... obvious in hindsight but using a Section Box, along with selected categories/subcategories, etc. turn off, to limit the amount of geometry in the scene can make a HUGE difference in export (and render) times.
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]