Major projects on the Revit platform include:
Project Builder:
A program that asks the user basic questions about a building such as the number of stories, match-lines etc. then builds a complete presentation and construction document set by automatically generating the required views and sheets while correctly naming and numbering them to comply with company standards. It places the generated views on the sheets, additionally it will pull standardized general sheets from the organizations library. Project Builder can generate about 50 sheets a minute and eliminates errors in naming and numbering, spelling mistakes etc. It effectively embodies domain knowledge of construction sets within the program enabling more junior people to perform this task in profoundly less time than is normally required to set up a set within Revit.
Revit to Octane/Unity/HoloLens Exporter:
This program is the key to all rendering and VR work in Gensler's SE region. It exports .obj files for use in Unity and Octane directly from the Revit model, (a file format currently not provided by Autodesk). It will output FBX files to Unity and to Microsoft's mixed reality HoloLens platform honoring materials and transparency, currently not possible with Autodesk's Revit to FBX exporter.
Its primary use however is to move Revit models to Octane Render, a super fast GPU based renderer. The exporter will export;
- Materials in color or grey-scale
- Revit Cameras to Octane Cameras
- 'Scatter' data for high poly object substitution of Revit furniture, plants, lights and entourage categories
- Weld vertexes on the way out for smaller models without edge tearing
- Automatically adjust Revit rgb color values to avoid material merging in the obj specifications
- Optionally organize the obj data by Revit Category, or Revit Material
Octane's quality and ease of use makes it a superior authoring tool for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences. The workflow is thus model and assign materials in Revit, texture and light the model in Octane, render to flat images, or single point of view VR scenes viewable on Samsung Gear VR devices, or export from Octane (see below) to HoloLens for high fidelity Mixed Reality, or to the Unity gaming Engine for VR on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or Samsung Gear VR devices.
Major projects on the Octane platform include:
Animator:
This program allows for the creation of movies directly inside of Octane, avoiding more complicated workflows requiring animations to be set up in external programs. The tool is quite different from traditional AEC animation programs in that it based on the aggregation of a series of camera moves, e.g. pans, rotations, orbits etc. rather than following a predetermined path. This means a movie can be composited in a manner more akin to the way commercial movies are currently made.
Batch Render:
This program permits the bulk rendering and exporting of the result of any number of scenes configured in Octane Render. The key innovation is letting the user specify the amount of time for each scene to render thus enabling them to manage precisely to a deadline by dividing the remaining time by the number of renderings required. This is possible due to the fact that Octane is a progressive renderer, in that it keeps rendering until told to stop continuously improving the quality of the output as it goes.
Unity and Hololens Exporter:
This program will export a rendered model to the Unity gaming engine, and the Microsoft Hololens resulting in higher quality visualization on these two platforms.