Rendered Walkthroughs & Dividing up the Rendering Process

Creating a walkthrough in Revit set to a rendering model graphics style is a very system resource intensive process.  Revit needs to render back to back images without fully clearing out the memory in use.

In most cases a single workstation will be unable to render the hundreds or thousands of still rendered images for a typical walkthrough.  Even if the workstation could, the rendering process would take days to complete in most cases.

One approach which typically works well is to divide up the frame range of a walkthrough.  This allows the rendered walkthrough to complete in most cases and allows for multiple workstations to divide up the rendering process.

For example say you have a 200 frame rendered walkthrough.  And you have 5 workstations which can be used for rendering.

In a walkthrough view, when you export the walkthrough under R > Export > Images and Animations > Walkthrough, you have an option for Frame Range:

If you have multiple workstations, open a copy of the project file on each workstation.  Then export a different frame range on each workstation.  For example:

Workstation 1 = 1-40
Workstation 2 = 41-80
Workstation 3 = 81-120
Workstation 4 = 121-160
Workstation 5 = 161-200

This will finish the walkthrough 5 times faster, and give you 5 video files.  The last step would be to combine the video files, in an application such as Windows Movie Maker, and export 1 complete rendering animation.

You could also choose image files instead of the .AVI format.  This would create still images for each frame, and they could be combined in a similar program.

It is important to clear the Windows temp folder prior to starting Revit and the rendering process on each workstation.  The default folder location is as follows:

Windows XP : %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp

Windows Vista\7: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp