Octane Rendering Software, a Plug-in for Revit Architecture

For those of you who are familiar with Revit Architecture, a building information modeling (BIM) software used widely in the architectural industry, you should be familiar with the rendering capabilities. For those of us who completed our architectural degree, we were most likely introduced to this software in design school.

Do you remember that studio deadline and having to produce renderings of our project in Revit? We found ourselves frantically trying to put together our design presentation a day before the project was actually due, because lets face it, it is college and there are some of us that are procrastinators! The night before the deadline, we are sitting in the studio computer lab, we open our project in Revit and we create a 3D perspective view that best showcases our design. We then open the rendering dialog and begin the rendering process. What we tend to forget when working with the basic rendering capabilities of Revit Architecture, especially on computers that are not equipped with the right hardware, is that the rendering process of a good quality image may take hours to produce. For procrastinators, this is a design student’s worst nightmare!

An alternative rendering approach, to end those countless headaches, can be a software called Octane.

Octane is a rendering software produced by a company called Otoy that produces quality images in a shorter amount of time by using the computer’s GPU instead of the CPU. We are talking seconds compared to hours!  This software uses a real-time rendering approach that lets you modify changes directly in the scene as it updates almost instantaneously. Although there are other rendering software products out there, Octane is a definite contender and may be a quicker and more time efficient approach to realistic renderings. For more information on this software please visit Otoy’s website http://render.otoy.com/gallery2.php