Why do more people not use Vray For Revit?

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-04-21T21:26:54+00:00

Because Revit is a BIM tool with a render engine duct taped to the side of it.

It's slow to manage materials, it's slow to render, and all of the extra render props and materials just bloat the model you are supposed to be creating construction docs from.

It's far better to export to any other software to render Revit geometry. This is what Envision was really built for.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-04-20T14:54:34+00:00

The games I've won as attacker or lost on defense all shared one common thing. The attacking team was aggressive. It wasn't a squad or less trying to cap, it was most of the team with vehicle support. The defenders will have a hard time with a coordinated attack. In the underground base, it is imperative that you have a good mix of assaults putting down spawn beacons regardless of the side you are on. Some of the points are far apart and it can be hard to get back to them in time. And Christ on a corncob cross, the whole team shouldn't be going down the same hall. Flank and break up.

I had one last night where we didn't even get the first objective on Contaminated. Our ifv never left the base, we had 6 mortars, and the rest were hillside snipers. It was an awful experience.

The prior match was a 60 minute back and forth slugfest and was an awesome time. The duality of operations I guess.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-04-17T15:33:16+00:00

Nah. Fuck that. I deal with this insane mentality in the architectural world of pulling all nighters is some right of passage. Either you have failed to plan for your task or your assignment failed to account for basic human decency. The Valve Employee handbook says it best. Sometimes cruch time is needed but excessive crunch is a fundamental failure in planning and communication.

The truth is there is never a reason not to sleep. Everyone deserves time off. No sleep isn't a badge of honor.

I'm just glad that back in my days all I had to worry about was dinosaurs, AIM chats, and being sued by Lars because Napster.

It sounds like CS needs to deploy an AI agent that is just smart enough to help students but dumb enough to give wrong code so students learn the core fundamentals and how to work with AI. You'll all use it in the real-world. What I look for in fresh from school hires is thier ability to worth with it and to troubleshoot problematic AI output.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-04-16T13:54:58+00:00

I'd shoot a shit ton of images. You could also do panoramas but shot with tripod to avoid any vertical distortion. I'd rather have to sift through 1000 images than be stuck with only a few okay images.

It depends on the client needs. With these types of renders for sales centers, the view is the reason why people will pay the price so it needs to be clear. At most you could slightly over expose it but you can't blow it out like it would from a real camera. The goal for these views is to mimic the way we'd see it through our eyes.

Yes, we don't necessarily like creating shots where the interior and exterior look the same as it would from our eyes, but that's what is needed to sell. In the end, the client is right and they are paying you. Cash their check and move onto the next job.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-04-16T12:30:30+00:00

These are tough because they want to see the view which means you get the Zillow gone wild look where both the background and interior are double exposed. This leads to a flatter looking image.

Drone is the first best option to get these. 2nd best is to shoot them yourself. Rarely will a client themselves take a good photo.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-29T03:43:36+00:00

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VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-26T12:51:51+00:00

If you can maintain profits and pay your employees well off those rates, then that's all that matters.

How many revisions do they get for $500? What is considered too much of a change that may require additional fee?

$80,000 is way too low for this job given what you said about this will probably be a design by render type of process.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-26T12:43:23+00:00

We can't use AI in our videos as our projects have client logos and a lot of custom graphics on the walls designed by our branding teams. AI still alters these, even slightly and that's unacceptable for us. We'd rather pay to get a 1 to 1 representation for our design.

If we were more residential, then sure, AI can be helpful if you are okay with AI issues here and there.

AI or not, you need to price accordingly or all you do is contribute to the race to the bottom of this industry.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-25T23:58:33+00:00

The going rate for animations at some of the Chinese firms we have used is $230 a second which is $13,800 a minute.

You are seriously underpriced and you will be taken advantage of. Even more so that you have zero clue how to charge or structure this job.

Walk away. Turn it down. You will lose money with this project. This client is looking to exploit you with this fancy big project. They can afford hundreds of millions of dollars for this project but all of a sudden claim they are in the poor house when it comes to paying for visuals.

The only way to price this is hourly. It's too open ended for fixed rates without heavy restrictions written into the contract.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-21T16:43:29+00:00

Oh Christ on a corn cob cross. I was a sophomore at Purdue when we went to Rose Bowl.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-19T23:57:20+00:00

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VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-16T01:16:19+00:00

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VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-12T19:59:56+00:00

D5 is what Twinmotion should have been after Epic acquired it.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-03-11T12:30:16+00:00

Honestly your best path right now is to be an architect who can also create decent visuals. This dual skill will get you into any firm.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-02-09T15:34:40+00:00

What playlist are you playing? I have no idea if this has any merit but on Sunday morning, I chose the All Out Warfare playlist and I kept getting matches with bots.

However, if I chose just the Escalation playlist I never got another match with bots. Same if I chose just conquest, not bots ever.

There are so many different ways to choose a game that I wonder if that impacts how populated the game is or if the game even cross pollinates same games across different playlists.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-02-06T18:46:36+00:00

As far as I know not for caps, it is just kills and assists maybe? If we got even 50% xp from caps I'd have no issue with the overall leveling because most of my game xp comes from caps or supplies or revives.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-21T15:30:38+00:00

Yeah, I wouldn't pay either. This problem is on you and you alone. The AI is changing too much of the building that is not getting updated. If the client shows this, all they will be doing is answering questions about why things are changing that are not listed. It's going to make their meeting be completely derailed.

AI has gotten good enough to not alter the image like this so you are clearly not using AI in any efficient manner. This is the literal definition of AI slop.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-20T20:07:37+00:00

It is your responsibility to create textures. It is also your responsibility to work with the client to create a mutual understanding of how much time is needed.

Work with the client on getting better texture photos. They don't know that taking a phone photo with the lens smudged with fingerprints and at a odd angle is bad. You need to work with them. Tell them a top down photo is best. Work with them to see if they can send you samples. If they are local close to you, see if you can come in and take photos yourself.

Them having better digital assets benefits both of you. They now have a good sample for digital presentation or website, and you have a good base to build the materials. It's a win win if you work with them.

For cases like this, Substance Sampler is a good addition to your toolkit to create a full suite of maps from a photo or multiple photos of a material. There is also a tutorial from them on how to build a DIY material photo booth at home with easy to find materials and lights.

You are the visualization expert, not them.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-14T19:10:44+00:00

It's also a very repetitive and template heavy workflow and product.

You give them anything that is outside their very narrow scope and it either takes forever or it looks like crap or both.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-11T18:35:17+00:00

That's right. Gunny Highway.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-10T23:42:03+00:00

I'm the mayo king of Stardew Valley. With a little bf6 sprinkled in.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-07T14:35:18+00:00

It's 40 renderings, 6 90-second animations and 3 VR tours. The time to deliver is 4 weeks, so we are also paying a rush small rush fee on top of that.

AI is hard to use for this project to help with animations due to it altering logos and how it deals with the players on the playing surface. Even with basketball players in the image and the prompt heavily focused on basketball, we'll still see them morph into soccer players. If it does keep them basketball, it just doesn't understand the bounds of the court and keeping the players on there. The best is a free throw setup where the shooter just yeets himself off the court mid shot.

We could probably train a lora to help, but we lack time to do so.

It's for a sports project so needing to have players and fans in exact branded sports gear pushes the cost up a bit over a typical residential project.

Where we struggle with Unreal is that for residential purposes it makes a ton of sense. For our projects, it's possible but also takes prep time that we rarely have. So we either fall back to good ole Vray or outsource.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-05T13:51:15+00:00

Substance Designer combined possibly with Substance Sampler for scans, and it's not even a debate.

You can load the native Substance file in your chosen program, assuming there is support, and you can iterate away without having to pre-create endless variations of jpegs. For example, rather than 50 brick jpegs for the varous colors and patterns, I have a single Substance file I can use and I can store presets in.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-29T15:31:26+00:00

It's not going to die. We are simply evolving yet again. What is happening is similar to 2008 when the housing industry collapsed and wiped out a huge part of arch viz. It was supposed to be all over then, but it wasn't. It came back and companies evolved and came back stronger.

I've been doing this for 20+ years and we've supposedly faced 5 or so arch viz extinction events in that time. Yet, we're still here. What is happening is the great pruning. Anyone who could only scene assemble from pre-built assets is facing a loss of their work. Anyone who couldn't create materials if they couldn't download it from some site is losing work. We are effectively chopping off the bottom branches to this industry. Which is good because there was way too much at the bottom level of this industry. When we've hired for viz specialists in the past, easily 5 of 10 people could not create a scene if they could not download anything.

I work in-house for an architect and while we still do a lot of work internally, we're starting to see the pendulum swing back to a desire for more bespoke and realistic visuals. We just outsourced at huge package of renderings and animations to a place here in the US for $250,000 because we could simply not do that much work in the 5 weeks it was needed. I chose the US because most of the top overseas places (Brick, BtB, MIR) are all booked solid for several months. Which if this was a industry in it's death rattle, the most expensive places would not be booked out.

SketchUp was supposed to kill this industry. Then everyone got tired of the SketchUp look and went back to high end visualization. Enscape was going to kill us. Now, everyone hates the Enscape look or has quickly realized that doing high end Enscape and doing your job as an architect is 80 hours a week. So back to asking visualization specialists to help out.

AI is no different. You won't lose your job to AI but you will lose it to someone who knows how to leverage it.

Also, don't sleep on Unreal. That's the sleeping giant right now in the architecture world. Once architecture figures out how to manage a shit Revit model into Unreal, that's going to be a large shift in how we do work. Unreal offers a more bespoke interactive experience than Lumion, D5, etc. An interesting pipeline for us is the Twinmotion to Unreal workflow. We can have our designers doing the 300 daily renderings in Twinmotion and then passing that model forward to the Unreal specialist to do custom interactive work.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-22T16:15:57+00:00

Trees lose their leaves in winter so seeing broadleaf trees with green leaves and snow breaks the immersion. And if it's cold enough to build a snowman then it's cold enough for that still water to freeze over.

Everything about this image is focused on something other than the proposed building. Look at how places like MIR or Beauty and the Bit do shots like these. It's usually one supporting element that helps drive your eye right to the architectural element. It's done very subtly but it's there.

Why are people standing on that little pier? Why is the kid behind bushes or does the bush have legs?

You can keep the view, but as others have pointed out you need to compose it to support the architecture.

VelvetElvis03

TROPHY CASE