Rendering Changes in Revit 2009

The Revit 2009 products have a lot of nice enhancements in them - some of them seemingly minor, but with a huge impact, such as being able to dimension to a point or override dimension text. However one that will be noticed in a big way (and hopefully a positive one) is the new rendering engine and interface. When you move to the "Rendering" tab of the Design Bar you will now have two tools - "Modify" of course, and "Render View". Selecting this button will bring up the new Render dialog box, which has all of the settings for rendering in one place. Revit now uses the Mental Ray rendering engine, bringing it more fully into standardization with other Autodesk products, and in my opinion, providing for much more realistic and compelling images while at the same time simplifying the rendering process.



In addition to the revamped interface and rendering engine, the render properties editing and interface of material dialog has been revamped with an asset browser built in. There is a huge library of pre-configured material templates and types added.