Realistic views in Revit is a cool new feature recently made available for our Revit designers.
Giving companies world wide a much more creative way of visually communicating their design intent to stakeholders and collaborators.
Easily navigate through your BIM model natively in Revit and display your applied materials in real-time, wihtout having to export outside of the environment.
One of the tools you have for achieving a really good realistic view is setting the right lighting.
Once you have placed your lighting fixtures throughout the project, you can easily modify them in the Edit Type dialogue as shown in this example.
Make sure to have the right initial intensity set for your lighting, to make sure that it fits with the right setting you want.
For the light loss factor these are all set to one by default, but changing them will have some effect on how it is displayed on your view
Changing the initial colour is essentially changing the lightbulb, or the colour of the temperature of that lightbulb.
You can see an example changing from halogen to another one will change it and you can see how much more brighter it gets.
To enable realistic view you go down to the bottom left and you change it to Realistic.
Changing between the visual styles is straightforward, but to get a good visual from the realistic view, you have to apply the right materials
and configure them so they fit with the surfaces they apply to. If there's no material applied, you will end up with a grey surface as shown here.
Elements such as floors, walls, roofs and ceilings, are defined with several layers in Revit.
There's an exterior side and an interior side.
in this example we are going to assign an exterior wall with its cladding material.
For each material you can assign a texture that applies to all the surfaces that has that material assigned.
For this example I am going to apply an exterior wall cladding, which you can see in the image there.
If you click on the image, you will be able to define the spaces and the overall size and scale of this texture.
It is very important that you scale it to the right surface.
Otherwise you are going to end up with an obscured view of the material.
Once I have assigned both the exterior and the interior side of the wall, you will see it change in the Realistic View.
Now let's do the same thing to the roof, we are going to define an exterior side and an internal side of the roof.
And once you have assigned all your desired textures and materials to your objects, you can start to play around with the sun and exposures.
You will find the Sun Settings down in the left bottom, right next to Visual Styles.
If you turn on the Sun Path, you will be able to see how the sun moves throughout the day and which month it is.
If you take one extra step into the Sun Settings, you will be able to set up your Solar Study.
This is also used for Energy Analysis and Sun Analysis, but we are going to be using it for how the shadows are going to be cast throughout the Realistic View.
Down at the bottom in Visual styles you will have Graphic Display Options.
Within in you will have Shadows, Model Display, Lighting and Realistic.
You want to enable Cast Shadows in order to see a much better output of your Realistic View.
Once that's done and you have hit apply, you will start to see the shadows that's defined by the Sun Settings that you have just set.
From the same settings you also have the option to control the overall lighting of the Realistic View.
By changing it to Exterior Artificial only, you will get a night-time capture with all the values that you have specified in your lighting fixtures.
if you want to control the overall exposure of the setting, you can go into Realistic and change it to manual.
Changing these values will have a huge impact on how your model is going to be displayed.
If you follow these steps you will have a Realistic View up in no time.
And if you are looking for more material on this topic, make sure to check out our Knowledge Network.