For those of you that have been paying attention to Autodesk’s Revit BIM software and what’s in store for next year, well done. For those that haven’t: STOP THE PRESSES! Revit is about to get a mighty overhaul as Autodesk goes forward with its plans to release Revit Sunrise, sometime around the middle of next year.
A whole host of newer and better ways of doing things are on the cards, but the biggest news appears to be the predicted increase in swiftness that Sunrise will have when it comes to running 3D models. It’s no secret that Revit’s 3D rendering has seen very little in the way of improvement over the last decade or so, therefore, when its announced that Sunrise will run 3D models around 40% faster, users take notice. How are they managing this significant improvement in performance? Well, they call it occlusion culling, which is a fancy way of saying that your computer’s graphics card will only be employed in rendering the model elements that are being displayed, leaving hidden of off-screen models – including walls, ducts, etc. – alone until they are needed, vastly improving the time it takes for different views to open and update.
Besides this, it’s also claimed that colour fills will be relegated to a background process to allow you to continue working in a model while views update, thus speeding your process along further, and the use of RevirWorker processes to significantly reduce the time it takes to export sheets to DWF and DWFx files.
And, along with trying to make the processing, erm, process that much more quick and efficient, Sunrise has tried to work in lots of helpful touches to make a user’s day-to-day tasks simpler, such as: Enabling the use of global parameters to capture design intent on a single project file without it having to be assigned to categories; being able to filter voids and solids with only one tool; adding additional modelling capabilities to perspective views; advanced thermal zoning; finally being able to cancel the entire run of printing or exportation of multiple views with one button, instead of having to manually cancel each view separately; plus a ton of other updates and features designed to streamline the BIM process.
The Revit Sunrise Release preview has finished now, indicating that the developers seem to be done with most of their beta testing. It just remains to be seen exactly when in ‘mid-2016’ the update will actually roll out. For many, it can’t be too soon.