Revit Architecture and Max

Recently, I rendered my first Revit model in Autodesk 3ds Max. While I had extensive previous experience with Autodesk Viz, I had only used AutoCAD models in the Viz environment. I have rendered many Revit models in Accurender within Revit and have been able to tweak the settings enough to get very decent models. On this rendering though, we wanted to create a nightime rendering and that was something that you can not create well in Accurender.I was thrilled at the easy transfer from Revit into Max. While you have to export to AutoCAD first, when you bring that file into Max it allows you to select items by object. This project had three buildings, thus three linked files, and by being able to select the similar objects of each building allowed me to go from Revit to finished renderings in one day. Mix the easy use of the Revit/Max combo with ArchVision's RPC objects (People, Trees and Cars) and you can go from simple to amazing.

I am soon at the end of the 30 day trial that they allow from the download at the Autodesk website but I will be highly recommending the purchase of this product for our company. I will also try a copy of Viz to see if the operability is the same and will report back to everyone once I have reviewed it.

Project North / True North

This has always puzzled me and wanted to find out if anyone else out there felt the same. When setting up a project you do not always know what project north will be on new construction project. The default orientation though for Revit is set to Project North.

So, basically to get things setup correctly from the beginning I have to put in the property coordinates from the surveyor, test out options to figure out the building orientation, rotate the entire project so that it lays out correctly on the sheets, set the view properties to True North and then finally go to Tools > Project Position / Orientation > Rotate True North.

Is it me or is this set backwards? Does anyone out there have a good reason why it is acceptable as it is currently set-up? Is this something that the Revit development team can fix? Kinda like the Ceiling misspelling on a tab that took them a few releases to fix.