Rendering Workflow (pros and cons)

We tend to do all of our visualizations and rendering work in-house. It would be nice to hire an outside firm every time, but schedule requirements and financial requirements tend to dictate otherwise. Autodesk has a "nifty" way to link a Revit model to a 3dsMax model and automatically update the changes to the model as they are made.

This is good because:

• No need to worry if the Revit modeling is "done" or "current" because it auto-updates without new modeling in Max. There have been numerous times where we've re-modeled something in 3dsMax just to match changes we've made in Revit.
• The Revit lights, while probably not totally accurate, render up pretty nicely in Max. I'm sure that by using ALL of the lights modeled in the project it's really increasing render time, but it's nice not to have to trick the model into being well lit, or explain to clients that "well, that's not really what the lights will look like...." when they ask.

This is bad because:

• The linked model isn't exactly the most user friendly. Geometry is pretty much non-editable
• The materials and mapping seem to come in as a hot mess. Significant work is required in Max to get everything looking correct/good.

Ultimately, the goal would be to have the project designed and completed, and THEN export it into Max for tweaking, geometry adjustments, etc. Unfortunately, that is not the world that we work in.