Tutorials BimCraft help Walkthroughs
Render a picture of the model
Make a daylight picture of the 3D view: sky, the sun at your site's latitude, soft shadows, glass windows, then save it as a PNG.
Written for BimCraft 0.5. The same help is inside the app: press F1.
Render on the toolbar makes a picture of the 3D view that looks like daylight: a sky, the sun where the site's latitude puts it, soft shadows, light from the whole sky that darkens corners, and colors that can look like glass or metal. The model and the file are not changed.
Render the view
- Set up the 3D view the way you want the picture: orbit and zoom, hide storeys or elements you don't want, and set a section if the picture should show a cut.
- Click Render on the toolbar.
- Choose the Size and the Quality, then click Render in the dialog.
The picture fills in as it renders and gets smoother with each pass. Stop (or EscEsc) ends it early and keeps the picture so far.
- Click Save PNG to download it. It is named after the model's file.
What shows in the picture
What the 3D view shows solid: hidden and see-through elements, hidden storeys and hidden models are left out, and rooms show only when Spaces is on. A section plane or section box cuts the picture as it cuts the view. Elements show in their own colors: coloring by property (the Color tab) is not used.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Size | The view's size, twice the view's size, Full HD, 4K or a square |
| Mode | Fast, or High quality (path traced) (below) with its Time limit |
| Quality | How many passes (or, in high quality, samples) are averaged: Draft 16, Good 64, Best 256. More passes give smoother shadows and edges and take longer |
| Sky | Clear sky, Overcast, Dusk or White studio (a plain white background) |
| Sun | June 21 at 15:00 at the latitude the file gives for its site (IfcSite), turned to the model's true north. Tick Use another date and time for this picture for another time |
| Brightness | Lighter or darker, in steps (stops) |
| Ground under the model | A ground at the model's lowest point that takes the shadows and fades into the horizon |
| Draw edges | Draws the elements' edges thinly over the picture |
When the sun is below the horizon at the chosen time it is night: the sky goes dark and the model's lamps light it.
Lamps
Every light fixture in the model is a lamp in the picture: the fixtures in an IFC file (IfcLightFixture, or an element typed as a light fixture), including ones you place from the library. Each shines down from just under the fixture. When the file gives a fixture's wattage, its brightness follows from it; otherwise it is 800 lumens, a warm white.
The dialog lists the lamps under Lamps: untick one to switch it off, or type its brightness in lumens. These changes are saved in the IFC (the fixture's CadCraft_Light property set, where you can also change them in Properties), and ⌃ZCtrl+Z undoes them.
When a file says nothing about where its site is, the sun is placed at 40° north, and the dialog says so. The time is the site's clock time, worked out from its longitude, so it can be an hour off where clocks are set differently.
These settings are kept in this browser for the next picture. They are not saved in the IFC file.
Glass and other materials
Under Materials, every color on screen has a look: Matte, Satin, Glossy, Metal, Polished metal, Glass or Frosted glass. Colors the IFC file makes see-through (window glazing, for example) start as Glass.
High quality
Choose Mode › High quality (path traced) for a picture that follows light the way a camera sees it:
- light bounces between surfaces, so a room lit through a window, or by a lamp, is lit all round and colors bleed onto their neighbors;
- glass is real glass: light bends through it and it reflects the model;
- metal and polished surfaces reflect the rest of the model;
- light panels light as panels, with soft shadows.
It is much slower than Fast: each pass traces every pixel's light again. The picture starts grainy and clears as samples add up, so start small (The view's size, Draft) and choose a Time limit: when it runs out, the picture so far is kept. Stop keeps it too. The first pass waits while the browser prepares the path tracer, a few seconds on a graphics card, longer without one.
In this mode edges are not drawn, textures show their color and roughness but not their bumps, and a section cut is made on the model before the picture starts.
How long it takes
The picture is made on your own computer, by its graphics card; nothing is uploaded. Time grows with the passes and the pixels: Best has 16 times the passes of Draft, and a 4K picture has about four times the pixels of Full HD. Large models take longer per pass.