Structural renders are getting used more often and the mental ray engine leaves a grey line at the horizon, here's a little trick to bypass the grey horizon line in renders, it's not great but it's quick:

1. Render an image and save to .tif or .png - This will create an alpha channel transparency with no sky, and no horizon.
2. Change the the target of the camera to be 100m or so in the air so that nothing but sky is seen, re-render and save the sky image as a .jpg - This renders really fast as there's no geometry
3. In photoshop (or image software of your choice) add the sky in behind the image.

.png image (with alpha channel)

.jpg image

composite (.jpg was rotated 180deg.)

The final image looks better once more scene assets are added and you don't need to place an expensive (in render time) tree line along the back of the image.

It's been a while since I've posted anything but I've been quite busy and these days that's a good problem to have!

I saw this topic at the Autodesk Revit Architecture Services & Support RSS feed I subscribe to and I thought it would be good to point it out since renders are becoming more & more important in all the disciplines:

Issue

You want to know why the size of an FBX file exported from Revit® is larger than the original Revit RVT file.

Solution

The original Revit file does not contain the same data as the FBX file. Revit scene file information is based on Revit-specific construction information obtained from the Revit software and is more view-specific in nature.

When this data is exported as an FBX file, it is converted to complex FBX scene information based on geometric data, such as vertex coordinates, UVs, and material data, which is embedded in the FBX file...

read the full atricle here

A helpful little tool that seems a little bit hidden, at least I've not seen or heard of it before.  When adding walls with the draw tool & the location line set to centre of wall I noticed that revit was finding the centre of pairs of lines in my cad file underlay.

fig.1, my cad file underlay

fig.2, 3 & 4, revit assuming parallel lines are really walls

fig.5, nice that's the point I wanted :)

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I can't remember the last time I was excited to get my hands on an update to a software package so much as I am for revit's 2010 update.  I am terrified of the ribbon mainly due to experiences I've had with it in autocad slowing to a snails pace but autodesk has assured us that this will not happen in revit.

What I'm most happy with is this quote from Inside the Factory "Another enhancement concerned the project browser. We observed many customers running with the browser undocked on a second monitor, despite having to re-set it every session. Revit 2010 now remembers the project browser state and location between sessions...Concerning dual monitors,  I can say that multi-monitor support is one of our most highly requested UI features. We are actively researching this topic and we would like to hear more about your frustrations, experiences and suggestions concerning multiple monitors."

Check out the full inside the factory post on Screen Real Estate and be sure to let them hear from you.