I have read not to go directly to .avi before, and I would much rather render single frames. However, I don’t have any software to combine the individual frames t the moment. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

When I try to do single frame interior renderings, I get just get blank, black renderings. Exterior single frame renderings will give me a white silhouette of my building on a black background.

Thanks for the help. I will look into both of those and start rendering single frames. Now I just need to figure out what I am doing wrong with the rendering settings… there are a lot more than in Revit or Navisworks.

I think I may have figured it out on my own (keyword think)… When going directly to .avi, I should have been doing everything uncompressed. That may have been a codec issue. I’ve gotten exterior frames to render just fine now.

As for interiors…

I did not realize that I needed to turn the lights in the scene to “on”. I’m used to Revit where the lights are automatically on and need to be turned off. I imported the model from revit and just assumed that was still the case (You know what they say about assumptions...). However, now that the lights are on, they are not showing up in the scene. All I am getting is daylight through glass doors in the rendering and the viewport (set to perspective and realistic).

I would love to upload the scene, but since it contains the export of the Revit model I can’t. It’s considered propriety by the Owner and we could get in trouble for posting it. I can say that I am using the MR renderer, the lighting is composed of photometric free lights, and the materials are all from Revit (I haven’t edited anything since linking the .fbx file from Revit). If you need to know any of the settings, I will be more than happy to provide them.

Check your exposure and the values for your lights.  Compared to the Sun your lights might as well be turned off. I believe the fix is to set the lights to Unitless and crank up the output (80,000 springs to mind).

How would I set the lights to unitless?

I moved to an interior room with no windows so I won’t be affected by the sunlight. I can figure that one out later. I’m pretty sure I need to learn more about mr Sky Portals.

Through a little research and some tutorials (Do you have any suggestions for good ones outside of full fledged training programs?)I figured out part of my problem… Ctrl+L. Now I have lights in the viewport and it’s not pitch black. The problem now is that it is tinted blue.

If it’s entirey indoors (no external light coming in) then it’s probably an Exposure issue. Unitless is an option on the Modify Panel (for the Light).
Blue? Not sure - you begin to see why I suggested posting the scene - there are so many possibilities it’s impossible to guess at all of them (yes, I understand why you can’t do that).

That’s what I was thinking. I’m just not used to having so many options for exposure (and everything else), so I’m not sure where to begin.

I started over, not that I lost any real work, and the blue has gone away (not sure what it was or why). I think toggling lights on and off in the viewport (Ctrl+L) was a big part of my problem. They’re lighting up the viewport and the renderings now, but they seem a little weak and they’re not emitting a whole lot of light. This may be a materials issue (I’ve read that materials lose A LOT of properties when you import/link them to 3DS Max) or a lighting issue. I’ll play around with both until I figure it out, unless you have a better suggestion.

I understood the benefit of posting the scene as soon as I opened 3DS. Thanks for understanding the reasoning. Many lesser people would have just walked away and stopped posting.