Render Queue (ish) for Revit

I love using the simplified rendering capabilities of Mental Ray in Revit 2009 and 2010, but it’s a hassle to do large numbers of renderings. Unfortunately, there’s no batch render functionality and the API doesn’t yet have controls for the necessary functions. However, using the journaling mechanism built into Revit and a handful of VB script techniques, you can build a render queue that, while lacking in User Interface, works pretty well.
This is a render queuing script that I built about a year ago and have refined a bit (one for revit 2009, on for revit 2010). It isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done, at least to make multiple renderings from a single file.

[Edit: There are variations and developments of this script with a more user friendly Graphic Interface at these locations:
Revit Batch Renderer: Beta 2.0
Batch Render . . . In French]

To use it you will need to do the following:

• Put on your propeller hat. Tinfoil will work too.
• Put the script in the same folder as the .rvt file to be rendered.
• Set your render settings (names of views, quality, size, etc) in the space provided. 2010 version has a bit more functionality than the 2009 version. (Please read the instructions in the script carefully, it's easy to put in bad information and the script is a sensitive hothouse flower.)
• Save changes and drag this file from Windows Explorer onto your Revit shortcut icon to run. Images are saved in the same folder, so make sure to remove all output before running for a second time, as the script will fail if you try and overwrite exisiting files.
  

Caveats: The last saved state of your file MUST be:

• All views to be rendered in the file MUST have render settings set to "print" NOT "screen"
• Render quality of each view must be set to something other than target output (i.e. you can't save the view with quality set to "High" if script is going to set it to "High" too).

The script shouldn't make any changes to your file, as it undoes alterations to your file before closing and there is no “save” at the end (workshare files do a "Relinquish elements and worksets" upon exit).

Tips: I recommend first trying out this script with your images very small and quality very low. That way you can trouble shoot the batch you intend to print (I often screw up getting the view names EXACTLY right). If you do this, don’t forget to delete your resulting low quality images, as the script will fail trying to overwrite them when you run it for a second time.

I’m sure someone out there with better scripting abilities can make something more comprehensive (something that could render from multiple files, for instance) and I’d invite anyone to use this script to do so. I’ll probably make some additions to it later to save out multiple exposures of the same image. If anyone has suggestions about how to improve the functionality, leave some comments and I’ll see what I can do.

As with anything you download from some bozo on the interweb, use at your own risk.

{Edit: There are variations and developments of this script at these locations:

Revit Batch Renderer: Beta 2.0

Batch Render . . . In French]