Rendering Library

Rendering Library is not installed

This problem came up when Revit 2009 products first released, but was asked to me the other day so I thought I would post on it.

With the 2009 release of the Revit products there is a new rendering engine included with the products.

This new engine uses a Rendering library to render views within Revit and this library is necessary to enable the rendering feature in the products. Without it, you cannot render a view.

If you have seen this error there could be a few reasons.

1. You choose not to install the Rendering library content.
2. You are using Revit Structure and choose the default installation. Revit Structure does not install the Rendering library as default with the installation. You need to enable the installation of the Rendering Library in the installation of the product. Check out a solution here for the steps to solve this problem.
3. You installed the Rendering library but Revit cannot seem to find it. Revit looks for the Rendering library location as it is specified in the Options dialog box as shown below.
   
   
   Revit is looking for a file called assetlibrary_base.fbx in this location. If this location does not contain the file, the rendering feature will be disabled. Pointing Revit to the location where the assetlibrary_base.fbx file is stored should prevent this error from popping up and will enable Rendering. By default, Revit stores this file in C:\Program Files\Revit Architecture 2009\Data\Rendering\
   
   If you need to download the rendering library because you did not install it the first time, download the ProteinMaterialLibrary.cab file from here that contains the rendering content for the webupdate you have installed. The same download CAB file works for Revit Structure and MEP.
4. Finally, your machine might not meet the minimum requirements for using the Rendering Engine.
   
   The rendering engine requires that you are using a processor that uses SSE2 technology. Intel Pentium 4 processors or equivalent AMD Athlon proccesors use this technology. If your processor does not use SSE2 technology you will not be able to utilize the rendering engine in Revit 2009 products. How do you know if your processor supports SSE2 instructions? You can use a free application called CPU-Z to ID your processor. Download it from here.