I have searched the forums for similar issues but have not seen any posts on this, so maybe it is just me.
I was excited about 2014, couldn't wait to see how wonderfull the rendering improvements would be.
I fired it up and rendered something.... ugg... that can't be right. The renderings looked awfull see attachment.
I tried this on two different machines with differing video systems. (latest drivers on both)
Played with every Inventor video option. (all 2 or 3 of them anyway)
Is this just me or is anyone else having similar issues.
They do render faster, but what good does that do, when they look like... well... (Censored)
Should I export everything as a step and send it back to 2013 for rendering?
Thanks.
T.S.
Just want to add that I agree with the OP. Really dissapointed with the ray tracing compared to 2013.
I also haven't bothered with Inventor Studio since ray tracing came in. But now it's pretty unusable.
hi LishuangLu,
Just wondering if there has been any progress on this issue and when we can expect a fix for it.
For me I use interactive whilst designing and making small changes, then I use Good when I want to take a screengrab. I never bothered with Best as in 2013 it was hardly different to Good.
I use 'Good' the most. I use interactive on the rarest occassions to do a quick color check, but 99% of the time i am using 'Good'. I don't use 'Best' at all because it takes WAY longer to render an image and the quality isn't that much better than 'Good'.
How did they even let this ship like this? This is a major functionality that just plain doesn't work. And now it has been months since release and they're JUST getting around to struggling to fix it? Ridiculous, and good reason to dump my subscription and move over to solidworks.
They've been too busy trying to find ways to monetize the cloud.
Yes, it seems pretty logical if you're going to update a kernel that you fully test it before turning it loose. This kind of release it now and fix it later mentality is what got the US auto industry in trouble years ago. Hardly a way to do business.
how are we doing on this? I understand that it could be a complicated fix, but do you have some kind of ETA on when this patch would be available?
And here I thought it was just me. I assumed this was just Autodesk trying to compartmentalise and use IV for design and Showcase for rendering...
Even if this was the case, that would be a poor solution for the ray tracing element of realistic view being broken. (especially if a person and/or company only had Inventor instead of the whole Autodesk package)
One of the main things i do with assemblies is tweak them in a presentation file in order to make higher quality images for operator's manuals. These adjustments can't be made in Inventor Studio or in Showcase unless i manually modded the master assembly to have components seperated (which would take 10x as long).
Tweaking in a presentation to show components in various orientations works perfectly with the ray tracing realistic view. But until this fix happens, i am forced to export anything i want to make a picture of into a step file and open it up that was in a previous version of inventor. Then i have to re-color the entire assembly and any decals used need a previous version of inventor created as decals don't translate in step files.
All in all, this is a huge pain in the butt, and like previous posters have stated, it is unbelievable how this could have slipped by someone and shipped clearly broken.
Slipped through, quite possibly. But hold up the release? If it didn't run under Win 8, that would be a definite hold. As would other problems which would prevent primary operation. I'm not certain, but if this kernel issue is from a third-party or another internal development silo they may not have had much say in getting it fixed in time or otherwise.
Without wanting to say the wrong things, at the end of the day Inventor is an engineering cad package - I would prefer they concentrate on those aspects before any visualization add-ons. Ok, the raytracing is down with 2014, but we still have Studio, Showcase and Max - arguably it's not the end of the world (just means a different work-process).
From memory, I think kernal updates are rare with hot-fixes and service-patches, so the reality might be having to wait for the next release (2015) for a fix.
Sam M.
Inventor and Showcase monkey
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I have to admit i wondered that... but, presumably there is more than 1 kernal (as this was specified to be to do with the RapidRT kernel) - the modelling kernal is the one that's often talked about with respect to version control and backwards compatability, so changes to this can only be done with each release. But, if there's a separate rendering/raytracing system, then i guess it could be updated without causing backwards-compatability issues. But, that's not to say it's wise making major changes to any core system without extensive stability testing which comes as part of a new major release. not to mention that if this RapidRT kernel is used across multiple software packages then any changes would presumably have to happen for all... cue more complexity and testing requirements, and possibly an even greater likelyhood of it being unlikely to happen with a hot-fix or service pack.
Sam M.
Inventor and Showcase monkey
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Would this issue also explain why I get laggy beahaviour after a minute or two using IBL backgrounds?
For example if I use 'Empty Lab' as the background, and use 'shaded' (not ray tracing), rotating the model is quite smooth to start with. Then very quickly it seems to slow down, especially after I've flicked to ray-tracing and back.
If I switch to 'default' or 'two lights' everything is fast and smooth again.
I'm really hoping that you are dead wrong on the issue because if you are right, that effectively stalls half of my job for 10-11 months.
To say that we have studio, showcase and max to fulfill the presentation portion of inventor is reaching for a cheap fix. Not every autodesk subscriber has the whole package. We only have one computer in our office that has the complete inventor package. The rest only have inventor.
To add to that, things like decals do not translate when opening inventor files in showcase.
i can't say anything on 3ds max, as i don't have it on my computer, but from what i can remember it was one of the most complicated programs that i have tinkered around in and i don't think that it would fill this need without extensive training on how to use the software.
Inventor's studio is no solution either. It is all fine if you are working on something the size of a doghouse or smaller, but anything on a large scale requires a large amount of playing around with environments to add lighting setups and messing around with them until you have a set up that will finally work.
Ray tracing was the perfect presentation tool that inventor had. It was quick, easy and it looked really good. Plus, becuase it was a visual style, if you were working with a presentation (which i mostly did) you were able to tweak components into different orientations, take a picture, move more components, take a picture. To use studio in this aspect wouldn't work as you would have to modify master and children assemblies to contrain components in the desired orientation.
In 2010, Inventor had a program called Inventor Publisher. It was specifically designed to make assembly pictures and to show various steps of assembly explosion for assembly guides or installation manuals. At the time it looked far better than Inventor's native graphics and was an effective tool. Unfortunatly, it was a prototype program and didn't continue into production. But in 2012, inventor introduced the Ray Tracing feature which made that program obsolete, as tweaking in presentation files now provided both the visual shine as well as the explosion ease.
To say that it isn't the end of the world that this feature is broken is true. But to compare, let's say a village has its only source of water blocked by a large boulder and to get more water they can either move the rock or climb over a mountain to get more water. Right now, fixing ray tracing is like moving the boulder and using another method to do what i need to do is like climbing over the mountain. Yeah, it is doable, but stupid as heck.
I agree that inventor is, first and foremost, an engineering cad program. But it is also being used, alot, as a presentation tool with features that were created for that purpose. And those features are broken.
Hey, I don't work for AD or have an insight into their dev process - I just know that in the past when they've said the bug is within the kernal we've had to wait to the next release for it to be fixed... Also, as touched on, it is the general understanding that file compatability from release to release (and the inability to use newer files on an older version) is down to kernal versions - if the core kernal is updated then would this suddenly make it 2014v2 and anyone with 2014 will be unable to open the new files?!? we don't know... All we do know is that the apparent issue is within "the RapidRT kernel" - whether this can be updated mid-release at all, dunno. whether this can be updated without affecting the overal versioning file-system, dunno... Whether RapidRT kernel can be updated for Inventor to fix our issues without needing to consider anything else that uses RapidRT, dunno...
I appreciate a lot of people use the raytracing but, as you've pointed out, it's a fairly new addition to the software which already had Studio, so you could argue that Studio is the more fleshed out and the primary rendering tool (with animation capabilities, etc.) and the raytracing feature is a secondary tool (and as soon as you start thinking down those lines, it goes lower and lower down the pecking order for any fixes).
Just, in my cynical way, unless you hear a statement saying "we can update the RapidRT kernel mid-release without screwing everything else up" then I almost wouldn't hold your breath. I'm not belittling your frustrations, I hope it is fixed, as any improvements to our software is a good thing, don't get me wrong.
Sam M.
Inventor and Showcase monkey
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Ya, i can understand that, and i apologize for my aggression in my frustration. I guess i should just accept the fact that i will probably have to start exporting everything new we make into a step format and import it into a previous version of inventor so that i am able to do what needs to be done for my applications.
And for what Mikah said. I completely agree with the slot function. I have used it alot since we installed 2014 and it is great. However, i would much sooner grind my teeth having to manually draw slots than to lose the ray tracing functionality. Had i known ahead of time about the ray tracing issue, i probably wouldn't have made the upgrade.
I guess it just goes to say that you should have one person run the program for a while and see if it is worth upgrading before having everyone jump to the next ship. Now, thinking back, im pretty sure we did that with 2010 to 2012 and this was the first Inventor upgrade where I was at the helm. Since we upgraded from 2012 to 2014, i was pretty blinded by the ability for center point rectangles and slot features that i didn't think that any other critical portions of the program might have bugs or errors.
All in all, i guess this can be a lesson learned. Hopefully they can fix it for 2014 yet, but if they can't im really hoping it will be fixed for 2015 or this will be a long 2 years.