Inventor Studio does not render transparent materials in video

[Anonymous]

I finallly got my animation ready, now all I have to do is render. The problem I am having is that even though I have chosen a transparent material for a part in my machine, when I render the video there is no transparency in the material. If I rendered an image instead of a video, then the transparency becomes perceivable. How can I solve this problem?

[WHolzwarth]

5 years later I'm stumbling about the same problem

Walter

[JDMather]

Can you set as a partial Fade instead?

[WHolzwarth]

I don't think so, Jeffrey.

The first part of the intended animation seems to be finished after about 8 hours.

I'll come back later with the video and a screenshot of the transparent parts in the IAM.

Walter

[WHolzwarth]

Here's the Video, done with 2016 Studio Render. 331 shots took the whole night, and I'm not pleased with the quality.

Textures are missing, transparent parts are not, and even with 50 loops in rendering black points are left.

That's not good for my health

Walter

[WHolzwarth]

And here's another video, a Studio animation recorded with Camtasia Studio.

I've had minor troubles here, too, because the minimal time interval for animation steps seems to be 0,1s. I had to double my initial times in Studio animation.

And in Camtasia Studio setting speed to 999% was needed (1000% is no more possible). It's still not really smooth, but can be made better. I'm too lazy.

What's the benefit of this workflow?

- Acceptable recording times

- Transparent parts are ok

- Textures come through

- No black pixels left

- Camtasia has better scene transitions than Inventor Studio

That's better for my health

Walter

[Daniel248]

Hi Walter,

You may remember the old ‘Beer renders’ we did a while ago in this thread…

Similarly, I’ve done a quick test for video with rendered glass, transparency and reflectivity here (link), which can be seen in the second part of the short video (15 seconds + reverse).

Video (just a simple camera animation) was rendered to Frames in Inventor Studio 2016, settings: Medium, 1 Iteration per frame, 450 frames, 30 fps, HD (1920x1080 frame size). Then, I’ve down sized and rendered to HDV 1280x720p MP4 8Mbps in post-processing.

When it comes to making videos, the problem with Inventor is that it has only very basic output video formats: we can only do Windows Media format (*.wmv – badly behaved, highly compressed, and limited to a paltry Bitrate of 1.5Kbps Max.), or AVI.

If we need a decent quality video straight out of Inventor Studio, we have to go for AVI Full Frames (Uncompressed), which will create a huge AVI file – maybe good enough to playback on a PC monitor, if we’re lucky enough to be able to open it. To do anything else with such file, we still need a video editor / converter.

N.B.: Just for comparison purposes, I’ve rendered exactly the same 15 second animation clip I've done earlier as uncompressed AVI HD 1920x1080, and after 1 hour and 10 minutes of rendering, Inventor Studio created a corrupted 2.61 GB AVI file which I cannot open or play with anything! Not good for anyone's health.

To get the best out of Inventor Studio, I render to frames and use a 3-rd party video editing program to create and edit the actual video.

[WHolzwarth]

Once more it's looking very impressive, Daniel.

But what's thr trick? I've tried your render settings with no acceptable result.

[Daniel248]

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@WHolzwarth wrote:

Once more it's looking very impressive, Daniel.

But what's thr trick? I've tried your render settings with no acceptable result.

---

Have you rendered to frames?

Can you post a frame that contains a view of the Door with a Glass pane (to see how transparent that glass is) ?

(Or post a whole Lego door with glass in it - I'll give it a try, to see if the glass properties are right...)

[WHolzwarth]

Here's a window (2016 files), Daniel

Thanks in advance

Walter

[Daniel248]

Looks like I'm missing texture "Honeycomb-small.png" from part 60581-TransClear.ipt:

Is it this part supposed to be clear?

It does not have any transparency set up in part Appearances, and there are no overrides in the Fenster.iam either..

[WHolzwarth]

If TransClear is set as Appearance, then this part should be transparent.

Honeycomb-small in Plate appearance is not in use, and can be removed.

[Daniel248]

Hi Walter, 

here’s my result:

• I’ve applied ‘Clear Light’ appearance to TransClear (window) Part;
• I’ve migrated all files to 2016;
• Loaded in Studio and done a quick render (Draft, 1 Iteration per frame, 30 fps) to WMV format.

Attached is a ZIP with the data files and the WMV render.

Again, after watching the appalling quality of the WMV video which has a lot of problems with highlights and is blotchy throughout, I believe that there’s no way in which this video can be improved as long as WMV format is used, and the bad quality output is down to the poor CODECS used by this format, and has nothing to do with Studio’s capabilities and performance (other than, well, it’s part of it – a bit like a new car that has been sold with an old rusty spanner in its Toolbox that doesn’t fit any bolt or nut used on that car…)

Spoiler

  You have to smile when you see that it can still make a video suitable for an “Internet, 56k Modem” connection bandwidth – that’s backwards compatibility maintained!

The TransClear part renders clear, though.

Try and render the Fenster animation in the attached ZIP, and post back if the window part still doesn't become clear.  

PS:

Not sure how you've captured that Camtasia video, but it doesn't look rendered to me - more like preview mode (I could be wrong, though, as I know nothing about Camtasia). Many appearances don't become transparent until raytracing or rendering is used.

[WHolzwarth]

Good evening, Daniel

I only tried the start of a rendering with your dataset, but it's looking the same as your result. Did you see the curtains? No textures in both cases.

My Camtasia video was simply done with two recordings in Camtasia of Inventor Studio's timeline, the first half in a non-sectioned view, the next one in half-sectioned view. With big assemblies timeline calculation slows down on my system, for smooth movement either a shorter time interval in Studio is needed, or the times for position changes in Studio must be increased.

But even then the record is not smooth in Camtasia, therefore I increased the display speed in Camtasia with factor 10. You've seen the result.

My thoughts about it: Life is too short, for waiting lots of time for a perfect rendering. I'm pleased already, if I can show some motions with acceptable quality. But Studio's renderings of big assemblies seem to be worse, than a Studio timeline is looking.

What now? IMO, Studio has problems with constraint animations in big assemblies. Quality is lost then. If you like, you can try a short rendering with the full dataset of the LEGO VW camping van. I'll upload it to GrabCAD in the next hours, and give a message here, when done.

Walter

[WHolzwarth]

Files now can be found here:

https://grabcad.com/library/lego-10220-volkswagen-t1-camper-van-1

[Daniel248]

Hi Walter,

That Camper Van LEGO is no toy - with nearly 1,500 components it’s one of the most complicated assemblies I’ve seen yet, in such small size – an incredibly complex 3D model!

That high complexity starts to show its drawbacks quite quickly when it comes to rendered animation – it takes huge amounts of processor power to compute after each frame change, and you’ve packed a lot of concurrent movement and very fast camera action there, too.

I’ve tried to render your original animation (as was built-in the original assembly) but I had to abort that mission, due to some camera views that have pushed my system into using more than 32 GB of RAM…. a slow ‘camera crash’. I realise that the original animation (and possibly the model) was done in Inventor 2014, causing some ugly perspective camera angle transitions when I’ve tried to run it in Inventor 2016, due to the changes made to Studio IBL lighting and Camera framing in between these two versions.

So, I’ve migrated all to 2016 and re-done the camera action trying to keep as close to the original action as I could, but still, I found it very difficult to keep up with the rest of the animation – I’d say it would be impossible to pack so many actions in 22 seconds and expect a smooth result. Maybe a 3DS Max enthusiast could take this model into 3DS Max and show us how it should be done…

The edges of LEGO building blocks are also causing a lot of aliasing when rendering a moving sequence, causing lots of ‘flickering’ lines.

All in all, the 3D model is very impressive, and ultra-challenging to animate.   

Here’s my attempt:

https://youtu.be/mdfHF2y86Oc

Spoiler

(Draft render, 1 Iteration per frame, 30fps) – the short zoom-in & out on the Beer Bottle in the middle of the sequence was done on a still rendered frame in post-processing – that was the only free beer I’ve got for doing this ;-))

[WHolzwarth]

Good evening, Daniel

That's impressive, and you deserve many beers. But I don't know, how you've done that.

But at first, let me tell about the history of this LEGO van:

At GrabCAD, many LEGO models can be found, that are made by member dk (D. Kohfeld). They are done very well, with perfect parts in general. But constraints are hard to overlook, because of not many sub-assemblies used by dk.

Therefore, I created some more sub-assys. Animating is made easier then, as well. But Inventor is not perfect with constraints and animating them. Flexible assemblies are another topic. LEGO models are very good for testing cases like this.

In this case, D. Kohfeld's model was done with Inventor 2014. My Studio animation was 2016, but used several non-migrated 2014 files. I never migrated whole filesets in the past. Sooner or later they were saved in a newer version.

Back to your Youtube video. I tried to reproduce it in a short sequence (0,25 s), but I didn't get transparent windows, and perhaps no textures on curtains, as well. I couldn't see them, because of no window transparency.

I could do uncompressed Avi videos in Draft mode (without transparency and curtain textures), but in High mode Inventor Studio decided to leave me alone, without any CER window.

Many thanks to you, Daniel

Walter

 Later: Hmm. With German Inventor 2016 Studio in High mode it crashed. With English Inventor 2016 Studio, High mode rendering is done. But lots of black pixels, and no transparency.

Are you watching here, Autodesk?

[WHolzwarth]

Meanwhile I've found window transparency settings.

In Appearance TransClear Transparency Amount was too low. Actually i'm trying 86

Translucency is now 10.

Now it's time for looking at the missing textures of the curtains.

[WHolzwarth]

Curtains are coming through now. Path for image was wrong.

[Daniel248]

Glad you've found the causes, Walter!

Cheers,

Daniel