Improvement for the render engine

[cekuhnen]

The openGL based 3d viewport renderer is pretty decent and useful in Fusion while modeling/designing to get a rough idea about the look and feel.

The raytraced render engine however I am not so sure about.

It feels like a basic start of a render engine, and not like something I could use for serious work.

Here are the following tools I think really have to be part of the render engine to make it somewhat

well rounded and productive

Materials:

1. emission material (mesh lights)

2. truly transparent (shadow free)

Env:

1. choose your own HDRI files

2. make use of the the render envs also in 3d modeling mode

( It is great that the render openGL envs are close to the raytraced envs, so it would be nice if while modeling I could get the same there as well for openGL previews.)

Camera:

1. lens degree

2. dof

3. save camera position

Renderer:

1. allow border render so I do not waste cpu time on full screen rendering when not needed

2. render speed seems to be quite slow to be honest

[cekuhnen]

 grrr one cannot edit ideas later.

Under render, what I meant to write for two is, that the CPU is not that much faster compared to a brute force path tracer which uses a full background for rendering the plate, while Fusion like KS uses a special shadow catcher.

What Fusion is doing within 90 seconds my work engine does in 10 with a GPU as the rendering horse.

So it might be an idea to also think about offering a GPU rendering next to CPU because all GPU engines I own offer materials which run on both CPU and GPU the same.

[roberto]

I agree, there are plenty of improvements that can be done to the renderer.

I think the first one, which shouldn't take more than 10 minutes, is to get the environment choices from A360 (with standard photographic light setups).
Then maybe add the option to create your own HDRI environment maps.

Others are:

Selecting rendering viewport resolution (to save images).

I think A360 should be the choice for those that want to offload rendering and pay to get cloud rendering, however the base features should be available to render locally.

[jakefowler]

Thanks Claas & Roberto for the great suggestions.

In the Jan update added new emissive materials, and offer focal length & DOF controls inside the Camera Settings command. Did this offer some of the things you were after? Any feedback or suggestions for these features would be great.

Regarding the remaining requests:

- Truly transparent materials - What materials are you trying to emulate? And would be good to know if you have played around with the transparency parameters to achieve these (you'd probably want a long absorption distance/low refractive index), and what this wasn't able to achieve.

- Custom HDRI files - This is in our dev backlog (item FUS-12141). I'll look into what work is required here.

- Use render envs in modelling - I think the original aim of separating the different visual styles was to keep the modeling workspaces optimized for design, and the render workspace optimized for rendering (e.g. keeping reflections muted in the modeling workspaces to avoid them becoming distracting). I'll discuss this with the team though & see what might be practical here.

- Save camera position - This is on our radar. You can do this currently with 'Named Views', but this won't record focal length/DOF settings, which we're looking into. Further to this - how valuable would it be to save environment information alongside the camera position/settings?

- Border render - Does this refer to selecting a windowed region of the canvas to render? If so, would it be satisfactory for this to effectively be a 'save image' operation? This isn't specifically on our list yet, but as we're expanding the rendering capabilities this is something we can look into.

- Rendering speed - I'm not sure whether there's any improvements in the pipeline regarding this, but I'll discuss this with our development team.

- Save rendering at custom resolution - This is in the works: item FUS-14180 in our dev list.

Let me know if I missed anything. And of course feel free to add anything else you wanted to see (either here or as new IdeaStation posts).

Thanks!

Jake

[cekuhnen]

- Truly transparent materials - fully transparent material without casting shadows so I can place a sticker / decal on it but be part of the material texture rendering (reflectione etc on it)

think about a photo of a human cut out I want the human to cast a shadow and not the box of the mesh the human texture is glued onto. images come only in square formats x and y pixels 😉

- Custom HDRI files - This is incredible imporant as the offered HDRIs are quite basic. HDRI is easy to use but depends a lot on the good image. You limit our ability to use the renderer well here by a lot.

- Use render envs in modelling - Makes sense - for inspection Fusion also really should have a light tunnel env for modeling. this is a pretty weak area in the app right now.

- Border render - why should I let the CPU render the full frame when my object is somwhere else? simply logic to have border rendering - every engine offers that!

- Rendering speed - I feel the moment I set the high quality setting the speed tanks too much compared to fast CPU engines in use today (not meaning path tracers)

[Anonymous]

I agree with this feature request and added ideas.

Especially: Custom HDRI files - This is incredible imporant as the offered HDRIs are quite basic. HDRI is easy to use but depends a lot on the good image. You limit our ability to use the renderer well here by a lot.

Enabling custom image mapping/importing our own HDRIs would really help in final renders.

[phazaar]

Can I add to the point regarding named views etc that it seems to be impossible to render using a cross section? I'm not sure I can understand the rationale behind this, as to me this is one of the most common renders I use - taking a picture of the INSIDE of an assembly without having to use modelling to cut the part in half and make half invisible etc...

[colin.smith]

There are a mixed bag of item here.  Some have been implemented.  Others are in our backlog.

[colin.smith]

@cekuhnen

We have done a few things on this list.

• emission materials
• custom HDRI
• dof

If the other items are still needed please resubmit the idea.

Thanks

Colin

[cekuhnen]

@colin.smith

Yeah many got introduced.

Real lights save camera positions and faster rendering
Are good things still to evaluate.