Local Rendering

[sdthamburg]

To Whom it May Concern;

     It would be convenient to have a local rendering option. Instead of submitting to the cloud I've got twelve 3.0 GHz cores sitting idle here while the cloud is loaded.

[petrikas.m]

I would very much like to see a rendering system in Fusion360. I am certain that it is crucial in any workflow. Fusion360 has some nice materials, but the images that F360 exports at the moment are not usable. 

Even a basic engine would do, such as the one in Autodesk Inventor. Something that allows you to choose the image size, is able generate a soft shadow and drop some anti aliasing. 

This is very important! Thanks.

[filiberti.design]

It would also be interesting to have a sketch rendering type, the toon shader or software Piranesi

[keqingsong]

This is definitely something we'd like to offer to our users. This initiative hasn't officially taken off yet, but we are currently taking an inventory of the various technologies available to us and trying to evaluate what is the best way to implement rendering with Fusion 360. Feel free to shout out your ideas because we are definitely interested and would love to hear from you. 

[petrikas.m]

I'm pretty sure that the Autodesk Inventor "Realistic view" with Raytracing should do the trick for now. It's a powerful tool once you understand how it works. I wouldn't dare to ask for an Autodesk Showcase engine...

[keqingsong]

Thanks for the feedback! Keep them coming! 

[TRACERfire]

I quite like the Inventor rendering engine and have managed to get some fairly clean 50 megapixel images out of it.

I absolutely hate renders that attempt to emulate a real environment but I do utilise the "realistic view" in Inventor to create renders. Actually, I use several render settings and then overlay then in Photoshop.

I won't get too tied up into details but I use a mixture of hidden line, shadows on, shadows off, realistic, etc to create a final image.

I've loaded a sampling of some renders created entirely in Inventor (not the Studio either, as I find it quite cumbersome)

http://tracerfire.net/139005/1378414/gallery/robots-mechs-tech

[mark.young]

Awesome images Tracerfire...I just can't figure out how you get 50Mpixel images out of inventor?! How do you get them higher than the screen res? (and how do you find the 2014 rendering...it seems a bit broken...)

I would agree with making it work like Inventor. Have a interactive mode that updates quickly, a Good mode for fairly fast but decent visualizations and a Best mode that actually looks noticably better (Barely different in Inv2013) and is good enough for print.
Plus more environments than Inventor - the selection in Showcase is more varied and therefore more relevant for more people.

[colin.smith]

Hello everyone, 

Thanks for the feedback about rendering.  We understand how important rendering is to the design process.  There will be a rendering engine in Fusion 360, just not in time for the first release.

Also we would be interested in knowing which 3rd party rendering software you are using so that we could approach them for integration opportunities.

Keep the suggestions coming.

Thanks

Colin

[TRACERfire]

Thanks for digging the renders Mark.

I was trying a couple new ways of getting images out of Inventor without messing with an external renderer.

Again, I'm typically going for a non-photorealistic aesthetic. I often use raytracing at low to mid settings as I want a bit of tooth and grain to appear. It all gets mashed into several layers in Photoshop with tweaks to opacities, colour and curve settings.

Exporting Hi-Res Renders From Inventor (within the basic workspace)

Altering the resolution of renders in Inventor is dead easy:

Click the "Main Inventor Menu/Button Icon"

select "EXPORT ===> IMAGE"

select "SAVE AS TYPE"

Now, adjacent to the SAVE button is an OPTIONS button

Click that and adjust your output resolution.

I've managed to do landscape image export of 10000 x 5000 pixels and square images of 7000 x 7000 pixels. I'm unsure of the ceiling but that's seems to be as high as it will allow without freezing up.

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Regarding External Render Packages:

I don't have a huge use for an external render package at the moment but I have been looking into Thea Render, which looks interesting and is basically the commercial version of the freeware, open source Kerkythea Render --- http://www.thearender.com/cms/

Apparently, and for only €295.00, it has quite a good biased and unbiased engine and offers plugins (at extra cost) for the majority of the more popular 3D packages out there.

I can make due with the software I have at the moment, as I'm saving up for a ZBrush license and a house move.

[garin]

You asked for it and now you have it. We have added rendering to the new update that went out yesterday. Here is a quick test I did on it the other day, even have the ability to illuminate objects. 

[petrikas.m]

You guys are just amazing. Thank you very much for your hard work and making this happen. Cheers!

[schneik-adsk]

October 2013 updated included basic built in ray tracer.

[lure23]

Looks very nice and useful - thank you.

One change I would suggest: arranging menu items in alphabetical order is hardly useful. It creates problems if you ever localize the program to other languages, and it .. just feels wrong here.

I would suggest a thin-to-thick approach instead, where the fastest rendering (wireframe) is topmost and the slowest (ray tracing) at the bottom.

btw, Seems you have taken the 'Realistic' option away!

That was rather useful, and for me (with a slow machine) ray tracing certainly cannot be used to replace that. Bohoooo.

btw^2, Okay it's under Ray tracing > Disable now. Meaning if one selects 'Ray Tracing' from the above menu, but then disables it in the tracing settings, one gets the old 'realistic'. Bad UI - why not just have 'Realistic' in the menu (as before) and skip the 'Disable/Enable' button in the ray tracing dialog. So much simpler.

[samenor]

The «Best» quality ray-tracing generates beautiful images.. but (at least on my MacBook Air) it's way too easy to have it going in the background and then ~10-15 minutes in accidentally trigger the wrong touch gesture and have it start over / lose the rendering.

It'd be great if there were a simple way to prevent that or at least revert back to the last rendering state rather than having to throw it out and try again 🙂

[keqingsong]

I agree with this Samenor, and thank you for bringing this up. As of now, we are working to improve this built-in RRT experience so that it offers a better quality render with a shorter wait time. In terms of the sensitivity to movement, what would you consider to be a good solution?

Would you be okay with a prompt that shows up if you accidentally click on the design space reminding you that you are still performing a render?

Would you like the option to cancel to continue rendering or cancel to stop rendering? 

[samenor]

Yeah that would be great Kiqing (though I'd put an option to disable it for people who will find it annoying 🙂

[robert.kettle]

It would be good to be able to adjust the resolution of the image capture function. Image capture is a useful tool but the resolution comes out at 72dpi, allowing an image capture of 200 or even 300dpi would make it invaluable.