Information request: Rendering requirements

[colin.smith]

Hello Fusion 360 users, 

As you probably have noticed over the last few releases of Fusion 360 a lot of work as been done to improve the visualization, materials and rendering capabilities in Fusion 360.  As a next step in this process I'd like to understand how our customer use the rendering workspace (or why you don't use it) and what the output used for.   Please take a moment to review the questions below and post your option.

1. When working on a project how often do you apply appearance materials and create rendered images?
2. What are the rendered images being used for? (IE: design communication/collaboration, marketing, etc)
3. When you create images what resolution requirements do you have?
4. If you aren't using the Fusion 360 rendering workspace, what are you using and why?
5. If you could change one thing in the Fusion 360 rendering environment, what would it be?

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Colin

[TrippyLighting]

Before I go about answering these questions I want to explain what I am doing (or want to be doing) with Fusion 360 which are mainly two areas of interest.

I design and make LED lighting systems (so far as an all consuming hobby/passion but who knows...) and develop the visual effects and the optics of these I use Indigo Renderer.(an unbiased render engine) as it allows a fair degree of lighing simulation. The simulated renders ar stunningly close in visual appearance to the actual builds even though I have not used all of the controls available to accurately simulate light, such a tabulated spectra. My current woirkflow is that I experiment with shapes in Blender and once I have arived at something visually pleasing I export the geometry and design actual parts "around" the imported mesh geometry in a CAD system. Prior to F360 I used Geomagic Design in a VM on my Mac. After designing actual manufacturable parts I export the key parts back into Blender and create renders again to make sure that I did not screw anything essential up in the design process. This will become more critical as I intend to devellop mor interesting optics using caustic effects, that are highly non-linear in behavior and small geometric inaccuracies can destroy the desired effect.

To address these needs I do not extpect to use the F360 intenl renderer but would like to have at least OBJ export but in the long term an API for intergration of external render engines (I posted that idea in the Idea Station yesterday). An API would allow to shorten that cumbersoma and error prone workflow very much.

The other area of interest is that I occasianlly do some industrial design, so far mostly furniture designs and also try my hand at simply rendering difficult pieces that others have designed to furter my skills in that area.

That is an area that I see the F360 internal renderer playing a larger role in.

This chair was is made by furniture maker in New Zealand and was a pure modeling/rendering exercise.

The table was an idea for an improvement of a desing originally done in painted steel tubing. I had an idea of how  a design in wood could look like and hope to actually make the piece some day.

1. So for that purpose rendered images are are done frequently.

2. What are these used for ? Blow poeple way 😉 Everyone likes nice pictures!

3. I don't usually create print material or panorama renders so usual screen resolutions are suitable for my needs. I work on a 27" iMac.

4. Blender->Indigo Renderer. I own a License of Indigo and know how to set up realistic materials. I also use Arroway.de textures.

5. I already mentioned UV mappig, but really the biggest limitation currenly is scene setup and lighting. It seems the F360 renderer at the moment only uses IBL (HDR ?) and that is rather limiting. I would not have been able to achieve the same studio shots as linked above in F360 even though the actual scene and lighting setup is really simple (2 large area light sources) . The wood textures in F360 are high resolution and really very nice! Give us a specularity channel (exponent in Indigo) and renders with natural materials such as wood are going to look spectacular.

.