topic Re: Ray tracing support in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Ray tracing support

Ex_Machina_Engineering — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 10:33:32 GMT

I just wanted to ask if there is any chance we can get ray tracing in the Render environment done by the GPU now that DirectX supports that

Re: Ray tracing support

TrippyLighting — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 13:04:32 GMT

Of course this is only my opinion, bit I don't see GPU supported rendering happening any time soon. In Fusion 360 DirectX is is only used for Viewport graphics, bit not for 3D rendering at all. DirectX does not exist on macOS.

Also, many people don't have a good understanding of what that "raytracing support" actually means.
Most traditional PBR render engines when employing the GPU, use CUDA (Nvidia specific) or OpenCL (NOT OpenGL!) to accelerate the algorithms for unbiased raytracing.

The DirectX support for raytracing is aimed at gaming and real-time raytracing. It would require re-writing large portions of a render engine to move from CUDA / OpenCL to this DirectX support.

Re: Ray tracing support

Ex_Machina_Engineering — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 10:21:09 GMT

But if there is OpenCL rendering now in Fusion, why not run it on the GPU and save hundreds of hours of server time on Autodesk's Cloud, the energy consumption associated with it, as well as thousands of hours of local rendering and loads of frustration for Fusion users.

For complex work, I have Blender which is free and I use the AMD render engine with an old HD7970. This is light years ahead of using my i5-4670 processor to render in Blender or Fusion. So it's worth the hassle of defining materials in Blender if the scene is complicated. Let me clarify, I'm not making movies. But rendering a product in an industrial or home environment is sometimes worth it.

And it would add so much if it could be done in Fusion with material selection bringing the appearances with it. And it all seems like a deliberate choice rather than a technical challenge.

Re: Ray tracing support

TrippyLighting — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 10:28:12 GMT

Fusion 360 does NOT use OpenCL for rendering.

Currently, the only software that has a functioning (or so I hear) plugin for Fusion 360 is Keyshot.

It would indeed be nice to have other options and a Fusion 360 plugin for Blender or other Render engines would certainly be great.