topic Re: Community pictures December 2022 in Inventor Forum

Community pictures December 2022

-niels- — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 13:59:40 GMT

There were some seriously nice art renders posted last month, so check those out if you missed them.

I'll start this one off with a fun little project i did for a colleague that wanted a windvane he supplied an image for.

Rendered with IV2023 ray tracing, i must say i'm happy with the GPU speed... this took only 30 seconds to fully ray trace on the high setting (without noise reduction)

(for those noticing... the letters should be twisted to an upright position and it only shows the files that were lasercut)

The holiday season is in full swing, i wonder what you all will post.

Feel free to show off your work or surprise us with something holiday themed!

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 14:09:33 GMT

Nice flatpatterns!

What app did you use to get the cutting lines from the pics?

What video card do you use?

Re: Community pictures December 2022

-niels- — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 14:57:57 GMT

@cadman777

I do my image converting in Illustrator (CS6).

I let the program convert it to vector, then export the outlines as dwg which i can then import into a sketch in Inventor.

As for videocard, my system has a Geforce RTX 2080.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 18:22:23 GMT

That's what I do, except I use either InkScape or GIMP.

I used PaintShopPro before that.

I just switched to an nVidia Quadro M5000 and find the jerkiness has mostly disappeared.

It happened when a large assembly was opened and the cursor highlighted one of the parts or assemblies.

Same in a drawing, if the cursor was in the tree and highlighted a PartsList, the thing zooming got jerky.

Not anymore.

The previous card was an ASUS GeForce GTX 1070.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

frank.gavilar — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 12:48:34 GMT

Small update on this valve. I have shared a render of it before. It's supposed to go to marked Q1 of 2023. Doing the final renders for the manual as we speak and the photos are also in. Looks pretty close if you ask me.

A 09-2020 model render.

A 2022 model render

A 2022 model photograph.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 13:01:15 GMT

Nice renderings!

What app did you use?

Yup, almost identical!

Re: Community pictures December 2022

frank.gavilar — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 13:15:22 GMT

The render is made with Inventor 2020. I think the anodised material is a Autodesk appearance library which I edited.

The photo was cleaned up using Photoshop CC. I use lightboxes to take product photos so as long as I use Grid lighting in Inventor the results will look more or less alike.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

CGBenner — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 13:31:12 GMT

@frank.gavilar

Almost can't see the difference! Nice work, sir!

Re: Community pictures December 2022

-niels- — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 07:35:27 GMT

Nitpicking for the heck of it. (rendering looks great for Inventor, more effort would've been a waste)

Differences between photo and rendering:

Color difference and metallic sheen on green part

Color difference and plastic sheen on caps

Texture of filter

Washers behind bolts

Depth and rounded/beveled edges on embossed text

And ofcourse, no couplings attached in the photograph 😆

Seriously though, that's an awesome job getting the render like that in Inventor especially assuming you created it before seeing the actual product.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

frank.gavilar — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 09:09:57 GMT

Good morning Niels,

the product is designed by me, so I decide how it looks. Anodizing is a finicky process though so I waited to receive the actual parts before finishing the textures. I do find that anodized finishes within inventor seem to look great in the normal viewer but turn out way to bright during ray-tracing.

The inventor ray tracer needs surfaces to bounce from so perfectly flat models with 90,000000º degree corners will always result in a rendered look. For rendering purposes I like to use R0.05 fillets on my angles, but this is hell when using the same parts for drawings or machining. As stated I am still using IV 2020 and lack the model states functionality. In Q1 2023 we will upgrade our servers and update Inventor and Vault to 2023. Most of the parts we design ourselves will get <Render> states with rounded edges. Can't wait to compress my O-rings for cross sections.

All things considered it would be great if the Autodesk team could find the time to give us some new or improved tools but I think the chance of that happening is very slim.

As it stands now I tend to plan 3 days for renderings the cross sections and other images for the user-manuals. It's quite labor intensive because I need to color in the different volumes inside the product. Normally I use the assign affinity to keep 2 cores of the system to use photoshop. All the other cores are assigned to the ray trace process.

For these cress section I make a extrusion in the assembly file. Choose the right positional representation and the level of detail. Redo the extrusion to cut through all displayed parts and render one of the process stages. Sadly the extrusion uses the overall appearance of the cut parts. Displaying all cut sides of anodized parts as anodized. I might try to solve this with model states when the function is available to me next year.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

-niels- — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 09:43:00 GMT

@frank.gavilar wrote:

The inventor ray tracer needs surfaces to bounce from so perfectly flat models with 90,000000º degree corners will always result in a rendered look. For rendering purposes I like to use R0.05 fillets on my angles, but this is hell when using the same parts for drawings or machining.

Yeah, for that i love that in 3DS Max you can add a modifier to create "rounded edges" without having to actually apply them. (they are part of the texturing and are only processed at render)

Those cross sections look really cool.

If i had to do something similar, i'd probably go for a more "cartoony" look (think "technical illustration" visual style in Inventor) and get that into Illustrator as vectors to make the coloring process a bit easier...

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 13:55:38 GMT

Lookin' good!

Normally I use the assign affinity to keep 2 cores of the system to use photoshop. All the other cores are assigned to the ray trace process.

How do you assign processes to cores?

I'm not getting that.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

frank.gavilar — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 14:14:30 GMT

Go to <task manager> select the <details> tab.

Select the program for which you would like to change the core affinity.

Right click on the program and choose <set affinity>

Switch off the cores you do not need for this program. Inventor will now allow use the allowed cores. When you restart inventor the affinity will be reset to default (All Processors).

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 14:36:12 GMT

Nice, thanx!

You wouldn't happen to know a way to see which cores Inventor is using when it's doing a process would you?

Re: Community pictures December 2022

frank.gavilar — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:29:26 GMT

No sadly I do not know how to do this using the task manager. It might be that the system resource monitor can provide you with this data. Though during ray-tracing cores that are active will show up as 100% in use during rendering.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 14:15:08 GMT

OK, thanx.

I've tried to find an app online that does this, but they all don't go down to that level of detail, and they're mostly for systems management on the network. If any of them do it, none of the people got back to me when I inquired by email.

Re: Community pictures December 2022

chris — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 19:02:12 GMT

A blast from the past... here's a unit I designed back in 2013, no render, just screenshots

Re: Community pictures December 2022

cadman777 — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 23:42:33 GMT

Looking like a fun job!

Re: Community pictures December 2022

mpatchus — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 23:01:20 GMT

Happy Holidays to all!!!

Re: Community pictures December 2022

pcrawley — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 01:42:51 GMT

@cadman777 wrote:
Nice, thanx!

You wouldn't happen to know a way to see which cores Inventor is using when it's doing a process would you?

By default, all of them.

If you have a look at the "affinity" (shown in message 13 by @frank.gavilar ) it will show <All Processors>. When Inventor is busy rendering, it uses all the cores at about 100%. If you change the affinity and only select half the cores, the render takes twice as long, but you can continue working in other applications without the lag caused by Inventor sucking up all your resources.

For general modelling you can set Inventor to use 2-cores and you'll probably not notice the difference. I do this sometimes when using other rendering apps like 3ds max.

Great renders @frank.gavilar 👍