Rendering Plant 3D with a clear background

[Anonymous]

Dear Forum Users, 

I would like to create a rendering of my plant 3D model which has no background so that it blends in nicely in my website. This is possible in Inventor but does not seem possible in AutoCAD. Changing the background colour to match would be possible but not optimal. 

I thought to export the model and import it into Inventor but I've had no success. The Plant 3D objects are not solids so they don't show up in Inventor. I've tried a number of different file formats and searched around on the web for a while but haven't found the solution I'm looking for. 

Has anyone got any experience with this? Thanks in advance for your help. 

Joseph. 

[Tomislav.Golubovic · Accepted solution]

In Plant3D, type EXPORTTOAUTOCAD and it dumbs the model down to dumb solids, then import to Inventor.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Tomislav, 

That worked! It's kind of embarrassing actually but for other people I'll include a little story.

The reason I was confused is that when I did the import Inventor spat me out on a part file which looked like the below image. But there was also an assembly file all of a sudden which I originally overlooked. 

 

I still have one minor issue though. See in the image below that the valves got turned 90 degrees. 

Are there any settings I should change? 

Thanks in advance! 

[Tomislav.Golubovic]

No idea on the valves, I haven't seen that before. Does it look ok in normal AutoCAD before you insert it to Inventor?

[Anonymous]

Yeah it does look OK in normal AutoCAD so it must be something to do with the Inventor import. I'll play around with the settings and post something here if I fix it. Otherwise I'll just "free move" those few things. Annoying but do-able. 

Thanks for the help! 

[George.Endrulat]

You might want to look at Plant 3D --> Autocad --> 3DSMax --> Three.js

So that would be a regular plant 3d dwg exported to autocad then that exported .dwg imported into 3dsmax then that .3ds file used in three.js to display the 3d model on the web in a canvas.  You could do some nice parallax movement as the user scrolls or something else, maybe the model spinning slowly, etc, in three.js.

[Anonymous]

Thanks George,

That's a great idea and definitely something I had in mind already for the future. 

Do you have experience with three.js? I also had the idea of something like an engine or pump which explodes and then unexplodes as the user scrolls. It would be awesome to find some example code of something similar. 

Joseph. 

[Anonymous]

I found a suitable workflow to overcome my issue. 

1. EXPORTTOAUTOCAD in Plant 3D
2. Open in Vanilla AutoCAD
3.  Export to .igs
4. Import into Inventor
5. Render

Here's the result! 

 

[George.Endrulat]

It all depends on the goal you have.  If you want a static rendered image or an actual 3d model in the webpage.  Performance wise the static image would obviously be faster in every sense, but you lose a lot of potential to do things like spin it around or fly through it.  Yes, I do have experience in taking a 3d model and using three.js to display it in a webpage, it's surprisingly easy. 

For your exploded part model you would use keyframed animation: three.js webgl - animation - keyframes (threejs.org) again, it's not as hard as it looks.  Keep in mind that a large model from Plant 3D is just that, large, and will require the user to download it to display it on the webpage, is a user going to sit and wait for a few hundred MB to download?  Probably not.  So a model with a few thousands pipe lines is almost certainly out, but a few hundred might be ok.  You can remove some of the complexity in 3dsmax and get the final size down and if you choose to use glTF model type as an export it should be even smaller, you will lose precision, but if it's just for display, that might be ok.

 The last option is to render the animation out to a video file and display that for the animation.  This might be your best bet, all the good points and none of the bad.  You just need to know ahead of time what you want your animation to do and look like.  We've been able to display canvas based video, i.e. large and in the background, for quite a while without a hiccup.

[Anonymous]

Thanks George! You're a legend. Thanks for the motivating pointers! 

One way I've been thinking of doing it is to create a video that runs in the background as the user scrolls. i.e. scrolling down makes the video run forward, scrolling back makes it run backwards. I think that would strike a good balance between performance and user experience. Then on other pages I would also like to have it more interactive like you described.