What tool to use for photorealistic rendering of Inventor projects?

[Anonymous]

Good day to you all,

We are a small team of engineers, using Inventor for production purposes however we would like to use our models for marketing showcase purposes.

Although the built in functionality is OK, we would like to explore more potent tools to allow us to render photo-realistic images of our products. Do you have any recommendation?

We don't need something overly complicated, we just need to use ipt/ipj files and from there to render more realistically than the built-in engine currently offers. A hardware recommendation would also be appreciated.

Thank you!

[gcoombridge]

Have a look at Blender (open source). I didn't find it very intuitive but people seem to get very good results once you get the hang of it. 

[Xun.Zhang]

Howdy @Anonymous  I see that you are visiting as a new member to the Inventor Forum.
Welcome to the Autodesk Community!

Inventor studio is pretty cool to use, have you tried it before?

Hope it helps!

[Rory_M]

Inventor Studio is OK but does have its quirks and limitations. I've had some good results from it but it does take time to get something realistic.

Material mapping is one of the main limitations.

I've attached an image from Inventor Studio of one of our products, it looks OK but isn't photorealistic. It's difficult to add the little imperfections that make things real.

Showcase used to be the first choice for making pretty pictures of Inventor files, but that's dead now, so that leaves these as the main contenders:

3DS Max - Imports native Inventor files and is a very powerful tool. Unfortunately, the learning curve can be a bit high. If you're a subscriber to the Product Design suite, you'll already have it.

VRed - Marketed towards the automotive industry but I think it's a decent renderer that isn't too difficult to use.

Blender - No native Inventor import but there's ways of getting files in. Quite steep learning curve in 2.79 but that's to be improved once 2.8 officially launches as it has a slicker UI. Very powerful and best of all free. A great online community to help you/tutorials etc.

Keyshot - I haven't used this but as I understand it does two very important things very well:

1) Shallow learning curve

2) Excellent rendered results.

From comments I've seen in here and the old Showcase forum, I'd check out Keyshot first if you're looking for a paid solution that is easy for engineers to use, and Blender for a free solution (get the 2.8 beta) but be aware that the Blender learning experience might not be as fast.

[thenottakenname]

I don't know, that looks pretty dang nice to me.

Whenever I need something to look good, I open up a part/assembly, go to the view tab, change the visual style to realistic and then enable ray tracing. I let that run for a while on high accuracy, and some things can turn out pretty gorgeous. Make sure not to pan your view or anything, it'll cause the render to reset. When it's done, there's a save button to capture your active view. It can take a while but the results are great!

[Rory_M]

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@thenottakenname wrote:

I don't know, that looks pretty dang nice to me.

Whenever I need something to look good, I open up a part/assembly, go to the view tab, change the visual style to realistic and then enable ray tracing. I let that run for a while on high accuracy, and some things can turn out pretty gorgeous. Make sure not to pan your view or anything, it'll cause the render to reset. When it's done, there's a save button to capture your active view. It can take a while but the results are great!

---

Thanks, it's certainly good enough for our needs.

I find Studio a bit clunky but I'm used to its ways and can usually get an image that looks pretty good for sales/marketing purposes.

I think for most "engineered" products that are being sold in to the engineering industry, Inventor Studio renders are fine.

If you're into consumer goods and selling to the public who are used to beautiful renders or need advanced material control or texture mapping then I think it's lacking.

If I wanted genuine "photorealism" without spending too much effort, I'd definitely look elsewhere (possibly Keyshot).

Likewise if I needed advanced animation (particle effects, deformation etc.) then 3DS Max/Blender would be on the list.

[dgorsman]

Anything capable of high end photorealism is not going to be a simple matter of installing a different program (likely several).  It also requires a different mindset and skill set from technical engineering and design.

If there isn't someone already on staff who can do this I would highly recommend contracting this work out to a specialist. 

[blair]

Autodesk would have been better served, dropping the work they've done on Studio and merged their "Showcase" into Inventor. Far better results for the effort required.

[Rory_M]

Just to follow up on this, I've had a play with the latest release candidate of Blender and can honestly say that it's ridiculously good for the price.

The changes to the interface that have been made make it logical and relatively user-friendly. There's loads of useful tutorials and resources online too.

Based on my experience of Blender 2.8 and 3DS Max, I'd say they're on a fairly even footing when it comes to learning to use the UI.

Where Blender really shines through though is in the new Eevee realtime engine.

The hardest part of rendering is getting materials and lighting right. When you have to tweak it, render it, tweak it, re-render it etc etc it gets a bit tiresome.

The realtime feedback from Blender makes things so much easier.

One thing that isn't initially obvious is how to get assemblies from Inventor into Blender, here's quick guide for anyone interested in giving it a go:

Inventor Stuff

1) Open your assembly (or part) in Inventor.

2) Go to File > Save Copy As

3) Change filetype to *.obj

4) Click "Options"

5) In the options dialogue, set units to Meter (it works for me, you might need to try different options)

6) Set Resolution to Medium (again, you might want to try different settings to increase/decrease mesh resolution).

Inventor Export Settings

7) Click OK

8) Save your .obj file

Blender Stuff

1) Start Blender

2) File > Import > Wavefront (.obj)

Blender OBJ Import

3) Go to the Import Obj settings (bottom left of the screen) and make sure "Object" and "Group" are ticked in the "Split By" section.

Blender Import Settings

4) Browse to and select your file and click "Import OBJ" (top right of screen).

5) Voila! One imported Inventor file. If you've done it correctly, individual parts will be individual mesh objects. Any parts with multiple colours will be a single mesh with multiple materials applied.

[Rory_M]

Just as a quick comparison, here's a couple of images of some quick tests I did.

One is the realtime display, the other the render.

The materials aren't quite right, but to be fair, I'd only been playing with it for a couple of hours and haven't really got to grips with it yet.

This is one of our standard cutters (RCV75HD) that is made from aluminium which is black anodised. It's not the most interesting part from a colour perspective but does show how good the visual feedback display is.

Realtime Display

Realtime Display

Render

Render

[iMaJiNe_Designs]

I'm starting to experiment with rendering my Inventor models, and from what I've heard about Showcase, it's too bad Autodesk killed it. 

I can fumble my way around 3DS MAX; but jeez it's a rabbit hole of settings, etc for those of us that aren't experts with it.  I imported an Inventor Assembly into MAX as bodies and although I received numerous error message, the individual parts did import; but were renamed the same thing in the model tree.  I tried it as meshes and it came in just fine and more or less kept the same materials as assigned in Inventor; but a couple of components for some reason didn't import.  Decals didn't import either.

Then I for giggles looked at VRED as the videos I've seen are impressive; but the pricing turned me off and I saw no sense messing around with the trial when I knew that it's outside the budget.

Blender looks impressive; but once again it appears to be over kill for my needs.

Inventor Studio is clunky to say the least.  It seems there isn't a middle ground for rendering Inventor models.

[anthonyzepeda1969]

Looking around Forum for some rendering support. Found this thread and would like to piggy back off of it.

So using Inventor Studio I'm not able to get a very good quality render for marketing of a product on our website.

I searched in my AutoDesk Products library and see something called "Rendering". See screenshot. I am looking for something simple and easy to use as I have ZERO experience in rendering for marketing.

But sounds like Rendering may be what we want to use.

However, it appears that you can only import files from AutoCAD or Fusion360. Is this true? If so can someone maybe give me a suggestion to what they recommend?

Seen a post on here about AutoCAD Showcase, but sounds like that was nixed years ago. 

thanks in advance

[anthonyzepeda1969]

This is my last attempt at a render using Inventor Studio.

[mcgyvr]

@anthonyzepeda1969  Did you try Blender as suggested by Rory in message 9 of 13 above?

While you can mess around with Inventor Studio and keep tweaking your appearances you are likely best to try using Blender to achieve what you want.. Or 3ds max which is included if you have a subscription to the Product Design and Manufacturing Collection software. 

Both of those programs are going to require a good time investment (and so will Studio) to get a very good result you can be happy with.. 

[anthonyzepeda1969]

Is Blender an AutoDesk product?

I need to check what we have in our subscription. 

[gcoombridge]

@anthonyzepeda1969 not an Autodesk product but its free and open source. Blender.org

[SharkDesign]

If Inventor isn't good enough for you, I would say Keyshot every time. 

I've never seen a renderer as good as that one. 

Autodesk have something called Vred, but I've never used it. 

[anthonyzepeda1969]

Thank you all for the responses.

I seen someone recommended 3Ds MAX, think I'm going to try that first.

[anthonyzepeda1969]

My apologies I did not reply directly to your question.

No I have not tried Blender. I have to get permission to download any new software.

3Ds MAX is part of our subscription so I will try that first.

Thank you. 

[gcoombridge]

Just to add to this thread again - the rendering tool I have been using most recently is Enscape. It acts as a plugin only for Revit, Rhino, Sketchup and a couple of other platforms (unfortunately not Inventor or Navisworks). I export an OBJ from Inventor and open in Rhino. Similar to Keyshot in that it has a very shallow learning curve (1/2 hr) and produces very good results for the applied effort.