Please overhaul studio

[Anonymous]

Please overhaul inventor studio; it is the laggiest, crashiest, clunkiest, most awful part of the inventor experience by a margin. It is a blotch on an otherwise great software.

Studio is pretty much unusable on assemblies over 100 parts. We should be able to work without fear that the frequent and regular crashes will corrupt our studio data and thus catapult us back to the start. We should be able to group components. We should be able to move components and fade components from arbitrary points and fades to their original points without having to create 2 animations. Ray-tracing takes forever. We can’t quickly see a proof of our animations because even this takes hours to produce for anything more than a 5-part assembly. 

Just an all round disgusting software which is the sole reason that I will be uninstalling inventor once I have completed this animation I am working on- which I have had the pleasure of doing 4 times now because each time it has crashed at a different point in the process. Just cancerous; thank Christ I get inventor through my work and don’t have to pay for studio. Yuck. Please make studio your priority for next release. I pray to thee inventor devs. Please.

[FrodoZhou]

Hi,

Thanks for the sharing the feedback. In terms of quick proof of animations, just to make sure, have you tried to check the 'Render Animation->Output->Preview: No Render option'? That option serves as preview rendering exactly for proof validation purpose and is way faster than ray tracing, with trade off in rendering quality.

For the crashes you mentioned, will you be able to identify a way to reproduce it consistently? If yes that will be great to help us diagnose into. Thanks!

Frodo

[gcoombridge]

Studio isn't great but it doesn't need to be when Blender is free... 

[Anonymous]

I must admit to posting this after a frustrating studio crash. A few days later I’ve calmed down a bit, but I think all my points are still a valid reflection of my experience with studio.

RE crashes; I have an assembly of 350+ components. My experience with studio is somewhat like this:

> select all components I want to do some animation process to. Click whatever animation button whether it be fade/component/etc. Wait 1-5 minutes depending on number of parts selected. If a small count of parts this is quick, if it’s say 40+ parts it takes minutes.

> in the animation dialogue window adjust whatever parameters I need and select ok. Processing this takes about double the time that it did to open the dialogue box. The software is in not-responding mode during these processing times so susceptible to crashes wherein studio data is compromised if this happens to you. Better have input all your time/fades/movements/etc correctly because...

> back in the studio home environment now. All your selections are undone when the animation is created. So if you want to edit them or add another to the same components, yup, you gotta reselect them all over again! Argh!

> rinse and repeat. 

> saving your inventor studio data takes ages. For my purposes I am experiencing about 15 minutes wait for a save to complete during which the software goes into not-responding mode. If you have a pc error or crash here your studio data is lost.

I also experience crashes when trying to set up a multiple camera timeline on any assembly with a medium or large number of parts. This is just when clicking and dragging say 6 cameras around the timeline.

Lastly, when I am rendering it takes several hours even in the draft mode. The draft more took 4 hours to complete a draft for me last Friday. And if I am producing something for promotional use (let’s be honest this is the main purpose of studio) then this takes several days of rendering time where I really lose my pc because I am so scared to interfere with it because if it crashes during rendering I corrupt the studio data. This has happened to me twice in the past 3 weeks.

Is there an easy way to shift timelines of animations or even the whole animation to a new point in the timeline, without clicking and editing the dialogue boxes for each individual part and its respective animations tree? I haven’t found this yet, but it means you *have* to plan out your animation in totality prior to starting *and* not change your mind later on. A nice feature would be ability to extend the front end of the timeline as well as the rear end, and possible streamlining of editing or repositioning animation actions.

i am sure I could write a book covering my experience of these issues. My main point is that it’s upsetting when competitor 3d modelling packages already have animation creators which are significantly superior.

Why should we need another software package such as Maya or 3d Max? The learning curves on these I suspect are too severe for most inventor users and in addition they are basically animation suites so they feel like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Perhaps the solution lies in some studio like gui activated in inventor which uses Maya as a backend? I don’t know, I am not a dev.

thanks for the replies and sorry for the screed!

[FrodoZhou]

Hi James,

Would you like to have a meeting to go through the issues you are running into? If yes I will be happy to setup a meeting for you, you just need to send your contact info to [email protected]. Thanks.

Frodo

[Anonymous]

Hi all, 

thanks for the offer frodo, but I will kindly decline for now as I am too busy.

Update: I have discovered a workaround for grouping parts by adding relevant parts into folders in the assembly tree. It at least streamlines the most common animation groups. 

For the other issues, I have simply resorted to reducing my assembly file size and rendering several shorter animations, which I stitch together in a third party video editor. Not ideal but it got me by.

my pc is 8th gen i5 with 1050ti 4gb card fwiw.

i really do mean than inventor is a really nice modelling software. I have enjoyed those aspects of it a lot, but earnestly, Studio needs development.

[FrodoZhou]

Totally understand, and I am glad you're finding workarounds so that you can move forward. From hardware side, you  can likely use more memory depends on the size of your datasets, the thing is when OS runs out of memory Inventor will need to swap the data in memory back and forth which will make everything slower. The minimal required memory to run Inventor is 8GB and 20GB is recommended.

If you can share I'll be happy to see your rendering images/videos from Studio, also feel free let me know if you want to setup a meeting at a later time. Thanks.

Frodo

[smilinger]

Inventor studio is the most frustrating and stupidly implemented add-in in Inventor.

https://drive.autodesk.com/de29c74d1/g/shares/SH919a0QTf3c32634dcfb776d4230b162e4f

This is a video I recorded and sent to Autodesk years ago. In the video, I was just trying to change the visibility of selected components from 50% to 100%. Because I was editing the value in the textbox directly, it takes about 3 minutes to change it from 50% to 10%, as you can see, and it will take 3 more minutes from 10% to 100% if I type another "0" into the textbox. Tips: do not edit the value in the textbox directly, use copy and paste! What the f**k! Sorry for the language but that was what I was really thinking at that time!

The video was recorded when Inventor 2013, I'm not sure if it's fixed in later releases.