Oculus Rift S and VRED Design

[M.Hawryluk]

Hello,

We want to use VRED (preferably Design) and Oculus Rift S to make renders and VR presentations.

I have no experience with VR software/hardware and I need a small scale proof of concept.

CAD data will be prepared in Inventor Professional 2019.

Current setup: i7-8700K @ 3.7GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD drive, graphics card: NVIDIA Quadro M2000.

The first question before I place an order for a new hardware: does anyone have experience with Oculus Rift S together with VRED Design? Are there any problems connecting these two?

Second question is about my current graphics card as it is not on the Oculus recommended cards list.
I guess I may need a better one, so what do you recommend?
Higher Quadro model (P4000) or some GeForce (for example GTX 1080)?

With kind regards,
Michal

[michael_nikelsky · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the Rift S should work just fine with VREDDesign. The GPU however is underpowered. As far as I know Nvidia does not qualify any Maxwell GPUs as VR-Ready and since you have a very low end variant it will mostlikely be too slow for most scenes.

I would recommend at least a Pascal, better an RTX GPU, since those have some features that can improve performance for VR. What you really need depends on the size and complexity of your scene. For automotive scenes you should get the fastest GPU you can but for smaller scenes something like an RTX4000 should work just fine as well. 

We don´t officially support Geforce GPUs but usually they work just fine as well and a 2080TI will probably outperform and RTX4000. 

Kind regards

Michael

[M.Hawryluk]

Hello,

Thank you for the explanation.
I will make the first try on my current hardware, but I see I will have to buy a new card.

I want to start with VRED as it reads Inventor files and seems to be user friendly, but I am not sure if I can put in it really big file and make a VR walkthrough (minimum quality settings).

As I mentioned before, VR is completely new to me (just some basic experience with rendering in Inventor Studio and Showcase) so maybe you could also have a quick look on what I want to achieve, and guide me regarding software in point 3.

Actually I have three goals:

1. to make renders of industrial installation modules (some pipes and vessels) in better quality than from Inventor Studio (VRED Design).

2. to make a VR presentation of these modules (low quality rendering or just a shaded CAD-style representation) also in VRED Design.  Comparing the physical size with a car these objects are big (let's say a size of a family house).
What I want to achieve here is to rotate/zoom/pan object and get the feeling of size in VR.

3. if step 2 proves to be successful I want to try with VR walkthrough over a complete site (a few buildings with a lot of piping inside).  I don't need quality graphics in this case, just to get a VR feeling of the size.
I'm not sure if this is possible at all on my kind of PC, and is VRED a suitable tool or do I need Navisworks + Iris VR / Revit + Enscape?

With kind regards,
MH

[Christian_Garimberti]

Hi,

i made some test with some dataset of complete plant buildings from Inventor.

Dimensions are not important. Complexity of the model and quantity of details makes the difference.

So could be more difficult to see a car in VR then a big plant.

Trying to answer you question:

1. If you used Showcase you'll love VRED. The workflow is pretty the same, but obviously with many more possibility. Quality, usability and speed of VREd are very better then Inventor Studio.

2. Make VR with your dataset is very easy with Vred. i made a sample vide some times ago. https://youtu.be/aNJeCSPcvnM

Visual quality (cad style or a more realistic visual style) doesn't impact to much in performances, unless you use some very complex meterials with bumps or displacements. But in my experience for plant or industrial purpose it is more or less everything made of steel or some plain paints.

Interact with the model in VR is another question... with Vred Design you cant create your own interaction scripts, so you have to use the built in interaction features. And there are no function to directly manipulate pieces of the model. But you can prepare some animations than can be started while in VR.

3. Vred have no limits on the model complexity and dimensions. For VR GPU is everything. To manage big dataset i had to use 2x nvidia quadro P5000. There is no rule for this, and i think you can only understand if you need more GPU power trying your model in VR.

Best

Chris

[michael_nikelsky]

Additional to what Chris said an important thing to what out for is the number of nodes in the scene. It should not be too large, usually I recommend anything between 3000-10000 nodes as a maximum, depending on the hardware you use (that includes the CPU since there is a lot of work to do for it when there are many nodes).

There are a couple of things you can do to improve performance in VRED for a scene, for example occlusion culling, but every scene is somewhat different so you might need to do some manual optimizations to get the best performance.

Kind regards

Michael

[M.Hawryluk]

@Christian_Garimberti and @michael_nikelsky Thank you for support! Now it is clear which way to follow.