Render Studio workflow questions

adam_richardson

Hi - I watched the Render Studio webinar - very helpful, thanks! I'm not on Pro or Enterprise so I can't use it yet, but I had a couple of questions about workflow that I'm curious about.

1. Is it possible to move light sources around in the render environment, or do you have to drop back to "regular" Onshape in order to do that? Obviously you can make other types of adjustments to lights in the render environment, I can't tell if you can move them and therefore see the results of the move in real time.
2. Is there support for (or the need for??) UV mapping? Unless I missed it this wasn't discussed at all.

Thanks!

GregBrown

Adam, lighting in the scene can come from a couple of different sources. 1) the environment i.e. the hdr image that you can upload or use one of the many in the libraries. or 2) objects in the scene but have emissive properties (applied via materials) to them or 3) indirectly you can bounce light around using reflectors (objects with reflective properties e.g. a mirror! So for 1) you can adjust the properties of the environment by scaling it, rotating it, and many, many other properties. For 2) you can translate/scale/rotate any modeled object in the scene without going back to the part studio or assembly. I tweak things all the time using this technique. 3) same as for previous - you can play with the "extras" in your scene. I typically place things just out of view, whether they act as light sources or reflectors. Think of setting up a real shoot in a photo studio and this will get you on track. Happy to provide examples if you need.

Next, and by the way thanks for tuning into the webinar! There are many things we did not cover in this initial webinar - we're looking forward to sharing many more tips and tricks... Providing u-v mapping is certainly possible. You can use alternative projections for textures, for example without too much hassle. More advanced techniques are possible and beyond the scope of a quick forum post, but again happy to provide examples. I did in fact touch on it briefly come to think of it - I showed the Team Ghost Raptor BattleBot which had a whole bunch of stickers applied. Some of these stickers were not in the world X/Y/Z planes so in order to reduce distortion I had to use alternative projections.

Hope this helps!

GregBrown

To add to the above, here's a quick example:

Here is my assembly, note the extra geometry that I created to act as light sources above my model.


I have applied in this case an IES light to these strips of geometry. I got my definition of a fluorescent strip source from https://ieslibrary.com/en/browse. You'll need to play with the intensity etc to get things to your taste.


Here is a quick sample of the result. You can see the reflections of the strip lighting on the intake. 

adam_richardson

Thanks for the follow-up Greg! Good to hear you can move things around while in Render Studio, would slow things down a lot if you had to keep going back and forth.

I understand about setting projection direction for textures/decals etc. As I'm sure you know, higher end renderers such as Keyshot, Modo and Blender have UV unwrapping capabilities to precisely control how a texture wraps around a complex shape (in cases where a basic cubic, cylinder, etc automatic wrapping leads to distortion of the texture). UV unwrapping is a bit of a black art and one of the things a lot of people (myself included) have a hard time working with, so I was curious if/how that was being approached with Render Studio. I wondered if Nvidia's AI magic had some way of assisting this to make it less of a pain 

GregBrown

As I'm sure you know, Render Studio uses NVIDIA IRay as it's "engine" - and IRay is as high (or higher) end as any you mention there. As we continue to enhance our Render Studio implementation we will be able to bring more and more of its goodness - it's just a matter of how we choose to deliver it in the UI versus any lack of technology. So, yes, it's exciting!