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Render Studio
amir_livne
Member Posts: 76 EDU
in General
It was very interesting to hear and read about the new Render Studio.
Unfortunately that feature is not available in Onshape Education and I wonder why.
As we all know, that feature in Solidworks is open for all users.
As a teacher I know that many of my colleges would like to use and teach that option.
I'll appreciate if Onshape will give us the opportunity to use the Render Studio as well.
Sincerely
Amir Livne
Unfortunately that feature is not available in Onshape Education and I wonder why.
As we all know, that feature in Solidworks is open for all users.
As a teacher I know that many of my colleges would like to use and teach that option.
I'll appreciate if Onshape will give us the opportunity to use the Render Studio as well.
Sincerely
Amir Livne
1
Comments
If you are interested in how beta functionality like this is rolled out, I suggest taking a look at the Improvements to Onshape forum post. There are a couple comments about the process and rendering in particular.
We appreciate your excitement and are always looking for ways to improve our EDU offering!
If you need rendering for your class, you can always export your models and import them into a different rendering package, or if you use Keyshot, you can check out the connection app in our App Store.
At first I would like to thank you for your reply.
I'm really sorry but I think you didn't understand me so I'll do my best to explain myself.
Most of my students learn Solidworks at high school and they use to it.
As a Solidwork user for about 15 years in industry as well as a teacher almost every lesson I show them the benefits of Onshape upon Solidworks.
As an adult I can purchase a render application but my young students that will join the industry soon cannot do that so it don't have any significance.
These young students (and not me due to the fact that I'm 69 years old now) can be the best ambassadors of Onshape.
Think about it
Sincerely
Amir Livne
I might point out that they can become the best ambassadors of your mistakes and shortcomings as well.
Personal opinion, but as a pro user who has access to render (which is nice) I feel like it could use a little work to bring it into line with the simple but powerful workflows that I value in Onshape. It can quickly feel like you should take a photography course to use it. Just a thought that maybe they didn't release it to the educational sector to get bashed before getting some feedback from dedicated users.
Some of the best rendering people I've worked with also knew and/or learned a lot about photography. At IDEO, one person spent a lot of time with the staff photographer learning from the studio set ups (lighting, backdrops, etc) that were used for real product photos. Another person ended up changing careers from ID (with very high quality rendering) to fashion and other types of photography.
@Domenico_DiMare
It seems like you and @amir_livne are talking a bit cross purposes. It totally makes sense that the beta program is limited in scope right now by design, but will EDU and Standard accounts eventually have access to Render Studio? Maybe you can't make promises about future plans, but at least can you give some hints?
We've definitely heard and appreciate the feedback that teachers and students want and need rendering in many cases. And we are always working to improve our EDU offerings to fit the diverse needs of the education community.
On the Improvements to Onshape forum post that included the Rendering Beta, I think Jake summed it up well.
jakeramsley said:
At this point we haven't made any decisions about what Render Studio looks like after beta. There are some things on our roadmap right now that we are working on and we are hoping to receiving feedback to help drive prioritization of improvements. Beyond that, our requirements of a non-beta release are currently flexible.
On a personal level, I think that rendering has its place for users across all of our plan types, even our users that don't fit as Professional or Enterprise users.
I will say that Professional and Enterprise users getting early access is not correct. We release updates when the release meets our standard of quality. Sometimes we will run Early Visibilty Programs of functionality to get early feedback to help inform what is required for release. The users who we reach out to to join an Early Visibilty Program is based on different criteria and has spanned users of all plan types.
I'm a high school teacher in Toronto. My background is in Architecture and became a teacher after 20 yrs in industry. Started using CAD in the '80 before AutoCad and began with surface modelers. I used Creo and ArchiCad in school to teach with. During the Pandemic, Onshape was the go to, to continue teaching, in a remote setting and for this, I am grateful to Onshape / PTC.
My initial instruction to grades 11 and 12 includes rendering because of the need to teach the aspects of communicating design intent combined with the dicipline of setting up that comunication. I used Reality Server with students and they generated excellent results. I was told mid way through my 2nd year of remote teaching that Reality Server was being re-tuned for Onshape integration by PTC. Not sure what happened to that development process.
My goal is to expose students to the design professions. I just wanted to say that CAD aids problem solving through communication; teaching high school students how to communicate design intent without "picture making" delays the learning students need to undertake. And I know PTC is committed to helping prepare young people by giving them a glimpse of what current working environments involve.
All the best,
@Domenico_DiMare @jakeramsley @cody_armstrong
I too am a teacher using Onshape with my students, and encouraging other schools to join the ride in Australia since 2019. The one consistent stumbling point for uptake of Onshape is a lack of rendering engine at all in the early days and now not available to educational accounts.
Students undertaking major projects in Year 11 and 12 want to present their work in the best light and in an appropriate setting, and although they can colour it in with Onshape that is the extent of what's available. Yes they can export the file to another piece of software, but then the question becomes, why not use that piece of software in the first instance, if, as is the case in many instances, it is part of another CAD package.
Before you acquired and integrated the Render Studio it offered limited free use and that was fine for students. Then it spent a number of years being integrated and we're still in a position where it isn't available for education users. When I consider how user friendly Onshape is for students to get to grips with and how easy it is for student sign up, it is a shame that we will have to consider the implications for our senior students in the choice of software.
The most regular question I get asked by other teachers (as I spent the last coupe of years working for the department developing resources and support for teachers) is why should I use Onshape over Fusion or Inventor? As in NSW, as educators, we have access to both for free (as well as other Autodesk products) and both have very good render engines built it. Even though I trained on AutoCAD back in the deep dark distant past of the early 2000s, and have gone through Pro Desktop, Creo, Fusion and Onshape, I do honestly believe Onshape is one of the most intuitive programs to use and I now deliver it to all students from Year 7 (12 years old) upwards, so that by the time they reach Year 12 (our last year of high school) they are confident and competent enough to be able to draw up complex projects. Its just a shame they can't render them too!
I really don't want to move back to Autodesk products right now, as I've invested a considerable amount of time generating resources and projects around Onshape, which are both personal ones only for my own students and state wide resources available to download for any teacher in NSW from the department website. But as we're in a low socio-economic area, asking the students to pay for a rendering service that they could access for free with other software, starts to become the deal breaker.
I'm hoping with the addition of 900 new appearances it means we're now out of BETA and you might consider allowing access for educational users, even if at some limited level.
Thanks,
Connor
But it is not available to Education users, only Education Enterprise users, who are, I assume, paying for that service. I have no issue with this at all, after all you are business and the fact that you are willing to allow students and teachers access to anything for free is great. But I also fully understand why you and other companies do this. The greater the number of users leaving education and entering the workforce with skills already developed in Onshape means the greater likelihood companies will invest in your product. It's the same model PTC has been using for years with Pro Desktop and Creo, and for that matter the same model Autodesk uses.
What I was asking was whether at some point you would consider releasing more of the paid bits to simple education users. As I mentioned I spent the last couple of years working for the education department before returning to the classroom this year so that I could actually do what I love to do, which is teach. But during that time, in the hundreds of conversations that I had with teachers from all over the state, the main sticking point was the lack of ability to do basic renders, with teachers pointing out that Autodesk products are also free to use, but have a much better rendering engine built in and others pointing out that even Sketchup provides better basic rendering capabilities that far surpass the colours available in Onshape. Now I'm not necessarily talking about being able to place the item in a image with correct lighting and shadows that can be fully adjusted, at a basic level I'm talking about allowing the ability to apply those 900 new appearances and however many you already had to everyday parts, using the simple shading differences between surfaces and the addition of reflections that is already available to give a somewhat more realistic appearance, rather than a full on photo realistic render engine such as is available behind the paywall.
I hope that makes more sense, and if the answer is no then Ill just have to find another way as I'm reasonably sure the 200 odd students I've already got to sign up this year would be peeved if I asked them to switch to another software at this point. As my mummy always said, if you don't ask you don't get, so hopefully something positive will come out of this rather than my mother-in-laws view that the squeaky chicken gets the axe!
Thanks for an excellent product and here's hoping it only gets better.
Connor
The problem is that other free packages do have rendering included. That's your competition. Especially from Autodesk (fusion, it's great for schools!...it's just like Onshape, no need to install anything.....) with its free education licence.
It is a sticking point.
I still can't find the render options in the education enterprise to which I have access
@connor_macmurray this might help:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/71e388da7c0efa46041e06fe/w/2a39f2a2092bc13a9708dbaf/e/a0c1f0996e1c4993255a9c0f was helpfully provided to me by Onshape support.
Are there any plans to roll render out to Edu Ent?