Why do the update off a render studio scene take so long?

shawn_crocker

I'm finding the time to update a scene to take random amounts of time.  I have tried updating the scene even though I have not changed the model at all and it took longer then the time before.  Sometimes my model will not update.  I just sits on preparing until the render studio finally times out.  Is this reprocessing of the model super dependent on an over worked server resource?  What I am getting at is sometimes if I come back in a few hours the model will update without tool much trouble.  I'm asking this because sometimes the update takes so long I think I could have made a new scene and redecorated it in less time them updating.  Not sure if I am alone in this experience?

Paul_Arden

When you say finally times out, what is actually on the screen? If you get an error message or a support code please file a ticket with that so we can investigate.

In general currently updating takes longer than we'd like. The complexity is basically that we need to translate the ids for all of the things in the scene in order to keep associativity when there are modelling changes in Onshape. This can be many thousands of ids and will depend on what you have put appearances on in the scene. In general it should complete even if it takes a very long time. Right now it basically takes a long time because it has a lot to do, it has nothing to do with resources.

We are working to optimise it for the future of course. If you have specific documents which are not complex but take a long time to update you can file a ticket and we can investigate further.

Paul_Arden

When you say finally times out, what is actually on the screen? If you get an error message or a support code please file a ticket with that so we can investigate.

In general currently updating takes longer than we'd like. The complexity is basically that we need to translate the ids for all of the things in the scene in order to keep associativity when there are modelling changes in Onshape. This can be many thousands of ids and will depend on what you have put appearances on in the scene. In general it should complete even if it takes a very long time. Right now it basically takes a long time because it has a lot to do, it has nothing to do with resources.

We are working to optimise it for the future of course. If you have specific documents which are not complex but take a long time to update you can file a ticket and we can investigate further.

shawn_crocker

@paul_arden
Thanks.  The model is sort of complex in that is has quite a few parts.  This is what often happens.



I have tried actively using other parts of the document to keep it from expiring, but that doesn't seem to help.  It seems the render studio is on its own time table and can expire even when the rest of the document is still active.  Anyways, just putting out some feelers to see what is up in this area.  In this particular case I will blame it more on a very intensive model as I have modeled weld beads and such that have a bit of geometric texturing on them so the triangle count is probably through the roof.  Bump maps on welds alone just don't look real enough though which is why I have modeled them.  Maybe some one has a good weld bump map?  The best I have come up with is the hammered metal material.  That onto of the consistent modeled geometry texturing I have done makes for a decent looking weld.

Paul_Arden

Render Studio uses a 30 minute timeout which is less than Onshape, however it is supposed to turn that off during the conversion process, so that is a bug, please report.

shawn_crocker

Thanks.  I will do.  I believe (haven't timed it exactly) that it will process for longer than 30 mins.  I will make sure my computer isn't doing something like screen saver or something.  I have noticed sometimes if my screen goes to sleep even for a second, that the not connected screen will appear even though the rest of the document remains active.  Not sure if that is normal but will report.

S1mon

I've entered a couple support tickets about this. The amount of time basically makes Render Studio unusable for any kind of process where the CAD is being updated.

The way the appearance IDs are mapped to parts is so broken that it would take me hours and hours to clear the > 100 appearances that come in from translating. Half the time I right-click in the white space to click "remove", the menu doesn't even have that option. I already put a lot of work into making colors exactly the same for multiple parts in Onshape, but when they come into Render Studio they all have different (but basically identical) appearances. There doesn't seem to be a way to select all appearances in Render Studio with the same color and combine them into a single appearance that's easier to edit.

I'm really baffled how to use this tool without going insane. Unlike the rest of Onshape, there doesn't seem to be any progress being made. We get new features and improved functionality for Onshape every 3 weeks. I gave up trying to use Render Studio months ago and finally came back and find that it's basically the same unusable mess. 

There's no way to select more than one appearance at a time to do anything to it. Every part comes in with its own appearance with just a number. I can select a bunch of parts and assign an appearance to them, but then I don't have a way to find unused appearances to clear them out. How do I manage this:

There really needs to be an obvious way to select a bunch of appearances and combine them, or select a bunch of parts and combine their appearances. Ideally there would be an option to take things which are the same color (or material) in Onshape and make them the same appearance in Render Studio.

If Render Studio is going to default to assigning a unique appearance to each part, they should be shown in the tree view along with the assembly.

shawn_crocker

S1mon said:

I'm really baffled how to use this tool without going insane. 

I agree so much with that comment.  I have sort of found a way to use it in an efficient manner.  I have come to realize that all instances of a part do have their appearance combined into one.  Like you, I am also waiting to be able to have identical part colours(appearances) combined into one, regardless of if the parts themselves are actually the same.  Or some way to make that happen with some easy selections.  You may or may not be aware that you can search in the project tree view, group select a bunch of parts and then right click on an appearance from the standard library or from the scene library and apply it to the parts in one go.  I would certainly vote for any improvement request you create for some of these super key issues you have noted here.  ATM I have enough created that I fear creating to much more could push me into the realm of an annoying winer rather than productive criticizer.   .  I do have an open request for that grouping of identical part colours thing though.

S1mon

@shawn_crocker
I had a good call with @joe_dunne recently. It sounds like there will be some big updates to the front end of Render Studio to make it more in line with the way that Onshape itself works.

Selection is definitely one of the more painful things now. I've definitely gotten good at using the search in the tree to select all the screws or whatever.

Where it really comes to a screeching halt is selecting faces. I have a segmented display that I'm trying to light up. It's modeled as a single part with some shallow pockets which show the segments. In Onshape it takes a few seconds to select all the faces and set their face appearance. It takes minutes in between selections to do anything in Render Studio, and the highlighting is suspicious at best. I will probably resort to making a dummy part with the selected faces, and reimporting into the scene.

Paul_Arden

We're working on the grouping of colours outside of those parts coming from an individual Part Studio (that's the current level at which they are combined). There are some corner cases we need to deal with because of the ability Onshape has now to have named face colours, these shouldn't be and won't be combined but face colours in general creates a bit of a spanner in the works. In any event, there should be some improvement in the combining of appearances with the same colour soon.

Paul_Arden

S1mon said:

@shawn_crocker
Where it really comes to a screeching halt is selecting faces. I have a segmented display that I'm trying to light up. It's modeled as a single part with some shallow pockets which show the segments. In Onshape it takes a few seconds to select all the faces and set their face appearance. It takes minutes in between selections to do anything in Render Studio, and the highlighting is suspicious at best. I will probably resort to making a dummy part with the selected faces, and reimporting into the scene.

Just to explain a little as to why highlighting is so tricky, we don't actually have any of the CAD geometry on the client in Render Studio, everything is rendered server-side and the way we are rendering this does not allow us to have outlines 'show through' a foreground object that isn't selected. This is why outlines look a bit strange sometimes since they will get cutout by any objects in front of them.

Basically we are drawing outlines around a 'dump' 2D image without any access to the 3D data that created it (we do have a bit of extra information we call a 'clown mask' which tells us what is where so we can do the highlighting though).

We are working on ways to improve this but without the original CAD context it is tricky, we have some ideas though. We really want to avoid duplicating the Onshape CAD context in Render Studio since it is one of the major benefits right now, Render Studio doesn't need to load any geometry client-side, as a result it can render much larger, more finely tessellated datasets than even Onshape itself, regardless of your client hardware.

Selection comes into this as well since currently in our backend a 'pick' operation only gives you the first thing that is hit under the mouse, so we can't do nice stuff like Onshape has with select other and so on. We recently incorporated multiple pick into our backend however so this will be something we can do in the future.

These of course are smaller improvements, the large changes you talked to Joe about are much more about how we store data (and getting rid of the stupid save button) as well as removing the translation step. These are unfortunately much larger structural changes which is why there has been recently less improvements on the 3 week schedule. However those changes are going to let us iterate much faster once they are in. I think when people see the improvements they will be worth the wait.

We are still trying to squeeze in some commonly requested improvements like the colour merging on a shorter schedule though.

S1mon

@paul_arden
In my particular case, if a bunch of faces of the same color from the same part were assumed to be the same appearance in Render Studio, it would save many hours of work - or me just giving up on using Render Studio altogether. (I would expect some option to "ungroup" or "explode" or whatever to be able to independently color those faces, but the default would be to honor the work done in Onshape.)

Here's the offending part (which is just 1 of 184 in the assembly): 

It somehow has >1000 faces, which seems to make Render Studio slow to a complete crawl when doing any face selection.

Here's the stats from Onshape:

Paul_Arden

@S1mon Yes, it would be exactly for that case that this improvement would hopefully help. Overriding that would just be a matter of selecting the faces and assigning as normal which would break the link to the original appearance just for those faces. I'd be curious what happens if you use a named face appearance instead of a generic one, that might merge already, although I suspect across an Assembly it would still have the same issue. The work we are doing at the moment should definitely save you some time on a case like that though.