Looking for some help on Rendering Studio scene

sales_mt_solar

I would like to set up a rendering studio scene for our solar mounting structures so we can change configurations and then re-run that configuration through the scene for a customer to see exactly what they are getting. The model is highly configurable, but just geometry changes, no paint colors or materials changes. Changing qty of solar panels and frame arrangement. With all the possible config options there ends up being like 5 milllion + possible permutations, so need something that can be done per project. 

Apparently we can’t share scenes with other users? So it looks like if I want to have the ability to change configurations and re-run it I will have to learn how to do all the rendering scene settings myself? Or is there some way to pay someone to set up a core scene that I can then work with on my user? 

If anybody is interested I can gladly pm you a model
link or whatever… and glad to hire an expert if somebody can explain a way to make this work collaboratively. 

Super excited about the photorealistic marketing images I am seeing in the videos, unfortunately the attempts I have made so far look more like my kids’ crayons drawings than the stunning images I am seeing 🤣

Cheers,

Travis Jordan

sales_mt_solar

So...

• It sounds like either I have to set up the scene myself or have someone log in using my credentials for me to be able to have a scene I can play with, otherwise it will be in somebody elses account where I can't edit it.
• When I change configurations I am not able to have the assigned custom part finishes/appearances/"shiny-ness" ( I really don't know any of these terms yet) flow to the parts, rather I have to manually go select all the individual items again and re-assign appearances to every item? If so, that is dozens of hours per configuration change which is definitely a deal breaker... 
• Tesselating a new scene per each config ordered is fine, does not seem to take too long. The issue I am seeing is that the parts all come in dull and gross looking, and I have to play hunt and click with a thousand parts every time to get them back to shiny and pretty. I only have a few materials: Painted steel parts (all one color and sheen), Bare Aluminum parts, galvanized bolts, stainless bolts, and glass solar modules. I have the materials defined in the model, can the global default appearances be edited so they would come through usable immediately in the render studio? 
  

Cheers,

Travis J. 

Paul_Arden

• It sounds like either I have to set up the scene myself or have someone log in using my credentials for me to be able to have a scene I can play with, otherwise it will be in somebody elses account where I can't edit it.

Currently this is the case yes. As mentioned, this will change in the future but we don't have a timeframe for this as yet. It is currently one of the main focuses of our development. This goes along with the work to completely remove the save button.

• When I change configurations I am not able to have the assigned custom part finishes/appearances/"shiny-ness" ( I really don't know any of these terms yet) flow to the parts, rather I have to manually go select all the individual items again and re-assign appearances to every item? If so, that is dozens of hours per configuration change which is definitely a deal breaker... 

If you change the appearance of a part by assigning a new appearance to that specific part then no, that assignment will not automatically flow to copies of the same part which get introduced through a configuration change. There is however a work around you can use which would also make general setup easier from a workflow point of view.

Render Studio will merge all Onshape appearances which are the same RGB color together. If you pre-setup your parts in Onshape so that all of the parts in the Assembly you want to have the same Render Studio appearance have the same RGB color (and no other parts have that color) then you can very quickly replace the appearance for that colour with the library appearance you want (or edit its parameters).

To do this you use the "Scene appearances" folder in the Appearances library. When you select this folder you will see all of the Onshape appearance colours you chosen in Onshape. You can then select whichever library appearance you want to replace each color with from the other folders in the library (this is the best way to find realistic looking appearances) and right click on the pre-made library appearance and select "Copy appearance". Then go back to the "Scene appearances" folder, find the color you want to replace, right click on it and select "Paste appearance".

What that does is replace the appearance for that colour with the one from the library. Now, the real advantage to this approach is that if your new configuration creates more parts which use the same RGB appearance colour in Onshape, they will be automatically replaced now by that same appearance you copied and pasted earlier.

So for example let's say you have a solar module which has 5 parts each of which is setup with 5 distinct RGB colours (which are not used elsewhere) you can make a Render Studio scene with a single module and replace those 5 appearances using the above method. If you then change your configuration so that there are 3 of these modules, the newly added ones should get the same appearance assignments automatically with no work from your side.

I've tested this with a very simple Assembly on my side and it works for me, so that might be one way around your issue.

• Tesselating a new scene per each config ordered is fine, does not seem to take too long. The issue I am seeing is that the parts all come in dull and gross looking, and I have to play hunt and click with a thousand parts every time to get them back to shiny and pretty. I only have a few materials: Painted steel parts (all one color and sheen), Bare Aluminum parts, galvanized bolts, stainless bolts, and glass solar modules. I have the materials defined in the model, can the global default appearances be edited so they would come through usable immediately in the render studio? 

We have a feature request related to this where we were asked if we could use the Onshape material assigned rather than (or along with) the Onshape appearance to get more suitable default appearances in Render Studio. This is something we are considering but also don't have a timeframe for at this stage. Feel free to log a ticket related to this if that is also a feature you'd like to see and it will help boost the demand for that functionality.

Paul_Arden

Apologies for the quality but here is a quick video demonstration.

sales_mt_solar

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f74fd5aeb2532583a41b065c/w/47ebc08a5f1a40fcd4f22f71/e/a9d0670b91d0364f9180bf80

MichaelPascoe

So you have the assembly configurable, you just need Render studio to be able to quickly generate a render of the new configuration?

I would say composite parts would be the way to go so that you never have to select the new parts, but Render studio doesn't support these yet. There may be another way to parametrically group parts for Render studio. One way would be to link all of the like parts together with very small solid parts. Boolean them all together so that you only ever have to set the material for one panel in Render studio. 

sales_mt_solar

I also need advice on getting the initial render studio scene set up, but if you are saying that the configuration changes are going to break the render scene every time I update then maybe this whole workflow is flawed… I currently have composite parts, in sub assemblies, then brought together in the final assembly. Is that an issue for the Render Studio? I put a link to the specific model above in the comments…

Paul_Arden

You shouldn't have any issues with composite parts in assemblies with configurations with Render Studio. However currently to switch between configurations you must do an update of the scene, selecting the new configuration when you do the update. For a very large configuration space this is obviously going to entail a lot of manual work unfortunately.

Switching configurations dynamically isn't currently possible since we need to fetch the new tessellation when the configuration changes. Fetching them all in advance wouldn't be practical because the configuration space may be extremely large (as it seems to be in this case). Right now we don't have the ability to selectively replace the parts of the scene which change as a result of configuration changes, which would be needed for that.

As guessed in the original post, currently you cannot share Render Studio scenes between users, each user owns their own scenes. This will change in the future but we do not have a timeframe for this yet.

What you should be able to do is setup the scene, then update with a new configuration and save that scene (or just render the image you need and then throw it away).

For guidance on Render Studio fundamentals, the training courses have an introductory course for Render Studio now and the documentation is also a good source of tips and tricks.

sales_mt_solar

So...

• It sounds like either I have to set up the scene myself or have someone log in using my credentials for me to be able to have a scene I can play with, otherwise it will be in somebody elses account where I can't edit it.
• When I change configurations I am not able to have the assigned custom part finishes/appearances/"shiny-ness" ( I really don't know any of these terms yet) flow to the parts, rather I have to manually go select all the individual items again and re-assign appearances to every item? If so, that is dozens of hours per configuration change which is definitely a deal breaker... 
• Tesselating a new scene per each config ordered is fine, does not seem to take too long. The issue I am seeing is that the parts all come in dull and gross looking, and I have to play hunt and click with a thousand parts every time to get them back to shiny and pretty. I only have a few materials: Painted steel parts (all one color and sheen), Bare Aluminum parts, galvanized bolts, stainless bolts, and glass solar modules. I have the materials defined in the model, can the global default appearances be edited so they would come through usable immediately in the render studio? 
  

Cheers,

Travis J. 

Paul_Arden

• It sounds like either I have to set up the scene myself or have someone log in using my credentials for me to be able to have a scene I can play with, otherwise it will be in somebody elses account where I can't edit it.

Currently this is the case yes. As mentioned, this will change in the future but we don't have a timeframe for this as yet. It is currently one of the main focuses of our development. This goes along with the work to completely remove the save button.

• When I change configurations I am not able to have the assigned custom part finishes/appearances/"shiny-ness" ( I really don't know any of these terms yet) flow to the parts, rather I have to manually go select all the individual items again and re-assign appearances to every item? If so, that is dozens of hours per configuration change which is definitely a deal breaker... 

If you change the appearance of a part by assigning a new appearance to that specific part then no, that assignment will not automatically flow to copies of the same part which get introduced through a configuration change. There is however a work around you can use which would also make general setup easier from a workflow point of view.

Render Studio will merge all Onshape appearances which are the same RGB color together. If you pre-setup your parts in Onshape so that all of the parts in the Assembly you want to have the same Render Studio appearance have the same RGB color (and no other parts have that color) then you can very quickly replace the appearance for that colour with the library appearance you want (or edit its parameters).

To do this you use the "Scene appearances" folder in the Appearances library. When you select this folder you will see all of the Onshape appearance colours you chosen in Onshape. You can then select whichever library appearance you want to replace each color with from the other folders in the library (this is the best way to find realistic looking appearances) and right click on the pre-made library appearance and select "Copy appearance". Then go back to the "Scene appearances" folder, find the color you want to replace, right click on it and select "Paste appearance".

What that does is replace the appearance for that colour with the one from the library. Now, the real advantage to this approach is that if your new configuration creates more parts which use the same RGB appearance colour in Onshape, they will be automatically replaced now by that same appearance you copied and pasted earlier.

So for example let's say you have a solar module which has 5 parts each of which is setup with 5 distinct RGB colours (which are not used elsewhere) you can make a Render Studio scene with a single module and replace those 5 appearances using the above method. If you then change your configuration so that there are 3 of these modules, the newly added ones should get the same appearance assignments automatically with no work from your side.

I've tested this with a very simple Assembly on my side and it works for me, so that might be one way around your issue.

• Tesselating a new scene per each config ordered is fine, does not seem to take too long. The issue I am seeing is that the parts all come in dull and gross looking, and I have to play hunt and click with a thousand parts every time to get them back to shiny and pretty. I only have a few materials: Painted steel parts (all one color and sheen), Bare Aluminum parts, galvanized bolts, stainless bolts, and glass solar modules. I have the materials defined in the model, can the global default appearances be edited so they would come through usable immediately in the render studio? 

We have a feature request related to this where we were asked if we could use the Onshape material assigned rather than (or along with) the Onshape appearance to get more suitable default appearances in Render Studio. This is something we are considering but also don't have a timeframe for at this stage. Feel free to log a ticket related to this if that is also a feature you'd like to see and it will help boost the demand for that functionality.

Paul_Arden

Apologies for the quality but here is a quick video demonstration.

sales_mt_solar

That method seems to work great! It only takes about 3-5 minutes to tesselate the new configuration, and all the materials see to pass through just fine no matter what the configuration qty is. 

Thanks for the awesome hack!

Cheers,

Travis Jordan

Paul_Arden

sales_mt_solar said:

Thanks for the awesome hack!

Nice renders! Glad the solution worked for you.

shawn_crocker

Scenes created by one user are not visible to another user in the same enterprise.  I'm just now noticing this very disappointing lack of functionality.  Someone needs to have stern talking to the initial creators of reality server.  Why on earth would they have initially programmed in such awkward functionality!  This is insane.  Everyone literally has to recreate everything anyone else does.  No one can just build off of someone else's work.

eric_pesty

@shawn_crocker
I take it you haven't seen the "sneak peak" Onsahpe Live session... Hang in there, it's "coming soon"!

shawn_crocker

@eric_pesty
I haven't seen it.  I will have to check this out.

Paul_Arden

@shawn_crocker we definitely understand it is a significant limitation and it has always been the plan to remove all limitations related to the legacy method of storing data. It was a choice we had to make between getting people Render Studio in a way they could use it now (even with some significant limitations) or much later and we felt people could get value out of it now even with this restriction.

As Eric mentioned, we give a demonstration of where we're headed with that in this years sneak peak. Once we have moved all of our storage to utilise Onshape documents in full, we will get all the benefits that come along with that.