Rendering?

caradon

Is OS planning on adding rendering? Or linking to desktop rendering tools?
Renderings (stills and animations) have become pivotal in selling ideas, concepts, marketing colleteral...
I recently discussed the matter with someone in the render biz and personally I think rendering in the cloud currently doesn't make much sense as a business model. There's just too much computation. At least for realtime rendering.

Dries

joe_dunne

Dries,

Rendering is near and dear to my heart. Currently just about every existing rendering product is compatible with Onshape, since we can export to parasolid or STEP, or ACIS.

Suffice to say we are eager to optimize our workflow with them. However its a chicken before the egg problem. First we need to get Onshape, with Parts Assemblies and Drawings out the door. Then we can start talking about relationships and partnerships with key solutions like rendering or FEA or CAM...

I personally think rendering is a perfect fit for the cloud. Since by definition the cloud is a rendering farm. But as you say the business model is key. Its already a proven model by some rendering products like Lagoa. So I think they are all going to move from local calculations to cloud based calculations. It may take a while

question is how would you like to interact with a cloud based rendering solution? would you be willing to pay per render or for a given amount of rendering time? I think that is the biggest change, how the business model changes for them.

Joe

joe_dunne

Dries,

Rendering is near and dear to my heart. Currently just about every existing rendering product is compatible with Onshape, since we can export to parasolid or STEP, or ACIS.

Suffice to say we are eager to optimize our workflow with them. However its a chicken before the egg problem. First we need to get Onshape, with Parts Assemblies and Drawings out the door. Then we can start talking about relationships and partnerships with key solutions like rendering or FEA or CAM...

I personally think rendering is a perfect fit for the cloud. Since by definition the cloud is a rendering farm. But as you say the business model is key. Its already a proven model by some rendering products like Lagoa. So I think they are all going to move from local calculations to cloud based calculations. It may take a while

question is how would you like to interact with a cloud based rendering solution? would you be willing to pay per render or for a given amount of rendering time? I think that is the biggest change, how the business model changes for them.

Joe

caradon

Nice comments, Joe.
As for LAGOA: not so sure they have the right business model (flat rate). They just closed their Boston office, for whatever reason. They essentially got rid of their sales & marketing. Is that sustainable?

Dries

MaggieSu

I'm curious about the allotted rendering time idea. Is there a company out there that does this?
Rendering times for models can vary. What if you want to render a model that takes 10 minutes, for example, but you only have 5 minutes in your rendering time "bank"?

joe_dunne

There has been a market for online render farms for quite a while. I can think of a few off the top of my head

http://www.renderrocket.com/
https://www.rendercore.com/
http://www.rebusfarm.com/


There are a lot of them. I cannot speak for each's business model. But they have become a standard resource for high end use. Film and advertising. there is a challenge on the estimation side of things. I think one of the things each of these companies have learned is how to accurately estimate the upfront rendering time required for a given scene. Of course a lot of them are rendering 1000s of hi res images for a single brief scene. So its easier to suck up the cost of one test render, to get an accurate cost of the other 999.

Seems to me there is a fine line between these types of services and having the entire rendering task in the cloud...


Joe

caradon

Joe,

The render farm business model is indeed a solid one. It has proven time and again to be commercially viable.

Then the question is: what do you do before submitting render jobs? How do you setup and prepare for final rendering?

I think there are two paths:

1. Setup scene through parameters & settings. Then submit test render jobs to farm. This fits nicely in the render farm model. The workflow would be traditional, like Vray.
   
2. Realtime scene setup. Tweak lighting, materials, camera... in realtime. When done, submit render job to farm for final hi-res frames. The workflow would be akin to using e.g. KeyShot.
   

I estimate +95% of designers & engineers would prefer the second path, from a usability point of view.
I think the real challenge is how you handle the computational requirements (and costs) of realtime setup when everything is happening in the cloud.

What do you think?

Dries

kevin_quigley

Joe, I'm not a fan of cloud rendering for design level renders. What I mean by that is renders done during the design phase to internally sell a design. For marketing or motion graphics renders farm is the best solution (we use Rebus with Modo) but there you tend to be looking at multi hour stills at very high resolution or hundreds of animation frames.

The issue is that apps like Keyshot have redefined what we can do in 5 mins on the desktop. When SolidWorks first alpha tested PhotoView 360 it was a standalone app. Somehow the integrated Photoview has never really worked for us. Keyshot is simply faster, easier and better.

I would strongly suggest you look at building plug ins to Keyshot and other rendering systems than worry about cloud rendering. That way you enable your stage 1 users to access the best in class tools rather than force then to use said tools via file export or even worse, force them to use a basic cloud solution. I've tried Lagoa. Honestly? It was sluggish, difficult to set up and total time start to output about 10x longer than using Keyshot.