RealityServer for Onshape Q&A

Paul_Arden

This is a thread for general RealityServer Q&A which is monitored by migenius staff. If you have any questions, feedback, observations or general discussion that you want to be sure we see, this is the place to do it.

Of course if you have a specific topic, feel free to start another thread, you can also link to your dedicated thread here if you like. We are also available at support@migenius.com.

Paul_Arden

Just for fun, I'll kick it off with a question of my own. I've heard that there is some new AI Denoising technology in RealityServer now, how can I access that from the app?

Paul_Arden

paul_arden said:

Just for fun, I'll kick it off with a question of my own. I've heard that there is some new AI Denoising technology in RealityServer now, how can I access that from the app?

Great question Paul! We haven't documented this feature fully yet but since it is likely to be something almost everyone wants to use I have made a quick video showing how you can enable it.

https://youtu.be/QA2eHrg3R3o

How well it works may depend on your scene, however in most cases it will allow you to get noise free results in around 1/10th of the rendering time. You can see in the video there are three settings to turn on and control.

• Available to Use - turns on the creation of all of the extra information needed to make the denoiser work. This doesn't actually turn it on, just makes the information needed.
• Enabled - turns on the AI denoising system.
• Start Iteration - only starts using the denoising after a certain iteration number. This stops the denoiser kicking in during navigation and scene editing since since this might give results that are too blurry.

The denoiser can blur features in the early stages of rendering where there isn't as much information to work with but it should quickly refine over a short period of time (much shorter than waiting for the grain to clear).

chris_sturgis

Just to bring this in from another forum thread. I think the renderings look great, but a lot of the time I cannot receive a file. I am using Chrome, but am never prompted to save a file. When I get the files into onshape I am able to receive them, but as you mentioned the png comes out as a jpeg.

Also more clarity on what the render settings do would be great.

But I do really like Reality Server and hope to keep using it. It is quick and easy to use with pretty good results.

chris_sturgis

Would also love to be able to stack renders in the background, so i could do multiple angles at once.

chris_sturgis

I've been waiting on an output file for about 10 minutes now with the green progress bar fully filled. This has happened multiple times as well. 

chris_sturgis

I also paid for 10hrs of compute time and have 35min left and have only been able to get like 3 or 4 files to output.

chris_sturgis

finally started to get some files out of it.

Paul_Arden

I also reproduced the issue of the green bar being fully filled but no image saved. We are going to dive into the reliability of the render dialog tomorrow with the engineers and get to the bottom of what is going on. If it happens again to you and you are comfortable bringing up the JavaScript console (Ctrl + Shift + J on Windows or Cmd + Opt + J on Mac) we'd love to see if there are any errors in there.

For background (queued) renders, this has been on our own list for a while and it's something we hope to do but it is a fairly large task to implement so we want to focus on getting what's there working reliably before moving on to that. We definitely understand why people want it though.

For your used time, please email support@migenius.com so we can get you credited with some hours.

chris_sturgis

just doing some final renders. It has been working pretty well until it started to hang up a bit. Heres the javascript with errors.

Paul_Arden

Thanks for the info, I think most of those errors are harmless so it is likely something else. We are diving into it today and hopefully will have an update soon.

Paul_Arden

We have been working through the reported rendering issues today and also rolled in a few other fixes we found. While we believe we have improved the reliability of the batch rendering a lot we did not find one single issue that would explain everything users have seen so we are very keen to here how people go with this version. We pushed the update now and it has the following fixes.

Changes to Render to Onshape and Render to Disk:

• Automatically pause interactive rendering when dialog is open
• Fixed PNG not outputting alpha channel
• Fixed PNG being incorrectly named as JPG
• Added tooltips to render settings with more information
• Added ability to disable quality based render termination
• Turn off quality based render termination by default
• Added units to maximum time setting to make clear it's in seconds
• Reworked backend to improve reliability of batch rendering

Other fixes:

• Fixed issue converting scenes which had double quotes in part names
• Added brief guided tour on first use of the editor to show users around
• New 'Scene Materials' library which shows all of the materials used
• Fix problem with Reconversion which was not working for Part Studios
• Fix issues where camera backplate was not saved when new camera was made

The scene materials library is still in development so it doesn't show thumbnails yet and doesn't let you give the materials nice names, we are working on both of those. However it is useful if you want to re-assign a material you have already used and possibly edited to other things in the scene.

For saving renderings to disk, if you find nothing happens when rendering finishes, check that Chrome has not blocked the pop-up, since the application needs to open another tap to trigger the saving. Saving to Onshape doesn't need that though.

brucebartlett

Hi Paul, Great work on the updates. I have tried to get in a couple times over the last few days and it has timed out, however, I just tried this morning and seem to be working.

Is it possible to get back to the home screen to chose another model to render, I can't seem to find a way without adding a new tab?

Paul_Arden

brucebartlett said:

Is it possible to get back to the home screen to chose another model to render, I can't seem to find a way without adding a new tab?

The toolbar icon on the far right will take you back to your dashboard.

alex_huijser

Hi Paul, when rendering scene to disk the environement is not shown.This happend after the update I think. Is this a known issue? Any idea when updating model from onshape bug is fixed? Thx.
Regards,
Alex

Paul_Arden

This is by design if you use PNG as the output format since it saves an alpha channel. The environment is actually still there, some viewers just ‘helpfully’ mask the alpha channel for you. In Photoshop or other tools you can pull it back out if needed.

For the reconversion bug, this should now be fixed, however it might have issuea with older saved models.

alex_huijser

Thank you Paul for the explanation. It seems to work fine now. One thing...with a created camera you can't set the background color after you have added an environment. For the default camara this still works. Bug?
Regards,
Alex

Paul_Arden

You should be able to pull up the background options from the toolbar (the little ball with shadow icon) and set a new background colour. I have a feeling however this might be setting the background only of the default camera which would match with what you are seeing.

It is actually possible to set the background colour individually per camera. If you select the newly created camera in the scene graph, then expand it you will find a camera item under it, if you select that you should see the camera properties on the right side. You can then go into the 'Backplate' group and edit the background colour for that camera.

brucebartlett

Hi Paul,

I seem to be getting a blank screen when trying to render. I have tried numerous times and can only seem to get really simple models to work.

Paul_Arden

Bruce, we've definitely converted some very large models without issues, however every now an again we encounter something like this. If you are able to open the JavaScript console to see if any errors are being reported there it would be really helpful.

I'll also reach out by email to get your user id since that will let us run through the server logs and find out if there were issues there.

Paul_Arden

Also everyone just to note, we are aware of the fact that the new 'Standard Content' and configurations are not currently working with RealityServer. We have fixed this and are just waiting for a moment of inactivity to push an update for that.

Paul_Arden

@brucebartlett thanks for helping us diagnose your issue, which we can confirm is now fixed.

Paul_Arden

We have just pushed a new update for RealityServer with the following changes:

• Onshape Standard Content and Assemblies referencing configurations are now supported. As this is quite a new feature in Onshape we have not been able to test all types of configurations, however in our initial testing it all seems to be working well.

• A new top level category in the Material Library has been added called 'Scene Materials'. This holds all of the materials already in use in your scene. If you wish to assign a material you have already used and possibly edited to another object in your scene you should do it from here rather than the library so they can be changed together.

• Added the ability to rename scene materials. Note that only materials that are actually used in the scene will be saved when the scene is saved out.

• Scene material thumbnails are live rendered when you make parameter changes.

• Backplate information (e.g., background colour) is now copied correctly on camera creation.

• Added Save / Save As combo button for saving now so you can just save over your existing scene without having to remember the name, which was previously pretty annoying.

• Added step to the initial tour pointing out the presence of the return to dashboard button on the right of the toolbar which many users were missing.

• Various fixes for conversions and re-conversions. Including issue with the editor tripping up on things in assemblies that we don't support in RealityServer (e.g., sketches).

We have still had a few reports of conversion issues which we are tracking down. Hopefully this update helps with several of the previously reported ones though.

Doug_Jones

Hi Paul.  Is it possible now to import custom finishes (i.e., scan files) into RealityServer?  Or not yet?

Paul_Arden

Doug_Jones said:

Hi Paul.  Is it possible now to import custom finishes (i.e., scan files) into RealityServer?  Or not yet?

By scan files I assume you mean textures that you have scanned in some fashion rather than measured material data like X-rite AxF. If so then yes you can, however we don't have a simple guide for that just yet.

You can start with an existing textured material and change it's textured parameters by uploading a new texture file. You can also start with 'flex_material' material and drag the 'file_texture' function onto any of the colour parameters of the material and select a texture in that.

Parker_Hawk

paul_arden said:

Doug_Jones said:

Hi Paul.  Is it possible now to import custom finishes (i.e., scan files) into RealityServer?  Or not yet?

By scan files I assume you mean textures that you have scanned in some fashion rather than measured material data like X-rite AxF. If so then yes you can, however we don't have a simple guide for that just yet.

You can start with an existing textured material and change it's textured parameters by uploading a new texture file. You can also start with 'flex_material' material and drag the 'file_texture' function onto any of the colour parameters of the material and select a texture in that.

Paul,

I have tried this, and am able to get all the way to selecting a texture, however when I try to open it, nothing happens in Reality Server. Does it need to a be a specific file type, or something like that?

Parker_Hawk

Parker_Hawk said:

paul_arden said:

Doug_Jones said:

Hi Paul.  Is it possible now to import custom finishes (i.e., scan files) into RealityServer?  Or not yet?

By scan files I assume you mean textures that you have scanned in some fashion rather than measured material data like X-rite AxF. If so then yes you can, however we don't have a simple guide for that just yet.

You can start with an existing textured material and change it's textured parameters by uploading a new texture file. You can also start with 'flex_material' material and drag the 'file_texture' function onto any of the colour parameters of the material and select a texture in that.

Paul,

I have tried this, and am able to get all the way to selecting a texture, however when I try to open it, nothing happens in Reality Server. Does it need to a be a specific file type, or something like that?

Ok so here's a test document I'm working on,  https://cad.onshape.com/documents/1a01fa04182e9a986eff3910/w/21085e4104bfb35293aa807c/e/1a625e54f20a2ffc0463a6b3 
It has some objects and the file I'm trying to put on it as a base texture, I've tried both using the flex texture and putting the file_texture on it and replacing an existing texture with it, but I can't seem to get it to load into reality server.

Paul_Arden

@Parker_Hawk, I did just a little testing and noticed a problem in that our servers were limiting the upload size pretty drastically, we have increased that to 50MB now. I think what might have happened is that the texture you were trying to upload was too large for the previous limit. In the process I have now made a little video showing how to put a user uploaded texture on material parameter. You can check it out here:

https://youtu.be/El1dWY8UA1c

Parker_Hawk

Thanks for help concernign custom materials Paul, but now I'm having a problem with saving. Whenever I try to save a scene it almost always fails. Any tips on how to fix this?

Paul_Arden

@Parker_Hawk do you mean it fails when you try to save a scene you added a textured material to or just in general? I just did a quick test saving and loading a scene with a texture and it did not have an issue for me. What does the save dialog say when it fails, just "Failed to save"?

If you are able to open the JavaScript console and let us know if there is any information in there that would help to. If this is with the simple scene you shared earlier that should definitely work. Is it just any scene save fails? Also are you doing Save, Save As or the Save it prompts you for when you exit?

alex_huijser

Hi Paul, can I import my own environments? And/or is there a way to enhance the current ones? they are pretty fuzzy...