RealityServer for Onshape Q&A

Jake_Rosenfeld

@tim_hess427

Here is our help page on that topic: https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/named_views.htm

tim_hess427

Thanks @paul_arden and @Jake_Rosenfeld, I'll give the named views a shot.

Ritterly

Can anyone please help me figure out how to fix this?

AuroraRon

I've seen the same message today.  

Paul_Arden

Investigating, not sure what's going on here as nothing has changed on our side.

Paul_Arden

We've confirmed it appears to be an issue on the Onshape site and we are working with the team to fix it as soon as possible.

Paul_Arden

Onshape have now corrected the problem and the RealityServer app is now working again.

Ethan_K

Last night we had an outage from 1:20PM-9:30PM EDT. It affected only partner app OAuth flow. We've identified the issue and the normal OAuth flow should now be working. We're working on instituting additional precautions to ensure this won't happen in the future. Thanks for reaching out to us about this, and sorry for the inconvenience.

AuroraRon

I had to walk away from the computer and when I returned, I noticed two - three hours less on the remaining time.  Does not not shut down for in activity? 

AuroraRon

Questions 

1.  Using environments, how do we rotate the drawings / objects without the environment moving with it. 
2.  How do we change the lighting on the object and not have the environment lighting change with it.  Does not balance...
3. Why is the environment always soft focused?  Where the object sits is also soft and not photo realistic because of it. 

Thanks :-)

Paul_Arden

In general in RealityServer there are two separate concepts which can be easy to confuse. The environment and the backplate.

The environment is what provides the lighting to the model (as well as any self-illuminating materials). It is represented by default as an infinite sphere with a HDRI dome mapped onto it. If there is no backplate being used then the environment is what you see. By default we do have a backplate of a solid colour (white). When you remove this you see the environment. Because the environment provides the lighting, when you change it, what you see in the back also must change (to preserve physical correctness).

The backplate is an optional colour or image which replaces what you see where there is no modelling detail (where you would normally see the environment). Unlike the environment, this is just a 2D image and is mapped directly into the rendered result so it doesn't change when you move the camera and is not affected by changing the lighting environment. Typically it is used to replace the background with a higher resolution photo.

1. Using environments, how do we rotate the drawings / objects without the environment moving with it.

This is done by using a backplate instead of an environment. For a backplate you would need to provide the image you want to utilise. We have a video on setting up the backplate feature here:

https://youtu.be/iJTHLEDVXII

2. How do we change the lighting on the object and not have the environment lighting change with it. Does not balance...

This is also done by using a backplate. The lighting will still be controlled by the environment but you will not see the environment. Please see the video mentioned above for setting this up.

3. Why is the environment always soft focused? Where the object sits is also soft and not photo realistic because of it.

Mainly because to get a sharp image from a spherical environment map requires an extremely high resolution which takes a lot of memory. The environments are optimised to provide realistic lighting and not necessarily high resolution direct views. If you have your own higher resolution HDRI you can use it, however there is if I recall a 100MB limit on upload sizes and a HDRI of a high enough resolution to satisfy your requirements is likely to be more like 300MB. A backplate on the other hand will not have this issue and the images will be much smaller (they don't need to be HDRI images, they can just be conventional images).

Just a note for anyone who is not aware, we have a YouTube playlist with a lot of useful tutorial videos which cover topics such as this which can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIdgGb1SFjg&list=PLwUZBACf-CBNXLL1ymEtAOMtYuaLXJQ78

Or by clicking the YouTube link in the Dashboard of the application.

AuroraRon

That's excellent Paul thank you. I thought I watched all the videos but missed this one.   Very well done and understood. Keep up the great work! 

michael_bromley

I'm getting a black screen when I try to create a scene.  Has anyone encountered this before?  Upon creation I cannot see any of my models in the viewing window.

Paul_Arden

michael_bromley said:

I'm getting a black screen when I try to create a scene.  Has anyone encountered this before?  Upon creation I cannot see any of my models in the viewing window.

I've got your support ticket so we'll get back to you there to try and sort out the problem.

AuroraRon

Hey somethings not right here.... -1930 m or hours on my account and it will not let me add more.  Last I recall I think I had about 10 hours on there. 

Anyone else having an issue? 

Paul_Arden

@AuroraRon this is due to a change we made yesterday to fix a problem where users were being allocated far more free hours than was intended. It affects our long time users more as the magnitude of the problem was larger the longer the time since the user first used the app. If the user has consumed some of those extra hours then their account can potentially go negative.

Of course, this was due to our mistake so we'll fix up affected accounts (just doing yours now and will respond to your support ticket accordingly).

Paul_Arden

I gone through our database now and cleaned up all of the cases I could find of users who had gone negative as a result of the change, so hopefully there shouldn't be any more issues with this.

MBartlett21

@paul_arden
Mine is showing -170min

Paul_Arden

@MBartlett21 I think I found your account and updated it. If that didn't get it please email your username to support@migenius.com.

Doug_Jones

Hi @paul_arden. Was wondering if there are any plans for RS to eventually provide 3D asset export capabilities, for example glTF?

Paul_Arden

Doug_Jones said:

Hi @paul_arden. Was wondering if there are any plans for RS to eventually provide 3D asset export capabilities, for example glTF?

We don't have any immediate plans for this although our underlying RealityServer platform already supports export to various formats, including glTF. However right now we don't export any materials since converting the full MDL material model we use to the simplified PBR in glTF is quite challenging (particularly for non-opaque materials which glTF handles very poorly). We are working on using the MDL Distiller technology which allow us to bake complex MDL materials into simpler versions that would work with glTF but there are quite a few limitations to this as well.

Not sure if you saw but Onshape recently added glTF export to Onshape itself. Obviously it would only have simple diffuse materials though since there is no way to define the PBR materials in Onshape at the moment.

Doug_Jones

Thanks for the background Paul. Yes, I saw that onshape supports glTF exports, hence the question. Ideally, we would want to apply PBR textures before export from the onshape-app environment.  Our current workflows for web/VR visualization run from Onshape through 3DSmax, and are cumbersome. Most architectural visualization on the web is stuck on 3DS. Holding out hope that glTF can break that up, but as you point out, maybe there are limitations.

Jolly

So I am working from home and don't have access to my normal large monitor and am just working from a small laptop screen. How do I render an image larger than my screen? I can't get the custom aspect ratio to work and the largest image I can render is my screen size as it seems to render exactly what I have displayed on screen.

Paul_Arden

Jolls said:

So I am working from home and don't have access to my normal large monitor and am just working from a small laptop screen. How do I render an image larger than my screen? I can't get the custom aspect ratio to work and the largest image I can render is my screen size as it seems to render exactly what I have displayed on screen.

There is an option in the toolbar to render an image at a specific resolution and quality, you can access it here:



If you use Render to Disk note that you will have to allow pop-ups for the image to come up to be saved after rendering completes. If you choose Render to Onshape just note that we have had some reports of issues with this working correctly in some cases, we are still tracking that down. When you select the option you will get a dialog like this:



Here you can pick exactly the resolution and aspect ration you want. For the quality settings, I recommend switching to custom instead of using one of the presets and picking a maximum time and sample count. In the above it would render for 60 seconds or 500 samples, which ever takes less time. For most documents 500 samples is more than enough.

Jolly

Ugh, I don't know what I was doing before but I swear I tried that multiple times earlier and couldn't get it to work. I tried it now with a 2140w resolution and it worked great. So.... human error then. Thanks.

Jolly

Actually there may be a bug in the system somewhere. It's not working again. See below screenshot, when I hit render it produces a 726x439 image (I open it in paint and check pixel size)

Paul_Arden

Jolls said:

Actually there may be a bug in the system somewhere. It's not working again. See below screenshot, when I hit render it produces a 726x439 image (I open it in paint and check pixel size)

I'm not reproducing this behaviour here. I assume when you went to render again you needed to put the values back in again (it does not save them)? From the screenshot that seems to be the case.

By the way, you can leave the 'Quality Enabled' checkbox unchecked, that turns on a third termination condition based on quality, however the other two will likely kick in before that.

nick_lumb

Is it possible to import your own images onto the surface of an Onshape defined object and include that in your render?

If so, where is it documented please?

Paul_Arden

nick_lumb said:

Is it possible to import your own images onto the surface of an Onshape defined object and include that in your render?

If so, where is it documented please?

This video shows the process you can use to upload your own textures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RjKFVwlS3M

If you were more talking about decals, that isn't a feature we expose just yet.

Jolly

It mostly works for me.  Twice now it has reverted back to not doing custom sizes despite entering it into the custom sizes. I tried to reproduce it but was unable to. Happened twice in a 45min session of rendering 15ish images. Once it starts I can't get rid of it.  My workaround is to exit and re-enter which only takes a minute or two.