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Cadmio, Low Cost Render Studio Alternative?
I just stumbled across this iPad app which does a surprisingly good job at real time rendering. It's called Cadmio. It's far from perfect, but the ease of use and immediacy is impressive. The quality is more like a decent video game rather than a high-end photo realistic rendering, but it is 100% realtime.
It imports STEP files a lot quicker than Render Studio imports a scene, and gets decent results much faster. The results can be shared as a live, rotatable model (with optional saved views) to non-paying users (who also must be on an iPad). There's also a basic turntable animation tool.
I was able to figure out the interface, apply materials, modify existing materials, add/remove objects from material groups all with ease. The short list (~25) of HDRI scenes are very well chosen and useful. They will get old quickly, but at least it's not a thousand sad gray days in some field in the middle of nowhere. The materials are pretty good for product/transportation design and interior design, but lacking in some basic things like transparent plastics. There are no where near the number of parameters to tweak - this is a good and a bad thing. Some Render Studio materials have what seems like about 100 different parameters, half of which don't seem to do anything.
It's also much easier to find a material in Cadmio. The organization is a very simple catalog of "Plastic, Metal, Paint, Fabric, Leather, Wood, Mineral, and Utility". Each category has from a few to a few dozen choices. Contrast this with Render Studio which has about 17 zillion materials which aren't very organized. I'd like something in the middle.
On the downsides: one part came in with a couple missing triangles, the materials seem to spontaneously change in buggy ways, it's hard to set an imported object exactly on the ground plane, when you re-open a "presentation" it takes almost as long as it does to import which suggests that it's re-running the tessellation from scratch, there doesn't seem to be a way to import decals, and I haven't found a way to set the material for an individual surface.
Oh, and the most obvious downside compared with Render Studio - no easy updates from Onshape model changes.
Ultimately I want Render Studio to be successful. I'm looking forward to big improvements in responsiveness and ease of use. For people on a budget (e.g. not on an Enterprise plan) with an iPad, you might want to try Cadmio.
It imports STEP files a lot quicker than Render Studio imports a scene, and gets decent results much faster. The results can be shared as a live, rotatable model (with optional saved views) to non-paying users (who also must be on an iPad). There's also a basic turntable animation tool.
I was able to figure out the interface, apply materials, modify existing materials, add/remove objects from material groups all with ease. The short list (~25) of HDRI scenes are very well chosen and useful. They will get old quickly, but at least it's not a thousand sad gray days in some field in the middle of nowhere. The materials are pretty good for product/transportation design and interior design, but lacking in some basic things like transparent plastics. There are no where near the number of parameters to tweak - this is a good and a bad thing. Some Render Studio materials have what seems like about 100 different parameters, half of which don't seem to do anything.
It's also much easier to find a material in Cadmio. The organization is a very simple catalog of "Plastic, Metal, Paint, Fabric, Leather, Wood, Mineral, and Utility". Each category has from a few to a few dozen choices. Contrast this with Render Studio which has about 17 zillion materials which aren't very organized. I'd like something in the middle.
On the downsides: one part came in with a couple missing triangles, the materials seem to spontaneously change in buggy ways, it's hard to set an imported object exactly on the ground plane, when you re-open a "presentation" it takes almost as long as it does to import which suggests that it's re-running the tessellation from scratch, there doesn't seem to be a way to import decals, and I haven't found a way to set the material for an individual surface.
Oh, and the most obvious downside compared with Render Studio - no easy updates from Onshape model changes.
Ultimately I want Render Studio to be successful. I'm looking forward to big improvements in responsiveness and ease of use. For people on a budget (e.g. not on an Enterprise plan) with an iPad, you might want to try Cadmio.
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