Realtime Rendering appearance settings

[2ms1]

Right now when I turn on Realtime Rendering in the View menu, things look like this (the default):



I would like the environment to look more neutral like it is in these renderings though (would like to put pics in papers but the default atmosphere is too much):







Can anyone give me some advice on how to set up the Realtime Rendering to produce the nice reflectivity and all those things that give parts more realism of appearance, but with a more neutral looking background that would be more suitable for professional looking pics of your model?

 

[design-engine]

wait till Wildfire 5.0and use Pro/ENGINEER Mental Ray Google 'mental ray'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_ray

It will be more like Maya Mental ray. not worth wasting your time till you install wf5.0

But for sure you cant do anything in Wildfire 4.0 till you loose the chess board. That is from the rendering tools of the early 80's. Renderman You will need much higher resolution images + special images with more brilliant whites. Notice how the car has square white reflections.That is a large white rectangle above the car in that rendering engine. Probably Maya.

A $3000.00 per day photographer will make sure you get a specular highlight across the fender like the top car image. Takes a talented eye to make renderings like those even in Maya. That's 50 percent. 25 percent are tricks in the render and 25 is touching up and color correction in photoshop.


http://www.proetools.com/courses/adobe/photoshop.htm

All those images are composted. The reflections are fake... the carpet was laid in on the lower image.

If you want to do renderings like those cars you will need our two day photoshop class just to even scratch the surface of what designers use Photoshop for.

I did not proof this for spelling nor punctuation....
Edited by: design-engine

 

[[-Skint-]]

agree with what bart said.... but DO check out the hypershot demo... amazing stuff at very decent prices.


Check out this gallery on http://hypershot.hyperboards.com/index.php

 

[zpaolo]

If you want to obtain good renderings in no time, then check Hypershot. If you want to have a better realtime window there are some things you can tweak: in model display interface disable the visibility of the environment to have a realtime rendering with plain background.

In WF 5.0 there are some really nice realtime scenes you can use, but you can obtain good results in WF 4.0 defining your own "room", try creating a cubic room with black walls and ground, and a white ceiling, this is good if your object is not flat on the groun. You can also define a cilindrical room and load an HDRI picture for the walls, try importing an HDR from Hypershot demo scenes, it works well. You can also define your own walls in photoshop (I once used Lightwave 3D to obtain the cube walls from a true 3d scene, then imported them in ProE)

Paolo

 

[zpaolo]

To be more precise, here are some examples:

this is how a model looks in WF4.0 with the default realtime rendering:



You can disable the background visibility and check the options as follows:




It is quite better now, but I still don't like the way the reflection look, so I'll try with a custom scene:



This is a simple room with white ceiling and all black, the settings are here:



I then converted an HDRI from Hypershot in JPG format (WF4.0 doesn't load HDRIs as room walls) and set up this other scene:



The reflection is smoother and there's a nice highlight on edges. you can play with other backdrops too...

All this is for realtime rendering

 

[design-engine]

I would use images much higher than 3000x3000 at 72dpi
Often times I will create my own images for the room editor in Photoshop. Ill often place a circle within a circle with both white a grey or only using warm greys.That way the Pro/E part will reflect grey. (I go over all this basic type stuff in my week long surfacing intensive BTW.... An the zebra stripes in WF4.0 and prior uses too low of a bitmap for use.... I use the above photoshop image and work in real time with contoured surfaces with realtime render instead of using zebra in Pro/E.

Search Google for 'extra large images' Also products with flat surfaces don't look as good as objects with slight arc or more contoured surfaces. Also the Pro/E round does not reflect light accurately and you notice bit map struggles at plangency line.
Edited by: design-engine

 

[2ms1]

thanks for all the suggestions guys. Very helpful. FOr example, I
sadly probably would have never figured out how to make the room walls
white had it not been for the screenshots of settings to use...

I
checked out Hypershot and holy crap it's the most amazing thing I've
ever seen in my life! Within a couple minutes of installing it you
suddenly have these incredibly cool and photo-realistic looking things
that used to be ugly old Pro/E models! I amazed by how powerful and
easy to use it is.

I do have one question: I wondering what
would be the best way to do cut-away views if I wanted rendering done
in Hypershot. Is there any way to use x-section views like in Pro/E?
Mainly just wanted to report back my impressions of Hypershot and to
express a little gratitude for the help though

 

[holosim]

The Hypershot is a very impressive tool. However, if you are really interested in quality rendering, it would help to learn a couple of concepts.

Processed rendering vs. Real-time rendering.

An artist renders a scene with colored pencils or water color, and uses shadows, highlights and reflections to trick the eye into believing that what you are seeing is 3-dimensional. A computer renders just the same way, except it uses millions of calculations to figure out the color and brightness of each pixel on the screen (or in the image). The computer uses the model as a reference for surface angles, light positions, etc.

The car model you posted above was rendered using Mental Ray in Maya. It also used a process called global illumination to create the specular highlights that Bart had mentioned, instead of placing 'practical lights' in the scene. Global illumination allows you to use a special type of image, called an HDR image, to represent the world around your model, without actually having to model the world. That's how the model renders reflections of the surrounding scene. You can tell that HDR was used because even though the camera changes angles between the two car images you have, the specular highlights should not change, and they do. Sometimes an artist will forget to lock down the HDR image with the scene, and not the camera, and so the specular highlights move with the camera.



The scene around the sphere above is an image, not geometry, but it reflects onto the surface as though the sphere is actually there. Not only that, but the sphere would also be effected by the COLOR of the surounding surfaces, such as yellow buildings or blue sky.

The reality is, the car image above took at least several seconds to render, and more likely a couple of minutes. That's Post-Process rendering. It takes awhile for the computer to make all those calculations for the highly refined shape. Obviously, if it take even one or two seconds to render one image, that can hardly be considered real-time.

Real-time animation is any animation that is processed by a computer at least 12 times per second. So, for every second of an animation, the computer has to draw, erase, then draw again the image 12 times or more. 3D video games, for example, range between 30 and 50 frames per second, or more. Pro-E is roughly the same. Otherwise, every time you change the angle of your model, you'd have to wait a second before you could see the movement. Ever notice your model get clunky when there's too much detail, or you processor is running slowly? That's the frame-rate dropping below 10 fps.

As you can see from the guitar example, Pro-E has alot of potential for it's real-time renderer, but as was mentioned, the checker-board surfaces and red smoking room have to go. The trade-off between real-time rendering and post-process rendering is the fact that in order for the computer to render the images fast enough, it has to do few calculations (obviously.) So that means the textures will not be as refined, the specular highlights will not be as crisp, and the soft glow of the glossiness around the edges of your model will not be as smooth. Also, you'll never get shadows to spread as nicely as your car image. But you can get it close, and people will still recognize those visual cues and accept them.

If you want really high quality rendering, such as the car above, it can't be done with Pro-E, but you can get close enough for an engineering office. Otherwise, you'll need software such as Maya, or it's cheaper counterpart 3DS Max. Both have Mental Ray rendering available, but if you use 3DS Max, VRay is a very affordable alternative that actually handles metal surfaces and HDR quite well.

Enjoy!

Edited by: holosim

 

[[-Skint-]]

Good and Fair points Holosim, but I will point out to 2ms1 that WF5.0 now utilises the Mental Ray application as does Maya and 3DSmax.


There is a new thread over in the rendering section which will no doubt grow as we all start to progress onto WF5.

 

[a3_bham]

Very good thread above regarding the differences between render qualities, I've started the other thread on the following link: -

Does anybody know were to download the Mental Ray materials from? If so could you please post it as I could do with some asap.

Also weather 3D Studio Max Mental Ray Materials will work inside Pro Engineer.

Pro Engineer WF5.0 now comes with some more scenes that ones seen in the Hypershot demo, do people know were to download HDRI Images from as I could do with some of them aswell.

http://www.mcadcentral.com/proe/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=38 827&TPN=1

 

[2ms1]

I'm just moving to WF4 right now. It's going to be a while before I am going to be able to use WF5. How are all these things like Mental Ray, Maya, 3DSmax, etc different from Hypershot?

 

[zpaolo]

As you can see from the guitar example, Pro-E has alot of potential for it's real-time renderer, but as was mentioned, the checker-board surfaces and red smoking room have to go. The trade-off between real-time rendering and post-process rendering is the fact that in order for the computer to render the images fast enough, it has to do few calculations (obviously.)
!

There is another important difference: when we speak of "realtime" rendering we usually mean rendering that is done through the OpenGL graphic card. The difference here is not just the quality of the surfaces, but also the nature of the effects you can achieve: radiosity is not accelerated through OpenGl, as are soft shadows, therefore all these effects need to be "baked" or faked in some way.

With "proper" rendering systems all the calculation is run through the CPU (and sometimes the GPGPU) and all kind of calculation can be done. In this case the product is "realtime" in the sense that it calculates a "rough" scene fast, and polishes it with time, like Hypershot, or it is completely "offline" that is you press "render" and just wait.

Another note: you can have Mental Ray and a decent setup package with Alias Imagestudio. You can have a realtime package with baked effects (no real raytracing or radiosity) with Autodesk Showcase.

 

[zpaolo]

I'm just moving to WF4 right now. It's going to be a while before I am going to be able to use WF5. How are all these things like Mental Ray, Maya, 3DSmax, etc different from Hypershot?

WF4 has a good rendering engine, it is based on Lightworks, but being an old version of lightworks it does not support all the radiosity extensions of later issues of the engine. Maya and 3DSMax use Mental Ray, as does WF5. I played with WF5 and the rendering engine implementation is good, but it is not yet easy to setup as it is, for example, in ImageStudio. With 3DSMax (Design for example) and Maya you usually have the latest implementation of Mental Ray.

All these rendering engine are good and fast, but not "phisically accurate", if you want an "unbiased" rendering engine you have to check Maxwell or Fryrender. These rendering engines use a complete phisical model for simulation of light, so they are slower than the former, but results for complex materials are excellent.

Hypershot is not an unbiased engine, it is fast in rendering, and adds a "realtime preview" mode, that is you can see immediatly a rough representation of your scene with lighting, materials and so on. It is limited in the choice of lightsoruces as it only works with HDRI maps, but this is its peculiar target. Hypershot is good for product visualization, checking different finishes, matching a photographic background etc.

Paolo

 

[a3_bham]

Wicked threads above guys regarding the different renders etc.

Zpaolo, do know what version of mental ray Wildfire 5.0 is using? If so how do you tell?
and were can you download more mental ray materials that will work with Wildfire from?

 

[zpaolo]

Zpaolo, do know what version of mental ray Wildfire 5.0 is using? If so how do you tell?
and were can you download more mental ray materials that will work with Wildfire from?

No, I don't know, I read a press release where it was written, but I can't remember. Anyway I think Autodesk has a deal with Mental Images so that they have exclusivity for implementing the latest revision.

Consider that Mental Images has been bought by nVidia, who is also working on a gpgpu based realtime rendering engine (non OpenGL based), I can't wait to see the results