Render Them Speechless

Connected panoramas using Cloud rendering

Many of our rendering customers have asked us for a way of connecting various stereo panorama renderings, to get a connected, immersive VR experience. You can do this now using Autodesk Cloud Rendering and Autodesk Project Play.

See this example of connected stereo panoramas that we created - https://play.autodesk.com/pub/au2016pano View this on your mobile phone with VR glasses (like cardboard) for a complete VR experience.

Here are the steps for creating your own connected experience. 

1. Render stereo panoramas - First, render stereo panorama renderings that you would like to connect with each other using Cloud rendering. It is a good idea to create preview renderings first and test your lighting, materials and cameras. Then render the views in final quality at 1536 px resolution. Do not render larger than that since most cell phones may not be able to handle large resolution files. 

2. Download panorama - Once your panoramas are rendered, download panorama as a zip file. 

 

3. Prepare images - The only file you need for Play is image.png. This is a high resolution image with two rows - one is the right eye image and the other is the left eye image. You have to slice this image into 12 individual JPG images and label them 0.jpg to 11.jpg. You can do this with any image editing software that you prefer, like Photoshop. You can also use ImageMagick to this in an automated way.

ImageMagick instructions.

• Download and install ImageMagick depending on your operating system.
• Open up your command-line console.
• Navigate to the folder where you put your image.png
• Run the command: convert image.png -crop 1536x1536 %d.jpg (Note: if convert does not work, use magick image.png -crop 1536x1536 %d.jpg) 
• Once done, it should produce the 12 images that you need. 

  

4. Link panoramas - In order to link these panoramas together, use Autodesk Project Play. Here are detailed instructions for doing that.

Let us know how this works for you in your VR projects. 

 

Download Stereo Panorama for GearVR

Since many Rendering customers have been asking for this, I'm happy to let all of you know that we have added Download Stereo Pano for GearVR as an option for stereo panorama renderings. If you want to view your stereo panoramas on GearVR, you no longer need to process the images using ImageMagick and run scripts. We have simplified the process. In order to use this,

• Render a stereo panorama.
• Go to My Renderings, click on the thumbnail and choose "Download Stereo Pano for GearVR"
• A zip file is downloaded to your computer containing the image file and .json file. You can rename the files, if needed. 
• Please note that  if you have rendered a large size stereo panorama, it will take a long time to process and download. 
• Copy these files to your Samsung phone's media folder. 

Remember that, if you want all the original files, you can "Download Stereo-Pano as Zip".

Have fun rendering and viewing your images on Samsung GearVR.

Rendering solar studies

Solar studies enable you to visualize the impact of natural light and shadows on both the exteriors and interiors of Revit and AutoCAD projects. You can either directly render a solar study or preview it first and then render a full solar study. Some of you may know what a solar study is, but many of you may have seen this half-sun icon and wondered what it means.This is the icon for a solar study preview.

When would you use a solar study preview?

Solar study preview is an image which is used to preview nine frames of the solar study and adjust its exposure before you spend credits to render it as full solar study.

Once the exposure settings have been adjusted, click Start render button, to render the full solar study. Full solar study thumbnails are identified in a collection with full-sun icon. 

 

How are solar study previews generated?

In Revit, 3D view’s sun settings dialog, if you checked the Single Day or Multi-Day option, and then send it to Cloud Rendering, it will render a solar study preview rendering, instead of rendering a still image. Before closing the sun setting dialog, please make sure the date, time, frames settings are correct since this information will transfer to the full solar study.

What are the different ways of generating solar studies?

There are two ways to create full solar study, and each have their advantages:

• Change Sun settings in Revit -> solar study preview -> full solar study. Using this method, you can preview the rendering and adjust its exposure before spending cloud credits. 
• Render an image as a solar study, directly from the web portal.
  Using this method, you could create solar study quickly without changing the Sun settings in Revit.

 

A full solar study is generated as a movie file and looks like this on My Renderings. You can play the movie file in the portal or download it.

All Your Rendering Questions Answered

This week, Aradhana Vaidya from the A360 Rendering team answered all of your rendering questions in a webinar, but just because you missed the live Q&A session doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the answers.

Below are just some of the questions answered in the session:

• What is the render engine that’s used in the cloud and how does it work?
• What products does A360 Rendering support?
• How much time does it take to complete a rendering?
• How does A360 Rendering get the settings for lights, sun, quality, and more?

Piqued your interest? We recorded the entire session so you don’t have to miss a thing:

 

Have more questions about A360 Rendering? Join us on the forums to connect with A360 Rendering experts.

Render quality and noise in images

Many of you have wondered why your renderings look noisy or grainy sometimes. Some of you have asked about the difference between Standard quality and Final quality?

Standard quality renderings are meant as draft or preview images. They should be used when you are previewing your rendering and making decisions about colors, materials, textures, camera composition, etc. Typically they render very fast. Also, when you render a 1 megapixel image in standard quality it costs 0 cloud credits. You can iterate over materials and colors in this mode. Once you are happy with the design decisions, you can render in final quality. Rendering a scene requires analyzing all the light sources present, for each pixel in the final image. This calculation is more accurate and also takes much longer. This is meant for the final presentation quality rendering.

An image can also look noisy if there is inadequate illumination in the scene. For example, if you are rendering an interior shot that is lit with sunlight, but do not have enough windows to let the light through, then the image will look grainy. Also, if you are using artificial lights but their intensity is too low, or the number of lights is not enough, then again the image will look grainy. Once you add proper lighting or adjust the sun position, you will see improved results.

How to - Ensure parts of model are not missing in render

If your Cloud rendered image is missing parts of the model, it might catch you by surprise. This usually happens if the model is missing in the camera view. In Revit, there are many different ways of hiding/revealing models in the scene. To understand what is going on and fix the problem, you should check the following: 

• Select the view. Click on Visibility/Graphics override and check that everything that you want displayed is ON.
• Check if any Filter has been applied to the camera view.
• Check if there is any Phasing/Phase filter that has been applied that particular View.
• Change the material of the object that's not rendering (wall, floor, etc.) and see if that fixes it.
• Render from different camera view and see if the objects are still hidden.

Checking these things will help you diagnose the issue. 

How to - Choose light settings before rendering

When creating a rendered image, you may want a night time shot only using artificial lights in the room or an exterior view rendered using sunlight at a specific time of the day. You can easily get those results using A360 Rendering from Revit. 

 

When you render in Cloud from Revit, the rendering engine uses the light settings from your Revit file. It looks at the Lighting Scheme that you have set for your specific View. Here's how it works.

 

In the View ribbon, click on "Render" and check the Lighting Scheme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This scheme has various settings that can be used ranging from "Sun Only" to "Artificial only". Choose the scheme that's appropriate to the look that you are going for. This post describes it in detail.

 

If you choose "Artificial only" or "Sun and Artificial", the Artificial Lights button becomes active. Click on it to further adjust your artificial lights.

 

 

As always, render in "standard" quality first as a preview. It will be grainy but will give you a fairly good idea of you camera, materials and overall lighting. Once you are satisfied with it, render in "final" quality. 

How to - View stereo panoramas on VR devices

[Update - On 07/26/2016, we added functionality to Download Stereo Pano for GearVR]

 

Some of you have asked how you could view stereo panorama renderings on VR devices such as Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift. The simplest way to view this on a VR device is using Cardboard and here is the blog post describing that viewing workflow. For a more immersive experience, you might want to use GearVR or Oculus. But understand that VR viewing technologies are ever-evolving and experimental in nature. If Samsung or Oculus change their viewing technology, things may become incompatible. This is not something that Autodesk can control. Here are the steps that work for now.

 

 Oculus

• Connect your Oculus and download the required runtime files from here:
  • for Windows or for OSX. 
  • Make sure that everything is up and running and the Oculus demo works.
• You will need a browser that supports webVR, either Chrome-dev or Firefox with VR. 
  • Download the dev-version of Chrome. You have to look at your operating system and install the appropriate version. After you unzip and install it, open the browser and in the address bar type chrome://flags. Find "EnableVR" and enable it.
  • Download Firefox with VR and the WebVR add-on
  • For either of these browsers, make sure that the demos/sample files work as expected. 

• Try this stereo panorama example in the webVR enabled browser, to check if it works as expected.

Now open your stereo panorama link and enjoy the immersive experience!

 

Samsung Gear VR

Follow the steps below or simply Download Stereo Pano for GearVR. 

• Make sure you have rendered your stereo panorama at size “1536 width"
• Install Imagemagick. This is required to create resulting files required for GearVR. 
• Run the following script
  
  # create 12 tiles
  convert -crop 1536x1536 imageL.jpg L.png
  convert -crop 1536x1536 imageR.jpg R.png
  convert R-2.png R-0.png R-5.png R-4.png R-1.png R-3.png L-2.png L-0.png L-5.png L-4.png L-1.png L-3.png +append result.png
  echo ‘{ "title": “result.png”, "author": “anon”}’ > result.json

• Copy the ‘result.png’ and ‘result.json' files to your Samsung phone's "Media" folder.
• Now open the ‘otoy media player’ and scroll to your stereo panorama image ‘result.png’

Here's a Video showing how this is done. 

Here are the steps to generate a stereo panorama rendering. 

How to - Add a background image in a stereo panorama rendering

A stereo panorama rendering created using A360 rendering can be downloaded as a zip file.

Once you download the zip files and unzip it, you will see the following contents in it:

image.png - The main high resolution image

image.jpg - A lower resolution image for preview

imageL.jpg and imageR.jpg - The left eye and right eye images

pano.html - The html file

twgl-dist.js - Javscript file

readme.txt  - Additional instructions

 

Here are the steps to adding your own custom background

• Open image.png in an image editing software such as Photoshop
• Since this is a png file, it has an alpha mask and you can composite your custom background.
• Once editing is done, save this as a separate file or you could overwrite the original. But the final file has to be named image.png 
• Now you have to generate the left and right eye images and the preview image
  • Crop the top-half of the image and Save As imageL.jpg
  • Crop the bottom-half and Save As imageR.jpg
  • For the preview image, Save imageL.jpg as image.jpg. Reduce the size of this image to 1/8 of the original size. For eg: 9216x1536 will become 768x128 pixels. 
• All your images are now ready. If you want to preview how it looks on your computer, open Firefox browser (Chrome does not let you open local files) and drag pano.html to it. You should see a pixelated preview for a brief moment. After it clears up, you will see the new panorama with your composited background image. Example of the link: file:///C:/Users/xyz/Desktop/stereo_pano/pano.html. You should do this to check if your composite looks fine and if there are any edits required.
• In order to view it in the browser on your mobile device (this is what you really want), all the files in the zip file have to be hosted to your website. They cannot be uploaded back to Autodesk's site, which happens when we generate a URL for your rendered stereo panoramas.

I have uploaded an example here, where the cityscape in the background was composited into the rendered image.: http://aradhanavaidya.com/games/stereo_pano/pano.html?url=image2.

 

Cloud Rendering Workflow in Revit: Your Questions, Answered!

This week, we’re turning to a Rendering Pro from our very own team, Aradhana Vaidya—the Customer Success Engineer on the A360 Cloud Rendering team. Last week, she hosted a webinar on the Cloud Rendering Workflow in Revit, which detailed how to share renderings to the gallery and select render settings to create the best possible images.  She demonstrated how to produce high quality results with:

• Still images
• Panoramas & Stereo Panoramas
• Solar Studies
• Illuminance Renderings and Lighting Analysis

Lots of new and experienced Revit users attended, and asked a lot of great questions.  Below, we’ve listed some of the best questions (broken down by category) along with our best answers, which you can use to help you with your own rendering projects.

Materials/Textures/Lighting

1. Why do renderings appear differently, colors, material, etc., when they are rendered in the cloud vs. locally?

Native rendering in Revit uses mental ray. A360 Rendering is the rendering technology developed by Autodesk to optimize rendering in the Cloud. We try to match closely with mental ray (with high quality settings) but there could be subtle differences.

 2. We see a few renders with light emitting from can lights. How do you show light emitting from light sources rather than just the light affecting surfaces it hits?

If you want to render lights properly by showing the light fixture as a light emitting object, you have to create a material with “self-illumination” and apply it to the bulb or diffuser in your light fixture. These luminance materials are supported in Cloud rendering.

3. In some programs adding lights one by one is the best way to get a good final lighting. Is that also recommended in Revit renderings?

A360 Rendering can handle large number of lights very easily without slowing down the rendering process. So you can add as many lights as needed in your design. You do not need to add them one by one.

4. I have seen noisy or grainy renderings sometimes. What is the best way to get best quality renderings?

This might happen if there is inadequate lighting in your scene, such as indirect light coming from a window. If the scene is well illuminated, you will not see this problem. Add more lights to your scene or increase the intensity of the existing lights.

5. I was curious if Autodesk was working on enabling tint settings, as well as the reflectivity settings (in the slider) within Revit. Right now they don't render online.

Make sure you install the latest version of Revit--this should enable tint settings.

6. I am a student rendering in the cloud and I created a custom brick material. When i rendered in the cloud the brick size was huge. When I render inside of Revit the brick wall looks fine and everything is to scale. Why I am seeing this difference in my renderings?

For issues related to material properties such as tint or incorrect material scale, make sure that you have installed the latest update for Revit available here.

7. Can you use custom textures in cloud rendering?

Yes. You can create a material in Revit and use custom textures for color, bump, reflection, etc.

 8. Is there any source for realistic materials?

There are several resources available online to download realistic texture maps. We don't recommend a specific site in particular.

Panorama rendering

1. When downloading panorama, is there a way to view it as a true interactive panorama (like it is when viewed directly in A360 Rendering)? In the past when I tried to download an interactive panorama to my local computer, it only downloaded a series of stills.

When you render a panorama, there are two options available for download. One is jpeg file, which is an image strip. The other is to download as an html file. If you do that, you can view it in the browser, preferably Chrome.

2. When downloading panoramas as jpeg is there a viewer available to view these? I like being able to download and edit the images via Photoshop rather than just having the html download from the cloud. If so can this be shared with clients?

We don’t have a viewer that we provide. But there are several viewers available online that you can use, starting with this useful website.

Other questions

1. What other files types can be rendered besides Revit files?

Besides Revit, A360 Rendering is supported in AutoCAD, Fusion, Navisworks, Infraworks and 3D Studio Max.

 2. Does a linked model get uploaded to the cloud when I do a cloud rendering?

Linked Revit models work with A360 Rendering. When you “Render in Cloud”, your Revit file is never uploaded to the Cloud. We convert it to an intermediate file format which consists of all the information required for rendering, such as the meshes, materials, lights, etc.

 3. Can you render using A360 with Revit LT?

Yes

4. What rendering engine does A360 use?

This is our own rendering engine. A360 Rendering is the rendering technology developed by Autodesk to optimize rendering in the Cloud.

 5. How many cloud credits do I need for a render?

You need approximately 1 cloud credit per megapixel.