Cloud Renderer is a family of POC add-ins for SOLIDWORKS® and Autodesk® Revit® that enables physically based rendering of 3D models on the Microsoft® Azure® or Amazon Web Services® cloud platforms using LuxRender, physically based and unbiased rendering engine.
3D models created in SOLIDWORKS or Revit can be displayed in photo-realistic views or rendered with built-in photorealistic renderers. It is reasonably fast and produces high quality images. However, it does not support physically based rendering algorithms.Physically based rendering provides images of much higher fidelity, but requires significant computational resources. For this reason, it has been beyond the reach of the mainstream 3D mechanical CAD community, and has been primarily used in the digital art and entertainment industries. However, the highly scalable computational resources available on cloud platforms open new opportunities for traditional CAD users. AMC Bridge developed Cloud Renderer, a concept that uses advantages of cloud resources for rendering.
Cloud Renderer consists of two parts:
- SOLIDWORKS and Revit converters of 3D model data into a format appropriate for the photo-realistic LuxRender engine, an open-source format;
- Cloud cluster that can be deployed on the Microsoft Azure or AWS cloud platform.
SOLIDWORKS and Revit Converters
Conversion of 3D model data into the LuxRender format is performed locally on the user desktop. This format allows the user to store different portions of the 3D model data (geometry, materials, textures, light, camera, etc.) in separate files.
Current implementation of SOLIDWORKS converter is based on LuxRender version 0.8 and supports camera, geometry, lighting and materials data.
For more details about Cloud Renderer for SOLIDWORKS® follow the link.
Current implementation of Revit converter is based on LuxRender version 1.6 and supports camera, geometry, lighting, light groups, materials and textures data.
Rendering Using Cloud Cluster
Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud platforms offer computing resources, data storage and other specific cloud services. Rendering cluster consists of the following roles:
- Dispatcher: processes rendering requests from the client add-in, which includes allocating and freeing rendering nodes for each request, initializing rendering, and returning intermediate and final results back to the client;
- Worker: renders scenes and saves intermediate results to dedicated storage;
- Merger: merges intermediate rendering results and converts them into an image file of the format specified in the initiating request.
Cloud Renderer is based on Microsoft Azure SDK 2.8, AWS SDK 2.3 and is compatible with Autodesk Revit 2015 - 2018.
The video below demonstrates the main capabilities of the add-in: