Product Visualization Workflow from Inventor to 3ds Max to the Client

STEVEN SCHAIN: Welcome. This is product visualization workflow from Inventor to 3ds Max to the client MFG 502647. My name is Steven Schain. I'm a designer and trainer. I've been teaching 3ds Max since the DOS days way back in Dos release 3

I'm an Autodesk Certified Instructor, have been since 1989. And I do my training under The 3D Professor. That's 3ds Max, Inventor, Fusion 360, Maya, AutoCAD, and some other programs. I'm also a designer. I design now for 3D printing applications for my company, Spectra3D Technologies. And I am glad to say this is my 11th year presenting at Autodesk University.

So what we're going to do is-- let's look at the learning objectives for this class. We're going to discover the connection between Inventor and 3ds Max for an optimal design workflow. We're going to learn how to import an Inventor model into 3ds Max.

We'll look at creating and configuring scene materials. And we'll also learn how to place a camera and create a simple fly-through animation. And then, we'll render out the final design.

So the project-- this project is based on a client called Hide-a-Paw. They're an extendable pet steps. And the original idea was for us to take a prototype that was a steel prototype, put it in the computer, and then we can do some back and forth with the client, see if we liked it.

We printed out a couple of samples. And we moved on to a second prototype, which was wood and steel. And then, took that and put that into Inventor and prepared those models for 3D printing. Then, we were tasked with creating a simple animation for marketing.

So as we look at what we did in Inventor, Inventor was really to take the design and start building it as a solid model. That allowed us to do some reviews with the client and update the design, and update the design to a second revision that not only is lighter and more flexible, but also 3D printable. And it also incorporated the logo of Hide-a-Paw.

So let's take a look at the designs in Inventor. And I'll start with the original. The original was the one that was designed from the steel piece. And let me tell you, that was a heavy piece of machinery-- a piece of equipment there.

This is designed to slide in between a top mattress and a box spring and be installed by an individual. And this weighed about 80 pounds, was too heavy to use. But it was good enough for what we were trying to do.

We were trying to figure out how this was going to work, what it was going to look like, and we wanted to get the first design initially into the computer. So after going back and forth with the client, client came to us and said, OK, well, we have a second revision. And we want to take that revision and turn it into something that is manufacturable, initially manufactured just with 3D printing.

So we went through the process of developing the assemblies and subassemblies that we needed. I'll go ahead and open this, and you can see the different pieces. Now, for 3D printing, we did a little bit just to minimize the amount of material. But you don't need the same level of detail that you do if you're doing injection molding.

So with this, we just created the parts that we needed. The chamfers on the edges are to help with 3D printing and keeping the part nice when it came off the bed. And then the inset is for a piece of carpet that's going to go on there.

So each piece was made. We put it into the assembly, and then that assembly was 3D printed and output for testing. But this class is not about 3D printing. It's about going into 3ds Max. So that was what this was intended for as well.

So we-- now, we'll look at taking this into 3ds Max and what we did in 3ds Max with this project. So initially, when I work in 3ds Max, I set up a project folder. If you're not using specific project management software, it's really helpful to set up a project directory within 3ds Max.

It does a couple of things. One, it allows you to maintain some kind of project organization. And two, it's simplifies file management. So everything is in the same place. You can also put all the files you need for that project within that project folder. And you can see here, at the folder structure on the right-hand side, that 3ds Max automatically generates a top to your top level folder that you specify, and then it automatically fills in with those subfolders.

Another thing that I do is I start with a pre-built scene. Now, that pre-built scene will have-- it'll vary. So depending on what I'm using that scene for, it could be an outdoor scene, an indoor scene, could be lit by HDR lighting. Having a pre-built scene just makes life a lot easier.

It gives you a good starting point. And usually, it simplifies my workflow tremendously. I don't have to keep recreating the scene every time I want to do a rendering.

So what are the elements that that scene has in it? Well, it'll start out with various layers. So the layers might include lighting, cameras, background, construction layers, object layers. It just depends on what you need for that scene and that environment. Now, once we have the scene ready, we need to import the model.

Now for this one, I'll also merge in other models to fill in the scene. And we'll go through that as well. But importing the Inventor model, this is the part that you need to pay attention to. And when you import a model, you have two types of objects, a body object and a mesh object.

A body object is essentially a solid model built within 3ds Max from the Inventor file. And that is-- it's a good-to-have because you can adjust the resolution of the file or of the model at render time or whenever you need to. But it is a very cumbersome model to use.

So I use meshes. And those import cleanly. They're easy to use. They're lightweight. And if you need to update the model, you can always re-import the model and adjust the mesh resolution when you bring it in to increase the resolution.

You also have the assembly options so you can decide what you want to do with duplicate parts. Do you want to bring them in as individual parts? Or do you want one part and just reference the rest of them? Screws are a great example. You might have 100 screws in Inventor assembly, but they're all the same instanced part.

So what you can do within 3ds Max is bring that part in, and then all the copies are references of the original. You can also create layers by material, add object names to materials, and import a driving animation. In this case, we're not driving the animation with a parameter in Inventor. We're going to set up the animation within 3ds Max and rig the steps so that we can animate those independently.

The other one is merge and replace. You can choose to merge the objects with the current scene, which is what I'll be doing. Or you can replace the scene altogether. If you are just using this to do something with the 3D model, you may want to just replace the scene altogether. It's entirely up to you.

The material options allow you to import the Inventor materials and assign sub-object material IDs to any model that has multiple materials assigned to it in Inventor. That's really helpful. I usually turn both of these on all the time. And they work to help with simple-- they simplify the process of assigning materials to my models.

Again, talking about the mesh resolution, when you bring an object in as a mesh, you have the ability to adjust the resolution of that mesh. Now, a lot of the models that I'm bringing in for the pet steps are planar. There's not a lot of curves in them. So the resolution is not really as important. But if you have big models that have curved surfaces or cylindrical surfaces, the higher the mesh resolution, the higher the density of the mesh will be when it comes into 3ds Max.

And then you have the vertical direction. Now, the vertical direction is based on whether you import the vertical axis as X, Y, or Z. And that all depends on the original plane that you're working in within Inventor. So you may need to try this like once or twice. Generally, the Y or the Z-axis works, depending on how I start a model in Inventor.

And the one thing that I don't have here is the-- I'm going to go back to that slide-- is the driving animation. Now, you can drive it by joint or constraint. And when you drive an animation, you can use that deriving constraint and animate it within 3ds Max. It actually creates the animation within 3ds Max.

So the next thing is to import the Inventor assembly. I'm going to go through several slides here just to give you a heads up. I'm going to go through several slides before I get into 3ds Max. So what we're going to do is import the Inventor assembly.

Once the Inventor assembly is imported, then we can go ahead and set up the assembly and rig it. And we're not going to go into detail about rigging the assembly in this class. That's not what this class is all about.

So I will load a file that has the rig. And I can show you what the rig does and how it works. But once the assembly is rigged, then you can take that assembly and merge that into the final scene. What we'll do is we'll actually bring the assembly into the final scene, and then we can set it up there.

And then, you add animations. In this case, there's a free form deformation that's animated. That will be used for deforming the mattress. And then, we'll edit the scene materials. We'll modify existing materials, create a couple of new ones. And let's go into 3ds Max and do that.

So here, we have the default scene. We are working with this scene that's set up as a template. So I'm going to go ahead and go to the Template Manager-- oops, go to Tools, Manage Templates. And I created a template called Product Room. And that product room is using the product stage scene.

I grabbed an image from 3ds Max Snapshot and saved it as a template. I can create a new file from that template by creating New From Template, picked Product Room. And when I pick it, it will automatically load that template and allow me to start with a new scene.

So once I have that scene, I can go ahead and import my Inventor model. And what I've done here is I have taken all of the parts that I need for this model and put them all in one directory. And you can do that in Inventor using the pack and go feature of Autodesk Inventor. It'll bring all your models into one place. You can save it.

Or if you have everything already set up on your computer, you can bring in the assembly, and the Inventor plug-in in 3DS Max will automatically find all of the pieces that it needs. As long as they're available, if you can open it in Inventor and there's no errors, then you can bring it into 3ds Max. So to make it easier for this, I'll bring in the Hide-a-Paw Inventor file. It'll start the Inventor server and open up the Inventor import dialogue.

So I'll use Meshes as the import option. I'll leave Reference Duplicate Parts on. I do not want to create layers by material. What this will do is that will create a layer on the side here and name it based on the material. That's helpful sometimes, but not always. We'll leave the other ones-- the Import Driving Animation and Add Object Name to Material-- unchecked.

I'll merge it with the current scene. I'll import the Inventor materials and assign material IDs. And I'll leave the mesh resolution set to zero. I don't need to increase it or decrease it for this animation. And then, the Inventor file vertical direction I know is the Y-axis. So I'll click OK.

That will import the Inventor model. And that takes a minute, depending on the size of the model. The great thing is over the last couple of years, each iteration of 3ds Max has gotten faster and faster. And importing a scene or importing an Inventor model has gotten easier and easier.

So we'll let this import, and that should take just a minute here. And once it's done importing, we can start working with the model. So this has imported the model into the scene, and you'll see it comes in-- it comes in exactly where I put it and worked on it within Inventor.

So a really good-- just a quick aside here-- but something that's good to know is that if I'm working in multiple with multiple assemblies and I have them placed in the right place relative to each other, they will come into 3ds Max in that same relative position. So if you have multiple assemblies, they will come in within the relative positioning.

So once I brought this in, I can assign these to a new layer. And I'm going to name this Hide-a-Paw. And with everything selected, that brings all those models in.

And what you'll see is there's a couple of things that are turned off. And that is models that are hidden within Inventor. So anything that's hidden within Inventor will also be hidden when you bring it into 3ds Max. And I'm going to leave those hidden. I don't need those.

The other thing is everything comes in as one group. So when you start working on a model, you'll want to ungroup it. You can really work on it however you want. But in this case, I'll ungroup it and work on it.

Once I have the animation, I'll go ahead-- and let's open the next file that I'm going to use. And I'll go ahead and open the first file. And this is with the model already imported and merged in. And you'll see that I have the timing set up for the animation. And that is done through the Time Configuration dialogue.

Now, one thing that I've done is I've already merged in the bedroom set and the animated steps. And they're roughly placed there where I want them to be. But I don't yet have an animated camera. So I'm going to create a camera and add some camera animations. I'll add a physical camera. And I'll just come in here and do that.

Now, I'm going to go through this and just do some initial keyframes. And then I'll open another file that has the final version that you'll see what I've done. I've actually done this with two cameras instead of one. So starting with the camera where it is now, I'll move pieces that I need to.

So I'll take the-- let's grab the camera target. And let's move that to where we want. I want to start that just about there. And I'm going to set one of the view ports to this camera viewport. So here's the camera view. We just set it as a default shaded camera view.

And the other thing that I can do is while I'm in here, I can use these tools-- the viewport tools-- to get the view that I want. I can also animate using those tools as well. So I will turn on Auto Key. I'm going to just-- oops, let's turn on Auto Key. And let's set the key filters to just the position. And I have-- I clicked Create a Keyframe there.

So I have a keyframe at-- well, let's move it to 1 second so that we have our start keyframe. We have one second where nothing is going to happen. And then I have the animated bed and the motion of the steps.

So I'm going to come in and just move this around, right. Let's make sure that's right. That's-- select that view. Then we'll come in, and I'll move the camera in the top viewport. Bring it down on the side.

And that's going to create a couple of key frames. And this is just really-- right now, really simple. So it's panning around, right. So that's-- we're just creating some keyframes and setting the position of the camera. Now, let me go ahead and open the file that has everything in it that I need. And this has everything in the right place. It also has the animated free form deformation.

Now, the camera that's animated now are these two cameras. So I have two animated cameras in the scene. You can see the key frames for this camera in the timeline. So each of these is a keyframe. And you can see that this camera just moves around.

If I want to see what that looks like, come over and set this to camera 2. And let's change this from wireframe to default shading. So we'll go ahead and see what this looks like. So it's going to-- see that come in. And this is sort of a wide-angle view of the animation of the steps.

Then, I wanted a camera that was going to zoom in on the logo that I could use after I rendered to create a transition. So again, I can look through this camera. This is camera 3. Oops, this is camera 1. And this camera's not really doing anything until the very end of the animation when it's going to move in on the logo. So those are the animated cameras.

And when we look at the scene materials again, you'll see that these are all either OSL shaders or standard surface materials. And all of the substance materials have been baked out into textures. So this texture map right here is originally from a substance shader.

A nice thing about using substance textures within your scene is if you want to bake them out into just a bitmap, it's very easy to do that from within 3ds Max. And the reason these are all done this way is something that we'll talk about when we go to set up the scene for rendering.

Another important part of this is the lighting. And the environment is set up as an HDRI environment. So I'm not using any lights. And if I come way over here-- so this is the substance map for the leather. And you can see here, I can bake the outputs of that to this resolution. It's really helpful.

So here, I have this HDRI environment, and I'm using this Apartment Diffuse HDR file. I can adjust the exposure, the contrast, what it looks like in the viewport, whether there's ground projection or not. Since this is just lighting the scene and I have a floor, I don't need to worry about using any kind of ground projection.

I could also add additional lights if I want to using an HDR light map here, but I just want to use the environment. It renders faster. It gives me a nice look, and I don't have to worry about messing with lighting or anything like that. It's just super quick.

One reason why I did that is because I had to get this to the client within about 12 hours. So I was working on this on a Thursday afternoon, and I had to deliver the animation Friday morning. And I have one computer that has an NVIDIA 3060 graphics card with 12 gigabytes of RAM.

So having a scene that takes 20 minutes or 30 minutes of frame to render just-- it just wasn't going to work. I wasn't going to be able to deliver the animation in the morning. So by rendering using the GPU, I was able to get that time down to a minute per frame.

So let's look at rendering with Arnold. Now Arnold ships with 3ds Max. It's a fantastic renderer. It is one of the industry standard renderers that are out there. It's been out for a long time. And one thing that's important is depending on the quality of the scene, you're going to set your samples and your ray depth.

In this case, I'm using Arnold compliant mode with GPU rendering. And GPU rendering is done in the systems tab. And I'll show you that. You can adjust the camera anti-aliasing. And then for things like lighting quality, the reflection quality if you're using glass-- how good the glass looks-- that's all your ray depth.

You can also turn on adaptive sampling if you want. And adaptive sampling will help speed things up as well. So adaptive sampling lets you sample fewer points in this image to get the final image. It just helps render it, helps speed up your render time.

The other thing to do is set up your output size. In this case, we're going to output to full HD 1920 by 1080. And the output time is going to be a specific time range, depending on which camera I want to render. So the first camera I want to render is 0 to 30 seconds. And then the second camera that's close up-- there's no reason for me to render the entire animation. I just need the 3 seconds that is actually being animated.

And then, I'll save that file to a sequence. Now, you can save it to an AVI file. But if your computer crashes or something happens in the middle of that AVI file, you lose the entire thing. Rendering out to a sequence, you only lose the one frame that it crashed while rendering. So you don't have to go back and rerender the whole thing.

So let's go into 3ds Max and see what that looks like. And I'll go up to the Render Setup dialog. And on the System tab, I'll open the Device. And you'll see I have this-- I have the option for CPU rendering or GPU rendering.

If I turn on CPU Rendering and go to the Arnold Renderer, you'll see that I have the option for the number of samples in the Diffuse and for the number of samples for the Ray Depth. I'll turn on Adaptive sampling. And if I leave this in Arnold compliant mode-- and I can open the Arnold Render View here.

So this is already set up for rendering, but not sure what size this is rendering out to. So let's go to the Common tab. For this, I'm going to just render a single frame. And in this case, I have full HD. I'm just going to render it to 1280 by 720. That's going to save us a little bit of time. And I can save it to-- the output to a file-- but I'm going to leave that for now. I don't need to save the file for this demonstration.

So if I open Arnold Render View-- now you can render to just the standard render frame window, and this may slow down our presentation. But you'll see the Arnold render view does a pretty quick job. I can stop that, and it'll show me that the frame-- you can see how much noise there is.

If I switch over to GPU rendering and I go back to the Arnold Render View-- and let's go ahead and render that. And you'll see it'll take a minute to populate the GPU with the scene. But now I'm rendering this camera view here, and you'll see that it renders that frame pretty quick.

But let's go ahead, and let's do the same thing here. And you'll see once it refreshes, that it's rendering now on the GPU. And you'll notice that there's less noise in this final image. There's still a little bit of noise in it, but there's less. And that's because rendering with the GPU is just faster. It's easier and-- well, I wouldn't say it's easier. It's faster.

So the next thing to do is render each camera out to a sequence. So to set this up to render to a sequence-- the full HD1080P-- save this to a file. And here, I can pick Hide-a-Paw, Yes. We'll set up the PNG 24-bit. I don't need an alpha channel for this. And then, I'm ready to go and render this to a sequence. So I can click Render, and it's going to go ahead and render that out.

Once I'm done rendering, I can edit this together in a rendering program, whether it's like DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, whatever it is. Or you can use Video Post. And Video Post is sort of a throwback. It has literally been in 3ds Max since release 1. And it is a surprisingly robust editing tool for editing together sequences within 3ds Max.

So here, I have the Hide-a-Paw animation. And this is using an IFL file, which is just a text file. And I'm rendering that. We're using that from 0 to 21 seconds. Then, I have this Hide-a-Paw logo animation, which is the camera 2. And that is going from 20 seconds to 23 seconds.

So that's-- and then there's a transition from 20 to 21. Then, I just have the final ABI being output from 0 to 23 seconds because the last frame is a hold. And I can do that later on. I don't need to hold that for 30 seconds.

If I wanted to, I could add an image input event into this. And that's done here by adding an image input event. I can pick the file that I want. Let's go down to pick this last file. Let's see where it is. Here you go, grab that last image. And I can tell this to-- so there's the image input event.

I'm going to move it above the image output event. And I'll drag this-- oops, let's drag this over. It's going to go there. And let's say it is 2300 to 30 seconds. Oops, let's see where does that go-- 2320, so that's 2320. And then, I'll make sure the output goes all the way to 30 seconds.

Now, I have a full sequence. I can render that out. And it will render out to a 30-second animated sequence that will have a transition between there. And then, this frame will match up with that frame, and I'll just have a still image for the remainder.

Now, we can go back to presentation, and this is what the final animation looks like. Nothing too crazy, but it's-- gets the point across. The customer loved it. They just wanted to see how this was going to work, and they're using it in their online marketing.

And it allowed us to render this overnight. One thing that I did do later on is incorporate some noise reduction into it. So I took it into DaVinci Resolve and added some noise reduction that cleaned it up a little bit.

So I want to thank you. Again, my name is Steven Schain, CEO of Spectra3D Technologies. If you have any questions, you can reach me at stevens@spectra3D.com. Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoyed the presentation.