Visualizing Digital Prototypes in Context with VRED

PASCAL SEIFERT: Welcome to the Autodesk University presentation Holistic Design Review with Autodesk VRED. My name is Pascal Seifert, and I'm the Technical Product Manager for VRED.

First, let's take a look at the short video that sets the base of understand about the product that we will talking about today, mainly, which is Autodesk VRED.

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- You build amazing things that move the world forward. But before it's amazing, it's a prototype, many prototypes, that let you see every last detail so you can make every last decision on your design journey with precision. While physical prototypes are necessary, they are expensive, time-consuming and limiting, slowing down your product development processes and your time to market. And with VRED from Autodesk, photorealistic digital models are easy.

VRED allows anyone to create digital prototypes so accurate and reliable that you can actually make informed design and engineering decisions at many steps in the development process. VRED quickly transforms huge amounts of complex design and engineering data into compelling high-fidelity images, animations, and real-time presentations. Visualizations that you can then share in any format to any device with anyone, allowing everyone that's a part of your process, from designers and engineers, to marketers and executives, to easily review, showcase, and evaluate digital prototypes from anywhere.

So whether you're a small team with a simple process, or a large enterprise with a highly complex product development process across many departments, your teams can collaborate better, make decisions faster, and drive amazing products to market sooner. Discover how VRED can accelerate your business. Contact us today.

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PASCAL SEIFERT: Or at the beginning, let's take a look at VRED's combined value proposition, which consists out of three main pillars. The first aspect, which is a unique value to the VRED product family, is the capability to prepare and handle extremely complex data, if needed. Setting up and running data sets with billions of polygons and millions of possible configurations is not a problem for VRED, as it has its origin in the automotive industry where this is the norm.

VRED has three integrated rendering engines that can be easily switched with just a push of a button, allowing to [? pixably ?] choose the required rendering accuracy or performance needed for a given use case. Even the less accurate Open GL mode already produces photorealistic experience in real time, but has a focus on high frame rates for fluent experience on any devices, including XR devices. The two raytracing modes allow the user to choose which hardware they want to compute the image on-- GPU or CPU.

Both can be adjusted as well to serve different use cases and are able to generate close to simulation, create accuracy results, if desired. You can even connect several computation units to combine their power and, thus, speed up rendering and real time or image production. The last element which contributes to VRED's combined value is a deeply integrated collaboration capability.

That allows people to join virtual collaboration sessions remotely from anywhere on any device. Users around the world can connect via the VRED collaboration platform, and be in the same virtual space reviewing the same data. This works with all supported output devices and display types, like desktop, mobile, or even XR devices.

The objective is that everybody can freely choose their preferred device to join from anywhere in the world. Combination of those three elements make Autodesk VRED a perfect solution for visual communication, digital prototyping, and decision-making. Using Autodesk VRED for digital prototyping is all about realizing efficiency to be faster, more inclusive and, thus, save costs and time to bring product to market.

One outcome of using the product is to be able to experience and validate a digital prototype digitally and, most importantly, in collaboration. This speeds up the process and is way cheaper than conducting those tasks on physical prototypes. VRED's rendering is accurate and can be trusted.

It has been proven in the automotive industry over many years, and decisions can be taken with confidence, a reliable representation of visual prototypes. And finally, it allows you to keep every stakeholder in the loop and up to date. Communication is easy with VRED, and it's a tool make everybody a first participant, even if the teams are globally dispersed.

VRED design-- VRED Design and VRED Professional are the desktop offering tools of the product line. VRED Design has a feature set focused on solving the task designer face daily with VRED Professional. It is the most capable version of VRED expanding capabilities in many other areas as well, like advanced light simulation, engineering evaluation, and scalable rendering for the most challenging tasks.

VRED Presenter, as the name already indicates, is a desktop viewer application that can be open native VRED files and review them. While it does not have the authoring interface of Pro or Design, it allows reviews in all random modes and even supports XR reviews and collaboration, perfect to involve stakeholders that do not have the need to set up or change data sets. VRED Render Node and Core is the cloud, or server-based product, which run headless and can be used as the base to build custom tools and services running remotely and being accessed through custom interfaces that can be tailored to any personas need.

With VRED Core streaming abilities, the high-quality results can reach any device and be integrated into any custom front-end while the computation happens in the cloud or on a remote server. The typical workflow of-- or value cycles of VRED Solutions look as follows. It all starts with the input and preparation of created data.

VRED supports a huge variety of CAD and other formats from products like Inventor, Maya, 3DSMax, Catia or NX, as well as many other generic exchange formats for geometry and materials. Once the data is in VRED, there are some easy and quick ways to organize and prepare the data. The great thing is that afterwards it can be used for many different use cases and workflows without having to adopt the data again.

You can create simple renderings, like images, videos, or 360 experience. But also, use the real time graphics on different output devices, like, HMDs, displays, including 3D stereo, or streaming the result to lightweight mobile devices. And, of course, all that works in collaboration as well.

The findings and feedback that is gathered during or based on any of those usage modes can be documented and fed back into the creation process to support a holistic and close value cycle. That speeds up decision-making and time to market by connecting all stakeholders in the process to take informed decisions based on the same digital twin, allowing to design and build better products faster.

The project we want to talk about today is all about designing and configuring a kitchen with the support of VRED and its capabilities, considering the context and space it will be built into. Therefore, we are showing how to aggregate and prepare data from Revit, Inventor, and Fusion 360, and other data sources in VRED for a diverse set of review and validation purposes. Autodesk VRED acts as a visual platform to aggregate all elements needed to take decision and present free main proposals to a potential customer.

Besides obvious aspects, like, size of the room, layout, and appearance, we also looked at lighting and functional ergonomics. We are leveraging many different technologies, like, XR advanced lighting computation, and streaming to design the kitchen itself, but also to include the customer into this process. From the very beginning, making a decision in collaboration and keeping them up-to-date on the setup and the status quo at any time, the outcome is exactly what they expect, and the customer journey is more inclusive, therefore.

This is an overview of our pipeline. So we started with a simple Revit model. We brought into Inventor, and then over to Fusion where we actually designed the kitchen. The data set was then exported as an [? IHS ?] file to be read and was enriched with other data coming from different sources, like, TurboSquid or GrabCAD as well.

As a first step after importing the house and room layout from Autodesk Revit, we want to make sure the room has enough natural light and conducted a light study with different times of the day, leveraging VRED's procedural skylight environment, which allows to simulate different sunlight situations considering location and time. Of course, Revit has capabilities to some certain extent to do light studies as well. But here you can see the visual difference compared to VRED using raytracing and including multiple bounces of indirections, color bleeding, and raytrace soft shadows.

The light distribution inside the building and intensity values in different areas of a room are interesting to know and important for any workplace as well as in your kitchen. VRED offers several ways to visualize them from realistic to analytic. And all of them are based on VRED's highly accurate raytracing computation modes.

Realistic rendering is a mode that shows a photorealistic view of the light distribution in the room. Luminance tone mapping is a mode that shows a kind of heat map, which allows a more precise evaluation of the light distribution and defined hotspots. After realizing the window on the wall will not allow enough natural light in the room, we took the decision to add an additional window in the roof of the house just above the main working place of the kitchen in Revit, and imported the house again. This should allow to let enough natural light into the room and raise the perfect base, so our assumption.

As a location, we have chosen Munich, Germany, and [? render ?] [? study ?] from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM on 1st of July. We will repeat the light study with the final kitchen layout later to see if this has any side effects, like, side shadowing in the main working area from people or furniture and, therefore, should be enhanced with artificial lighting.

The next step is all about deciding the layout of the kitchen. This is where quick and less accurate rendering modes come in handy. We imported different very basic elements of the kitchen to see how the space can be used perfectly.

Using real time ambient occlusion to go-- to get a rough impression, it's totally fine to move objects around, measure and, eventually, place all kitchen elements at the right spot. Besides functionality, technical preconductions, like, water connections, or detecting possibilities and personal preferences, ergonomics and usability play an important role in this step of the process. There's nothing better than virtual reality to immerse yourself in the scene and experience this first hand. We quickly realized that due to the sloping roof, some parts of the room are not ideally usable when standing, and might be better suited as a storage place.

Once the layout is decided, we looked at color, materials, and finishes, starting with different options for the doors and door handles, which were mainly designed in Fusion 360 and imported in VRED afterwards. After reviewing some of the options, we decided for two different door panels and three different door handles, which will make it into our final configuration.

So let's move on to the color and materials. Leveraging the huge library of parametric materials from Adobe Substance, which is directly accessible from inside VRED, we went through many options for each element and decided for two complete sets of our final configuration. VRED Variant Set module makes it very easy to build simple but also very complex configurations of the whole scene, like it is in the case in the kitchen.

As you remember, the product was originally built for the automotive industry. A car usually has thousands of possible configurations, including objects, materials, and functional elements as well that need to be accessible with one click. Exactly for this case, the variant set module allows you to combine many different elements and scene states into one variant set that can be activated with the click of a button.

This feature came in very helpful when we were working towards or to find a kitchen configurations in this project. As the last step, we included different electronic devices in the kitchen. We then made the two final configurations more relatable and lifelike for the final customer decisions by placing additional objects in and on the kitchen itself.

So taking the natural light into consideration, we now placed artificial lights to ensure a properly lit working environment in every situation-- may it be day or nighttime. You can use VRED's own light types, but also include many external light sources and profiles, like, IS profiles, or ray light, to really ensure the digital twin has the exact same conditions as the kitchen ones it will be built. As soon as that was done, it's time to properly calculate light and shadow for real time use cases, and give the kitchen its last touch.

After we jointly designed the kitchen with our future customer and the surrounding, it will eventually be used, it's time for some final reviews and decisions. To present the two final configuration to the customer, we have decided to offer several options, both interactive and traditional. Something we did not use in our example but would have been a great help as well is using VRED XR streaming capabilities to allow the customer to place the kitchen in an empty room with the help of tablet-based augmented reality.

We have attached an example to provide a better understanding of this feature. But as we did not have the empty room, it was not possible to show it properly with our project. We leverage VRED's streaming capabilities to directly stream the interactive experience to our customers tablet, guiding them through the nuances and specialties of the two final options, and making sure we captured their feedback.

All participants are free to use the device of their choice. So while we be presenting the result within XR, the customer can also just join from the tablet, while still being able to interact with the kitchen and switch configurations themselves. Or in case they do have an XR headset, they can join us for a joint XR collaboration session, taking a more immersive look and experience their future kitchen firsthand.

Even if the customer does not have XR capable PC at home, we can stream the content directly to the XR headset from the cloud. After making sure the customer are happy with our two final configurations, we can move to the next step. In case the customer needs more time to think about their decisions, you can either offer to leave the collaboration session open so they can join at any time alone to check the options again, or you can render out some images and movies that demonstrate the kitchen configurations nicely to support their informed decisions, or just increase the excitement waiting for the delivery.

VRED offers a nice feature called Variants at Random, which batch renders images from every single possible configuration. And then totally, we could have created 165,000 images with one single click, which then can be nicely presented to customers in a catalog custom web page, or as an image download.

Another nice way to immerse the customer and give them a kind of VR experience in a cheap way is to render out 360 degree panorama videos, or images, and share them on social media from where the customer can navigate around with their mobile, or one of those cheap cardboard VR headsets in the kitchen. This is obviously not comparable with a real VR experience using an Oculus Rift or Vive, but also free and accessible without any specific VR hardware. Looking at all those options, you can see we have many ways there to collaborate to review the digital prototype, educate the customer, and guide them in their customer journey to take a buying decision with confidence and comfort.

And this does not even require them to meet us in person or leave their home. Let's take a look at the value VRED brought to this design process. While Autodesk VRED has its origin in the automotive design industry, we can see perfectly that it's valuable tool for visual collaboration, communication, and digital prototyping for any other industry.

We wanted to clear up with the perception that Autodesk VRED is an automotive only software. It is used by the biggest companies in industrial machinery, factory design, and planning consumer products. And as we showed in this presentation, it's perfectly suited to serve those industries as well.

The original VRED is a great advantage, indeed. The automotive industry has always been at the forefront of visualization technology and [INAUDIBLE] in many areas. Other industries now have the chance to leverage a tool that already has a solution to the problem they might be facing in the future.

That's it from our site. We hope you enjoyed the presentation and thanks for watching.