AMD Radeon ProRender for Inventor is a new free photorealistic rendering plug-in for Inventor. It uses open rendering standards (USD and MaterialX) and supports hardware-accelerated raytracing on GPUs.
The ray trace renderer allows users to ‘easily create’ photorealistic visualisations of design with ‘just a few mouse-clicks’. It is available now on the Autodesk App store.
Once installed, the plug-in adds a “ProRender Viewer” button to Inventor. When clicked it opens the companion ProRender Viewer and imports the Inventor assembly, complete with base colours and materials. According to AMD, the Viewer is designed to be easy to use, even for those with little to no experience with rendering.
To improve the quality of renders, users can also apply ‘life-like realistic’ materials from the included MaterialX-based Radeon ProRender library of 303 physically-based rendering (PBR) materials. This includes natural materials like stone and wood, all the way to composites and anodised metals.
In addition, users can add a ground plane and enhance the lighting by adding HDRI background images and adjusting other lighting settings.
The Radeon ProRender for Inventor viewer also has “live link” capabilities with Inventor 2022 which lets users continue to work on their designs in Inventor and see the render automatically update in the viewer. This feature is not available if using the viewer with Inventor 2021.
Other features include adaptive sampling that optimises render times and AI-accelerated denoising for clean noise-free images in less time.
Radeon ProRender works with all OpenCL 1.2 and higher compatible graphics cards (including Nvidia GPUs). For ‘significantly shorter render times’ it also supports dedicated hardware-accelerated raytracing on AMD RDNA 2 architecture graphics cards, which includes the new AMD Radeon Pro W6600 and W6800.
Radeon ProRender for Inventor uses “open and common standards” to help make 3D data easily transferrable between applications. This includes Pixar USD (Universal Scene Description) framework and MaterialX (created by Lucasfilm).
Inventor designs can be exported to the USD format and brought into any application that supports USD. The same goes in reverse if you want to import USD content into the Viewer.
Support for MaterialX means materials can be transferred between other applications and renderers that support MaterialX.
AMD Radeon ProRender is also available for several other applications. It is integrated into Solidworks Visualize, Modo, Cinema 4D and others. There are plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds max, blender, PTC Creo and others.
