AMD’s fast, easy and incredible rendering engine AMD Radeon ProRender is now available in over a dozen leading DCC and CAD applications, including the latest release of a plugin for Autodesk Inventor 2021 and 2022.
Built on industry standards, this rendering engine lets you create stunningly photorealistic images on virtually any GPU, CPU, and Operating System. The plug-in adds a companion Radeon ProRender viewer and rendering app to Inventor that uses the latest rendering standards, USD and MaterialX, and supports hardware-accelerated raytracing on AMD RDNA 2™ architecture-based graphic cards, including our latest professional graphics card, the AMD Radeon™ Pro W6800.
Inventor is a professional-grade 3D CAD software for product design and engineering and our free downloadable Radeon ProRender plug-in and viewer application for Inventor adds the ability to easily create photorealistic visualizations of your designs with just a few mouse-clicks.
Design Visualization Options for Inventor
Design visualization has become a very important step in today’s product design workflows. Being able to generate photorealistic images of your designs so you can easily show off what the finished product will look like is key to accelerate internal design reviews, successful client presentations, and for creating compelling sales and marketing tools.
While Inventor users already have a selection of visualization tools available to them, they are either be aimed at advanced users and require a significant time investment to use, or don’t support faster GPU-accelerated rendering. Our Radeon ProRender plug-in for Inventor offers instead an easy-to-use yet powerful photorealistic visualization tool that can take full advantage of your graphics cards for rapid results.
Key Features of the Plug-in and Viewer
The Radeon ProRender Inventor plug-in once installed adds a “ProRender Viewer” button to Inventor that when clicked opens the companion ProRender Viewer and imports your assembly to it. The Viewer is designed to be easy to use even for those with little to no experience with rendering. When you import your design into it, the base colors and materials are carried over and for fast results, you can simply render your design “as-is.”
However, to improve the quality of your renders you can also easily apply to your design the life-like realistic materials from the included MaterialX-based Radeon ProRender library of 303 Physically based rendering (PBR) materials. You can view all the materials available here, and the library includes a wide selection of materials from natural materials like stone and wood, all the way to composites and anodized metals.
On top of that, you can add a ground plane and enhance the lighting by adding HDRI background images and adjusting other lighting settings to create an even more realistic representation of your design. The Radeon ProRender viewer also has “live link” capabilities with Inventor 2022 which lets you continue to work on your design in Inventor and see it automatically updated with your changes in the viewer as you work. This feature is not available if using the viewer with Inventor 2021.
Additional Features, Including Hardware Raytracing
The Radeon ProRender Viewer also includes many of the features and benefits found in our other Radeon ProRender Plug-ins for other creative applications, including Adaptive Sampling that optimizes render times and AI-Accelerated Denoising for clean noise-free images in less time.
Another key feature introduced when the base Radeon ProRender rendering engine was updated to v2.0 is dedicated hardware-accelerated raytracing on AMD RDNA 2 architecture graphics cards. Although Radeon ProRender is GPU-accelerated on all OpenCL™ 1.2 and higher compatible graphics cards (including NVIDIA® GPUs), on supported products, hardware raytracing can optimize your render times even further.
Support for hardware-accelerated rendering is available on AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 series and AMD Radeon™ Pro W6000 series graphics cards, and the significantly shorter render times it can provide means you can get back to designing faster than ever.
Looking to the Future with the Latest Rendering Tech
Not only does our Radeon ProRender Plug-in for Inventor include many of the great features found in our other Radeon ProRender plug-ins, but it is also built upon some of the latest rendering technologies that could become the industry standards of tomorrow.
By using the Pixar® USD™ (Universal Scene Description) framework, a new standard for transporting 3d data between different content creation, design, and rendering applications, your Inventor designs can also easily be exported to the USD format and brought into any application that supports USD without having convert or adjust them for use in these applications. The same goes in reverse if you want to import USD content into the Viewer. Examples of leading application that supports USD are Autodesk® Maya® 2022 and 3ds Max® 2022 (beta support).
Like USD, MaterialX is an open, common standard (created by Lucasfilm) for the transfer of information between applications and renderers, but this time for materials. The Radeon ProRender material library that comes with our Inventor plug-in uses MaterialX, allowing for easy and accurate transfer of the same look for your design when it is imported into applications that also support MaterialX.
Support for both technologies shows that Radeon ProRender is looking to the future of rendering when all 3D data will be based on open and common standards and easily transferrable between any number of applications without any headaches for designers.
The Power of Open Standards
With Blender quickly becoming the standard 3D software, there is a growing need for it to work in a larger ecosystem of other applications. Exchanging data between 3D applications has never been easier than it is today. With Pixar® Universal Scene Description (USD™) technology, there is now a robust and open way to exchange and assemble data from multiple applications. As it is quickly becoming an industry standard, Blender users deserve a first-class experience with USD.
With this goal in mind, we have embarked on a project to enable USD assembly and rendering inside of Blender. Blender includes a rudimentary USD exporter, and soon will include import tools. However, there is no way to render existing USD data within Blender or reference a USD file into your Blender scene. Other tools which support USD, such as SideFX® Houdini™ or Autodesk® Maya®, additionally allow the assembling and manipulating of USD data. Finally, while Blender users create intricate shader networks for Cycles, we need a way to share shading networks with other applications.
USD includes a rendering system called Hydra™, named so because it allows multiple renderers with one common interface. We adapted this system to work directly inside Blender. By adapting Hydra as a render add-on to Blender, any renderer that supports Hydra can be connected to Blender easily, by plugging-in to the Hydra add-on. Furthermore, the Hydra system is fast at sending scene updates and rendering, which leads to better renderer performance than using common rendering add-ons to Blender. Currently, this add-on includes the Hydra OpenGL® renderer and the AMD Radeon™ ProRender plug-in for Hydra, though other Hydra render delegates should work easily.
Another important piece is enabling USD scene composition in Blender. We achieve this with a custom node graph, allowing users to pull in external data to mix with Blender data and filter, manipulate and export USD data. This allows powerful tools for pruning data, referencing data without loading it into Blender’s memory, the interaction between multiple artists, and exporting composited scenes for offline rendering.
And like with USD geometry, we handle materials using the open source MaterialX open standard. Created by Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Industrial Light and Magic™ for sharing material graphs across renderers, it is quickly becoming the standard material format. This allows adding material node graphs from Adobe® Substance 3D Painter™ and various Autodesk applications, as well as exporting them.
MaterialX is a growing standard with increasing adoption across applications. To help encourage adoption AMD plan to launch a free Material Library for sharing MaterialX materials on GPUOpen.com. Users will be able to use it to download materials and import directly to the Blender Hydra plug-in.
Download Info & System Requirements
The AMD Radeon ProRender Plug-in and Viewer for Inventor is available to download from the Autodesk store today. Radeon ProRender is optimized for AMD Radeon Pro and Radeon RX graphics cards (and supports hardware raytracing on Radeon RX 6000 and Radeon Pro W6000 series GPUs) and like many of AMD’s technologies, it is built on open standards and works on any GPU that supports OpenCL™ 1.2 (including NVIDIA® graphics cards) and on any CPU.