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AMD Launches Radeon ProRender Plugin for Inventor which will be a huge milestone for Inventor users that want to push photorealistic rendering for their product renders.

The plug-in adds a companion Radeon ProRender viewer and rendering app to Inventor that uses the latest rendering standards for GPU and CPU rendering. 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.

The Viewer: 

The viewer is very easy to use and provides the following functionality:

• Review: Review, comment on existing parts and assemblies
• Edit: Manually translate, rotate, or scale objects
• Lighting: Add and edit lights to your scene
• Materials: Apply materials from an extensive Material Library (which comes built into the Viewer)
• Render: Output final renders

Materials:

The ProRender Material Library consist of 303 Physically based rendering (PBR) materials ready to use. The quality of the materials are pretty impressive! 

Lighting:

When it comes to lighting in ProRender you will have a choice of four light types and a few HDRI Pre-sets but most importantly you can import your own HDR Lighting. You can also access advance lighting controls to change the rotation, position or exposure of the HDRI or Lights.

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Latest Rendering Technologies: 

The Radeon ProRender for Inventor uses two standard technologies to help make 3D data easily transferrable between applications:

‍Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) - 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 to convert or adjust them for use in these applications.

‍MaterialX - Materials can be transferred between other applications and renderers that support MaterialX.

Testing the Plugin: 

This is my Inventor scene ready for exporting to the ProRender Viewer. My Inventor Lighting is set to Soft Light.

Here is the result of the imported scene. I could adjust the lighting but instead I will create an HDRI from scratch using HDR Light Studio and replace all the materials with the ProRender ones.

The Lighting created in HDR Light Studio:

The final render using the ProRender materials and my own custom HDR Lighting: 

Conclusion

I really like what ProRender has to offer Inventor users, it is a strong first release. The huge material library and providing enhanced lighting through custom HDR Lighting is fantastic and if you dig deep into the render settings you will find two other options that compliment the plugin: 

• Adaptive Sampling which optimizes render times
• AI-Accelerated Denoising for Cleaner Renders

There are a few things to note for this initial release: 

• Material libraries are read only so you cannot modify or create new materials
• Decals don't seem to pull through from Inventor
• While using Inventor 2022 and the Viewer I did not see any evidence of live linking between Inventor and the ProRender Viewer after making changes in Inventor.
• Geometry can show artefacts of being a "Low Quality Mesh"  

Putting the minor Issues and limitations aside for this initial release I think ProRender could become a powerful rendering tool for Inventor, unless Autodesk have something up their sleeves for future releases of Inventor.