[dmritard96]

Would absolutely pay up if I could get realtime raytracing for Fusion360 (Industrial/Mechanical Design software). Waiting for renders to bake only to find out that the lighting needs to be adjusted slightly can be frustratingly slow.

[pasta]

I don't know if they will ever integrate this, but that's what I like about path tracing.

Even on slow computers you will get a real time photorealistic result. You will have to wait long before all noise is gone but you will notice lighting problems in a sec.

[semi-extrinsic]

Hmm, IIRC Inventor does realtime raytracing, with first image after ~10 seconds and production quality images after a couple of minutes (this was on a XPS 15 laptop with the GTX 960M GPU).

My guess is that it's one of the features Autodesk doesn't want to put in Fusion360 so they retain a market for the more expensive Inventor.

[GuB-42]

I don't think we can call it real-time below 6 FPS (0.17s). That's the framerate of cheap anime. And the goal should be at least 30, which is a typical video game framerate.

The only examples I have where real-time raytracing is used are demoscene productions where shapes are defined using simple mathematical primitives. (see the 4k intros "absolute territory" and "zetsubo", both from prismbeings for example).

[StavrosK]

Ten seconds is hardly real-time, that's how long Fusion takes too. You can't easily adjust the camera view when you have to wait ten seconds between adjustments.

That said, I think Fusion shows you a really low resolution image in real time, if I remember correctly.

[Nae3Au5x]

Most renderers support near-realtime preview. If fusion360 doesn't maybe write a script that watches for file changes, converts the CAD data into whatever your renderer of choice takes as input and then display in preview mode?

Maya+Vray spits out a preview within seconds on my machine.

[dmritard96]

Do you have some examples you can link to of something you have rendered in a few seconds?

Fusion has some sort of simpler preview, my guess is that its some closed form lighting solver and in certain contexts it can look ok but for photorealism of a scene, its nowhere close.

I see a decent number of suggestions that people have really fast renders but I'm suspicious that we are talking about very different things.

Here is what I am typically rendering:

-Full screen on a 15" retina MBP

-Ray Traced

-In additional to the product, whole rooms/scenes that contextualize including 3D textured woods, books with Decals that are wrapped, elements of various opacity/transmissiveness, objects with some luminance, etc.

- Some objects with very high numbers of points (there is a technical name I'm forgetting), but essentially, circles render with enough polygons to not appear as a collection of lots of small/slightly noticeable line segments

[StavrosK]

Unfortunately, there is no file. Fusion has this monstrosity where everything is stored in Autodesk servers. I don't know if you can export the files, but saving uploads them to Autodesk.

[dtf]

Rhino3D integrated Blender’s open-source Cycles renderer.

https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoCycles

[gt_]

I thought KeyShot had a quick plugin for that. I would be surprised if V-Ray for GPU doesn’t becomes available for Fusion 360 before long. I can’t honestly claim to know much about Fusion 360 but I do know the CAD folks love it. Octane or Redshift is what you’re really after but they are more boutique companies so it’s probably unlikely.