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Advanced Rendering Extension

jpeng
1-Newbie

Advanced Rendering Extension

A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why companies invest significant time and money into building a physical proto­type that can be photographed for use in marketing materials or consumer testing.

arx2.jpg

Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Rendering Extension (ARX) allows you to produce photorealistic 3D product images for use in design reviews, marketing collateral, technical documentation, user manuals, and product packaging–without having to build a prototype. And, as your design concept changes and evolves, you can easily update your images without creating a new prototype, thus reducing costs significantly.

With Pro/ENGINEER ARX, you can render images faster, with amazing realism. Simply select a specific material and apply photo-quality properties like a smooth, glossy finish or a rough, matte finish. You can represent the product‘s intended environment more realistically with Pro/ENGINEER ARX than with any other application.

You now have the flexibility to create the perfect effect with the power to directly manipulate the lighting through 360° of rotation. You can also create a suitable environment for the product to be rendered in, for example, an outdoor scene or an office desktop. Additionally, you can apply special effects like textures, reflections, shadows and depth of field to enhance the final image. These advanced capabilities not only create images that impress consumers, but they also give you back time to optimize your design, and more budget to produce collateral that will generate both sales revenue and excitement around your product.

Faster Design Reviews, More Impressive Documentation

arx3.jpg

With photorealistic images of the product in its actual environment, design reviews are much faster, and generate more enthusiasm. 3D-rendered images can also be used for consumer testing, and for tailoring the product and product launch to ensure success–at a significantly lower cost. High-quality images can also be used in technical publications, such as product documentation, white papers and user manuals.

Pro/ENGINEER ARX will enable your product to break into the market­place, not only with accurate promotional material, but with stunning visuals showcasing all aspects of the product.

Key Benefits

  • Improve communication via better product presentation and collateral for design, marketing, training, and customer-facing materials
  • Increase time for creativity–decrease time waiting for rendering
  • Achieve the highest degree of photorealism for designs
  • Reduce product costs and increase efficiencies in detecting design issues, so changes can be made before costly prototypes are built

New in Wildfire 5.0:

  • New Appearance and Scene Library entries, simulating real world materials.
  • Shadow Catcher Support added
  • New Appearance Classes, improved workflow and usability
  • Photo Render engine changed to Mental Ray for more realistic images
  • Skylighting has been added to give an even distribution of light
  • Environmental Lighting, you can render models using only HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) as a light source
  • Light Source Color Temperature control
  • Illuminance Units added
  • Rendering Scene File. You can create scene files containing the lighting, room, and advanced rendering environment effects
  • Direct Light Manipulation
  • The Appearance editor now allows full editing of the advanced (PhotoLux) material properties
  • LightWorks Material Archives (LWA) is supported

Features and Specifications:

Advanced Lighting Capabilities

  • Simulate a wide range of lighting, such as spotlight, skylight and distant light
  • Enhance lighting with High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) support
  • Vary shadow softness of each light, for example, by simulating sunlight
  • Enable light attenuation for real-world simulation of light fall off
  • Vary the intensity of each light to take into account other lights in the scene
  • Increase graphical realism by showing soft shadows of your product on the floor and reflections
  • Supports caustics, final gathering and global illumination
  • Offers physical correct lighting with color temperature and wattage inputs

Simulate a Wide Range of Materials

  • Apply both image maps and procedural maps to a model
  • Utilize bump maps to create relief and to represent material texture
  • Use decal maps when applying an image on the surface, such as a company logo
  • Determine the finish of the material–lacquer, satin or shiny
  • Access a standard library of over 200 predefined material types
  • Use dynamic
  • texture placement to precisely map materials and finishes to surfaces

Define the Product Environment

  • Set the floor, wall and ceiling position, and apply the appearance scheme or use an HDRI image to generate the environment, lighting and/or background
  • Snap the floor, walls or ceiling to the model
  • Choose a cylindrical or rectangular room
  • Use real-time rendering to view the room
  • Reuse predefined settings across multiple models, such as lights, rooms and effects

arx4.jpg

Special Effects

  • Global Illumination
  • Depth of field
  • Lens flare (best suited for point lights)
  • Light scatter
  • Region rendering
  • Shadow control
  • Color temperature
  • Tone mapping

Language Support

English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Korean

Platform Requirements (consult www.ptc.com/support)

Microsoft Windows (7, Vista and XP, 32 & 64bit)

UNIX platforms (Solaris 10 64bit)


This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team. If you would like to provide a reply and re-open this thread, please notify the moderator and reference the thread. You may also use "Start a topic" button to ask a new question. Please be sure to include what version of the PTC product you are using so another community member knowledgeable about your version may be able to assist.
16 REPLIES 16

Hi John

This ARX seems to be very capable of doing a great job based on the photos the PTC has demonstated in all of it's advertising. However, where does one learn how to do this? How come with all of the classes that PTC offers, there are none for this? I have only had limited sucsess using this and it seems really hit or miss. The problem is time. It takes too long between trials even with a very fast machine. Is there anyone out ther who can set-up simple rooms, colors and textures?

Thanks

Hi Marvin,

Not sure if this little demo will be helpful for you, but it will at least give you an overview of the current version. I keep hearing that today's rendering technology is much easier to use than ever before.

Also, I am attaching a little PDF with some general best practices for rendering. I am not a technical person myself, but I am sure someone here in this forum will get back to you with more precise information and some tips & tricks soon. I know we have some really experienced ARX users among our customers!!

Bettina

Thanks you for this materials.

Marvin

Thanks for your comments. Attached is a basic Getting Started with Rendering in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 tutorial.

This will walk you throught the steps to create your first rendering

Thank you for this tutorial.

For find more ARX free materials for your renders go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Creo-ARX/249926328400211

Such a very amazing link!

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DalbeerSinghSoh
4-Participant
(To:jpeng)

What is exactly LightWorks Material Archives (LWA) is supported?

Camillo

LWA is no longer supported as of Wildfire 5.0 when we switched to Mental Ray as our rendering engine.

Thanks

Paul Sagar

Director of Product Management, PTC

Paul

Thanks, also i have seen that cubes of preview renders had cool textures and appearance, bu i didn´t find them on the library (like that water)

Best regards

Camilo

The appearances that are supplied with Creo are meant to give you a good starting point. To create the effect of the cube above you will probably want to create a new transparnt glass appearance and then add a procedural bump map to it

Paul Sagar

Director of Product Management, PTC

Hello All,

Please direct me in finding additional HDRI images for use in ARX.

Thank you,

David

The HDR images supplied with Advanced Rendering Extension are supplied by Dosch Design. You can purchase more from www.doschdesign.com.

Alternatively you can search the web and find multiple sources

Paul Sagar

Director of Product Management, PTC

Thank you

Hi David

Just two HDRI images for now

Camilo

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