Leverage Inventor's real-time rendering

Are you using it?

Have you experimented with the real-time rendering environment in Inventor? If not, maybe you will want to soon.

Inventor provides the means to set your viewing environment so that you can get beautiful images without using Inventor Studio. The setup is exquisite in its simplicity. This image is an example:

It's simple and easy to use because everything is in one place, the View tab, on the Appearance panel.

I usually assign color styles to my components as I create them or when the assembly is made. When it comes time to produce an image I determine my camera angle and set the view to perspective camera mode. This yields the best results when using the IBL lighting styles.

To set the scene for the image above I did the following:

1. On the View tab in the Appearance panel, I selected the Lighting Style called Plain Room. I use this often as it provides reasonable lighting for such a  scene.
2. I activated All Shadows and Reflections.
3. Lastly, I set the Visual Style to Realistic. This automatically invokes Ray Tracing in the scene.
4. There are three quality options for ray tracing...
   1. Interactive - use this to set things up and navigate the scene. It takes less time than the other settings as it has the coarsest view refinement.
   2. Good - this setting picks up more of the light and is often "good" enough for saving an image.
   3. Best - just what it's name implies, the best ray tracing results provided, but it comes at the cost of the most time required. I use this when I'm ready for a final render.
5. When it's done, enjoy the view.

You can pause ray tracing, but note that if you change view orientation, it automatically resets. You can also disable ray tracing from the Ray tracing in-canvas panel.

To renable ray tracing, go back up to the Appearance panel and click Ray Tracing to turn it back on.

Use the File > Save Copy As command and specify your preferred image format and you have a great image.

Why not give it a try, you may just like the results you get!