TL;DR: A custom rendering tool for a very niche type of renders. Originally intended only for my own usecase, but maybe someone else might find it useful as well. No signup and all that nonsense needed.
Hey folks, I’ll try to keep it brief.
I love modeling and am not very interested in texturing or photorealism. Specifically, I’ve always loved clay renders. You know the matte white renders when nice ambient occlusion and visible wireframes. To me it’s a perfect way of showing of the details in a model. And as you know, Shapr3D’s visualization tools don’t fit this style at all (through no fault of Shapr3D, I think what I want it pretty niche) and I started looking into alternatives.
One way was of course to use Blender, but as as I exclusively use Shapr3D on the iPad, I would prefer to also produce the renders on it as well. A purely subjective problem when using Blender is also that the possibilities are literally endless, and I end up fiddling more with the renders than I’d really like.
I started working on a relatively simple web-based renderer, where the settings would be perfectly tailored to my taste, and I could basically import a model, press render and get exactly what I want every time. I’ve spend a lot of time on getting edge detection, edge rendering (edges are kind of the main part of this) and occlusion working right, but ended up exposing a bunch of values as temporary sliders so I could more easily mess with them while calibrating. Turns out a light setup that works great for one model might not work as nice for another, but I still think I can find a proper compromise.
Try it out an tell me what you think. While I aim for getting rid of most of the settings (again, this is not intended to be any sort of general-use renderer, it will do one style and one style only), if you end up finding a particularly nice combination of settings, they can be shared. Post them here together with a render or two, and maybe I’ll at least add a simple list of presets.
This will remain a clay renderer, tho I have been toying with the idea of trying to keep basic face colors embedded in the models. It’s easy to argue they might help with showing of the model details as well, by differentiating different parts.
AI disclosure: I’m a senior software engineer since 20 years back but have leveraged AI for some functionality here that was way above my head, most specifically edge detection. Turns out it’s easy to detect and render edges in polygon-based models, but detecting features in cad models is a completely different stort.
