You can see an overview of InstaLOD’s complete feature set in DP 03:19. In this issue, we take a closer look at the new features and functionalities that have been added in the latest update to completely revolutionise enterprise workflows.

by Calvin Bacon

In December 2019, InstaLOD released a huge update in which over 500 improvements and new features were added to their standalone software InstaLOD Studio XL. Among other things, these features speed up work within the software and make many steps of data preparation more intuitive than before. In addition to these many quality of life improvements, InstaLOD has launched several brand new products that are set to completely change the way 3D CAD and polygon data is processed in the enterprise market.

AMD ProRender

Let’s start with a feature that is a welcome addition for any 3D hobbyist, freelancer or enterprise customer: easy to set up final shot rendering. To prepare PBR models for product renderings by default, you have to be prepared to convert all materials to be compatible with the respective renderers, which in short means: every material has to be set up from scratch.

Render engines such as Arnold, Redshift or V-Ray have their own proprietary shaders, so you can’t simply use a Lambert shader to imitate complex materials such as clearcoat, subsurface scattering or sheen. InstaLOD automates what typically has to be converted manually with the integration of AMD ProRender. The PBR material is automatically converted into a ProRender shader.

This means that you remain flexible in the PBR model and can simply run ProRender at render time and sit back – without having to manually re-map textures. The Material Editor has also been improved; shading balls have been added for quick previews of materials. Adding and filtering materials is also quick to do, and the editor is easy to understand at first glance, with value sliders and texture input options per material parameter for easy editing.

In addition to the standard PBR parameters (Colour, Roughness and Metalness), the Material Editor contains many new parameters that can be used for raytrace rendering in Radeon ProRender. These include, for example, refraction, sheen, clearcoat and SSS. This means that high-end renderings can be set up with just a few mouse clicks, as shown above.

The integrated post-processing stack allows users to edit rendered images quickly and easily. Optional image processing functions such as colour correction, exposure, depth-of-field or AI denoising can thus be carried out locally within InstaLOD without having to open external image processing programs.

InstaLOD Grid

In companies, it often happens that employees cannot fully utilise certain applications. Application-specific training then has to be provided or, alternatively, colleagues from other departments have to take over the tasks.
InstaLOD now wants to change this with its new product InstaLOD Grid. InstaLOD Grid makes it easy to set up a local InstaLOD computing cluster within an organisation. This enables employees to access InstaLOD Grid via an InstaLOD Grid web application. Within the web application, users have the option of uploading their data and editing it using ready-made profiles.

Profiles are added by InstaLOD experts within the company when the master server is set up, which is quick and easy to do. Profiles are saved as JSON files by default, which can easily become confusing for beginners in their text form. Therefore, this was simplified for the web application so that the user does not need to know the individual operation settings, but only a title and a description are visible in the UI, so that everyone knows that profile XYZ, for example, creates an LOD chain without having to understand any settings within InstaLOD. This means that employees do not have to attend application-specific training courses in order to fully utilise InstaLOD functionalities and settings throughout the company.

InstaLOD WatchDog

Compared to VFX or game studios, large companies often have to process tens or hundreds of thousands of data for visualisations and other purposes. Due to their PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems, the data often changes weekly, if not daily. As a result, it quickly becomes confusing which data is new or has already been prepared, and processing such masses of data manually is almost impossible.

The process of data preparation is therefore not scalable in the traditional way, which is why InstaLOD has entered the market with a new solution. InstaLOD WatchDog is a powerful tool that can process and correctly mirror complex folder structures. After the initial processing of data, it remembers which files have already been processed so that data is only processed if it has been changed or newly added. This prevents problem areas where thousands of data would otherwise have to be completely reprocessed in the event of the smallest changes.
By combining InstaLOD WatchDog with InstaLOD Grid, you can create a fully automated ecosystem that makes it easy to scale data processing.

Changed data is automatically recognised, sent to InstaLOD Grid, processed and then stored in the correct folder structure. To simplify the system even further and avoid having to trigger InstaLOD WatchDog manually when the data changes, the InstaLOD Scheduler can be used to specify a specific schedule using cron expressions, specifying the intervals at which InstaLOD should check and process the data for changes or new data. This allows the data preparation system to run completely automatically without the need for manual steps.

Scene Rules

We took a look at InstaLOD’s Scene Rules in the article in issue 07:19. The issue explained how this set of rules can be used to perform complex actions when importing data with a simple set-up.

This includes actions such as adding materials, deleting objects or selectively tessellating certain CAD parts. These scene rules have also been revised in the 2020 update and expanded with many new predicates and possible attributes so that users now have even more flexibility when processing. Actions such as “Delete all screws that are smaller than 10 cm” or “Close all holes on objects that have more than 3 boundary vertices” are now a simple task.
A new Record option has been added to the Scene Rules, allowing users to automatically record rules without having to set them up manually.

You simply press the record button and set up the scene. Every change is automatically saved in a rule. The recorded profile can be saved and recalled at a later time so that the same steps can be carried out fully automatically.

Mesh Match Rules

The above mentioned Scene Rules are now also available within the Mesh Match Rules since the December update. This means that you can control which objects are processed by which mesh operations. This option was already available before, but the assignment of objects to operations was limited to the names of the objects. This has now been extended with the complete arrangement of attributes, which means that the size, position and materials of the objects can now be used to trigger operations.

Final Words

As you can see, InstaLOD has taken an already powerful tool and turned it into a real high performer that knows when to process which data and where it belongs – a fully automated ecosystem for data preparation that can be completed with product renderings for visualisations.

You can find more information about InstaLOD on the InstaLOD.com website or on InstaLOD’s YouTube channel. On the website you will also soon find a freely available evaluation version of InstaLOD as well as a new webshop to make it even easier to get started with InstaLOD.

The post InstaLOD 2020: rendering and automation with InstaLOD Grid first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Advertorial.

by Philipp Staab & Calvin Bacon

Who? What? Where?

InstaLOD is a software product for the automation of work processes in 3D production. In contrast to other, typically industry-specific 3D software, InstaLOD is used by a wide variety of companies: from entertainment customers (LOD, retopologisation, beacons …) to enterprise customers (CAD tessellation, decoring …). The cost- and time-saving software is developed by the Stuttgart-based company InstaLOD GmbH and was presented for the first time at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles after several years of development.

Within a very short space of time, the company has successfully established itself with the largest game developers and enterprise customers. Managing Director Manfred Nerurkar brings a wealth of experience in the field of real-time 3D to the company. Many years of experience in game development as well as the development of a commercial 3D engine help the company to understand the processes and develop automated solutions that deliver convincing results.

Optimise it well

InstaLOD’s optimiser is designed for the highest quality and extreme speed. The idea behind it was not only to be able to optimise as much as a 3D artist can do by hand, but to go even further – automatically and in just a few seconds. InstaLOD therefore has an intelligent optimiser and knows exactly where edges are needed and where they are not in order to achieve a perfect silhouette, maintain perfect shading or counteract texture skewing. InstaLOD’s advanced control options and vertex painting or selection sets allow you to define where the optimiser should optimise more or less of the mesh to achieve the perfect result for each type of mesh.

With the “Maximum Deviation” option, a threshold value can be specified that optimises up to a point at which certain changes to the mesh are reached. This allows you to automatically optimise any number of files in batch processing to a consistent quality and save different numbers of polygons per mesh as required. For example, automotive assets can often be thinned out by up to 90% of the data while maintaining the same shading.

InstaLOD has solved many problems in the area of optimisation that other optimisers have previously failed to solve. From the optimisation of skeletal meshes, where skinning weights are automatically transferred, to the optimisation of faulty geometry such as non-manifold geometry. There is no limit to the number of polygons. The InstaLOD Optimiser can process meshes of any size.

Remesher

In the good old days, creating UVs and remeshing were probably rather unpopular tasks that interns were allowed to do when they spilt their boss’s coffee again. However, remeshing itself is a process that has hardly been used in the 3D industry to date, as only low-quality results can be achieved despite long runtimes. With InstaLOD, we can carry out a complete retopologisation of a mesh within a very short time, creating new UVs and baking all the desired textures at the same time: Displacement, Curvature, ID, Normal Maps and whatever else your heart desires.

Here too, InstaLOD is able to process huge amounts of data without any problems. The first step in remeshing is to analyse the input geometry and the objective of the remesh. In this case, we have a large and dense amount of data and want to make it usable for a VR application. With large amounts of data, it is typically difficult to determine how many polygons are needed to achieve a good result. We therefore use the fuzzy face count target here, with which InstaLOD itself determines how many polygons are needed to achieve a result with the right quality for the subsequent use case. The “Normal” target set here automatically creates a quality that is suitable for VR applications for PC or console. After only about a minute of running time, we have reduced the previously unusable bust to approx. 5,000 polygons. The remesher thus saved over 99% of the data volume.

At the same time, the remesher created the UVs with the required high quality and saved all the textures needed for renderings or real-time engines. The asset is therefore completely finished and can be transferred to any render engine without having to be further processed or improved.

Kitbash workflow

InstaLOD’s revolutionary features make completely new workflows possible. One of these workflows is kitbashing, in which several high-poly objects are put together (kitbashed) and the scene is then remeshed with InstaLOD. This allows a game-ready object to be created from several unusable high-poly objects within minutes, including all UVs and necessary textures. The creation of such assets usually takes several days, even for high-end studios, as all steps from sculpting to UV unwrapping, baking, texturing etc. have to be carried out manually. This also applies to working with photogrammetry.

The problem with the gravestone elements shown here is that we have a scene with several million polygons, which cannot be easily transferred to a game engine. This is where InstaLOD’s Remesher can help enormously. The remesher is the perfect solution here, as it creates a single object from several objects. At the same time, we get UVs for this object and also bake all the necessary textures so that we can configure our materials quickly and easily in the next step within a texturing programme such as InstaMaterial or Substance Painter.

For this scene too, it is difficult to estimate how many polygons are needed to achieve a good result. Therefore, we will use the Fuzzy Face Count Target again, with which InstaLOD’s smart algorithms independently determine how far the amount of polygons can be reduced. In this case, the remesher was able to reduce the scene from around 1.5 million polygons to around 6,000 polygons. As we baked the Normal, AO, Diffuse, Position, Curvature, Thickness and ID maps at the same time, we can now use Smart Materials within our texture programme very quickly, which use the respective textures to achieve good results. We went from a high-poly scene to a game-ready object in just 10 minutes. This is just one of the many time-efficient workflows that InstaLOD makes possible.

InstaLOD Standalone

InstaLOD Studio XL allows users to work independently of other 3D software, with numerous enhancements and new features. One of the central features is the import and automatic tessellation of CAD file formats. This support ranges from generic CAD formats such as STEP to industry-specific formats such as CATIA V5. InstaLOD’s CAD workflows offer numerous innovations to fundamentally improve standard processes in the industry. But what if the CAD file has been modified by an engineer? Building on the CAD workflows, InstaLOD’s rules engine provides the ability to automatically prepare data in the event that the CAD file has changed.

Other improvements include a new occlusion cull algorithm that works exponentially faster, especially with extremely large objects such as CAD objects. InstaLOD Studio XL also offers something for the eyes: The PBR (Physically Based Rendering) viewport has been developed to allow users to visualise object materials as they will later be displayed in modern render engines.

InstaLOD Studio XL is more than just an application, it is a platform. A sophisticated plug-in architecture is used by major studios to use their own file formats with InstaLOD Studio XL and InstaLOD Pipeline. However, the possibilities for plug-ins go far beyond file formats: custom algorithms, rules for the rules engine and much more.

And what does the future hold?

We are always working on new products, such as a completely independent photogrammetry solution. We hope to be able to launch a preview on the market in 2019. Of course, we are continuing to improve our technology. We currently have five PhDs working in our research department, but we are still planning to recruit new researchers.

The post InstaLOD: Time is money first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Alexandra Kaschny.