Cloud-based rendering company is a natural fit for Onshape.
Realistic images are de rigueur these days. We used to get away with monochrome images of parts, but those images look as dated now as black-and-white movies. These days product images are ray traced, showing textures, perfectly rendered, with shadows and reflections. We could have used server farms, but most of us used workstations with graphic cards heavy with GPUs.
But what if your design software was workstation free and bragged about being able to work on tablets and Chromebooks—devices where graphic-generating power is in short supply or nonexistent? What if your workstation-free design company was keeping its servers busy with geometry calculation, leaving few cycles for ray tracing, a computational activity without equal, one that can calculate forever, as long as light rays can bounce off surfaces?
Onshape needed to catch up to archrival, Autodesk’s Fusion 360, which has had rendering built in for years. Autodesk had the advantage: a long and fabled history in producing photorealistic imagery, both for film (with Academy Award winning 3ds Max) and still images with Alias and VRED.
Onshape was faced with a decision to build in rendering, create a million lines of code, or punt: by working with a third party that was already cloud based and used to rendering product images.
For two years, Onshape has been partnering with Migenius to render images. Then, without so much as an announcement, PTC (which now owns Onshape) acquired the Melbourne, Australia-based Migenius.
About Migenius
Paul Arden cofounded Migenius in 2010. The company is based near Melbourne, Australia. Arden was CEO when PTC acquired his company early in 2021. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Migenius was one of the first companies to take advantage of the Mental Image’s iRay cloud-based rendering technology RealityServer, according to GraphicSpeak.
“Mental Images, maker of Mental Images, was at one time the leading provider of rendering software for content creation and CAD and provided Autodesk rendering technology for several years,” said Kathleen Maher, editor of GraphicSpeak, in a recent article in which she broke the story of the Migenius acquisition. “Migenius took over the packaging and sales for RealityServer in 2011 and started selling rendering by the hour,” noted Maher.
RealityServer is used by consumer applications (like shopping services) and was used to render SketchUp with a separate division of Migenius. The Bloom Unit division was acquired by SketchUp for its own development and Migenius was painfully cut off in 2020.
A shopping service can render a product with a shopper’s choice of colors or options and zoom, pan and rotate the view, and the image rendered with RealityServer tries to keep up.
It is not known whether Migenius will be able to retain its relations with other CAD companies (Trimble owns SketchUp) after its acquisition by PTC. Also, we don’t know if the consumer business of Migenius will be considered an expansion of or a distraction to PTC’s core business.
RealityServe was the only cloud-based app integrated in Onshape’s growing list of third-party partners. Migenius joins Arena as another purchased capability, bringing PLM to Onshape. PTC also acquired ecadmcad.com in May 2020 to bring EDA data to Onshape, as we learned during Onshape Live 2021, Onshape’s first-ever user conference that recently concluded.
Onshape also lists desktop-based KeyShot on its list of partner applications.
Onshape users were able to use RealityServer for two hours a month at no charge. We expect the number of free hours to increase after the acquisition is completed but will confirm this when that information becomes available.
