Shapr3D Goes All Out for Visualization

Easy to use CAD company pivots to industrial designers with PBR rendering.

The Hungarian answer to both SOLIDWORKS and Onshape in one easy-to-use package just got better looking. Shapr3D announced a photorealistic rendering mode at a virtual event titled Beyond the Curve, for which the company claimed that 7,500 people had registered. If the above picture is worth a thousand words, then we are done here. But if you are from an established CAD company and are looking over your shoulder for emerging threats, like to root for the underdog, or are a CAD user who is curious if Shapr3D has made rendering easy to use, then read on.

István Csanády, founder & CEO, Shapr3D. (Picture courtesy of Shapr3D.)

István Csanády, founder & CEO, Shapr3D. (Picture courtesy of Shapr3D.)

“I’ve been waiting 12 months to tell you about this,” said István Csanády, Shapr3D’s CEO, who somehow is just as excited now as he was when he first showed us Shapr3D back in 2018. Backed by $12 million in investment funding and developers handpicked from all over the world, Csanády is determined that his program—first launched on an iPad—will be the preferred CAD application for the next generation of mechanical designers, engineers and—with the changes we are about to hear of—industrial designers.

We’ve had glimpses of photorealistic visualization on a previous visit to Shapr3D’s Budapest office last year, but now the bugs have been worked out and the 2022 event was the first public showing of Shapr3D’s Visualization.

We were shown an assembly made part by part, using a stylus and a touchscreen, in a manner that is most natural to engineers—like sketching with pencil and paper. Once you see how the process happens with Shapr3D, you will be ruined for coaxing a shape using a mouse and a keyboard. What mechanical CAD (MCAD) users have grown accustomed to will immediately seem old, archaic and unnatural.

Using a stylus and tablet will be old news for Shapr3D users. What’s new to them is that after they have created their shapes, they can apply colors, finishes and materials. The part no longer needs to be drab and gray—the default color scheme in every MCAD program. The modeled parts can look like the real parts simply by dragging colors, finishes and materials from an available selection. You don’t have to send the part to be rendered. The part picks up a realistic appearance in real time with each drag and drop of a visual attribute.

The only way it could be easier would be if you didn’t have to drag and drop at all—if the part acquired all its visual properties upon assignment of a material and the finishes and textures fell to default values. Maybe in the next release?

The Shapr3D models now pop. They look as if they have been rendered with a ray tracing program but that is not the case. Shapr3D uses PBR (physically based rendering; see “The Fine Print” below). More on that later. Shapr3D’s PBR-based visualization will be close enough for most users most of the time. The textures, finishes, anodizing marks and bumps on the leather wristband … they all look quite real. The instantaneous image of PBR rendering will be a most welcome trade-off against ray-traced images that you have to request and wait for—and then squint to tell the difference.

Look Good or Feel Good?

Clearly, Shapr3D has veered toward aesthetics with its new visualization capability. Does the company risk alienating itself from die-hard mechanical designers who have historically dismissed the pursuit of maximum resolution images as merely “pretty pictures?” We think not. Everyone, whether they admit it or not, appreciates realism. Dismissing realistic images was really just sour grapes. We were not dismissing reality as much as we were griping about having to learn the language and tools of rendering and that rendering applications took too long. We did not want to admit that our hardware was inferior to that of gamers, special effects artists and others in less worthy pursuits. Remember, we were the ones who maintained that we were fine with 2D line drawings of the front, top and side views of objects. We upgraded to wireframe images reluctantly and rejoiced at isometric views that magically removed hidden lines from view. Admittedly, we were slow to adopt each step-up in CAD visualization. Meanwhile, the graphics hardware and software industry raced by us. Gamers, with their quest for realism and imagination unrestrained, were battling monsters and villains in scenes that made our dull gray part against blank backgrounds look like kids’ drawings on refrigerators.

We were okay with that. We were doing real-world designs of buildings, airplanes and assemblies with thousands of parts. These were not child’s play. We needed every megahertz to explode the assembly and every megabyte to store our monsters. Drab gray was good enough.

We can’t blame those engineers for downplaying realistic visualization. The ordinary person may judge a product by how good it looks, but for the engineer, beauty is more than skin deep. Engineers would rather have a full modeling toolbox, a robust set of commands and features and bulletproof reliability, and so they’ve written the prerequisites for enterprise modeling software. For the Big Four CAD companies (Autodesk, Dassault SysteÌ€mes, PTC and Siemens), functionality, practicality and reliability all come before artistic graphics.

But with Moore’s Law and the advances in GPUs, computer hardware has excess capacity. It can do it all. Product designs can be good and look good.

Hello, Industrial Designers

A move to a visualization-first MCAD product appears to be geared toward appealing to the industrial designer and the marketing department, both types who value rendered images—and see little value in MCAD’s drab gray shapes.

Targeting groups outside of the heart of a manufacturing company—the engineering and design core—may seem crazy for a design software company.

Crazy like a fox is Shapr3D’s Csanády, who sees more groups outside of the core group of design and engineering groups. That means more customers—and potentially, a first-mover advantage. With the Big Four CAD companies treating visualization as a peripheral function and ease of use a solved problem (as in “CAD software is easy to use if you know how to use it”), what better way to reach these orbiting groups than with a program that is easy to use (like no other), usable on Apple’s computers (the hardware of choice for “creatives”) and tablets but still deals in precise CAD geometry.

Shapr3D visualization in action. (Picture courtesy of Shapr3D.)

The Fine Print

Shapr3D does not use ray tracing to make its rendered images. It uses PBR (as noted earlier).

It may be hard to tell that the image above (produced with Shapr3D PBR renderer) is from a ray-traced image, so for most people, this will seem like a distinction without a difference, but let us explain.

Ray tracing works by calculating how rays of light bounce off and go through and between objects. The image produced by ray tracing gets better as the rays keep bouncing, just as the light bouncing around creates ambient light. The softness produced by ambient light is favored over the harshness of direct lighting, which would be the image created without bouncing. But what nature does imperceptibly at the speed of light can take megaflops of computing cycles on a computer—minutes for a still image or hours or days on a server farm for a movie.

It’s hard for perfection-minded engineers to stop the bouncing rays, as each bounce improves the image. Also, there can be multiple light sources, such as studio lamps for a product shoot or sunlight and indoor lighting in an architectural rendering.

PBR, in comparison, takes some shortcuts. A studio setting is faked. Light sources are limited. The reflections and transparencies are estimated. But as we can see, the estimates are reasonable, the result believable.

The rendering of Shapr3D goes one better than ordinary PBR. Notice the refraction as you look through the glass,” said Csanády. “We’re proud of that one.”

Sure enough, the part of an object seen through the glass is off, just as it would be when looking through actual glass.

What Shapr3D has done with refraction was something only ray tracers could do previously.

Ray tracing purists will point out how reflections don’t show parts accurately and that light sources are stationary or otherwise limited, etc., but for most of the groups that need a rendered image, the Shapr3D rendering may be good enough.

How Does It Work?

“We’re not trying to upstage KeyShot here,” noted Csanády.

But like KeyShot and SOLIDWORKS Visualize, the two most popular rendering applications for mechanical designers and engineers, Shapr3D’s rendering is drag-and-drop easy. You drag from an array of available materials and finishes, all of which are shown on balls, onto the product. The material list is long, including metals, plastics and even a few woods. The patterns can be scaled up and down to fit the product. Changing materials or finishes across the board (such as changing from all steel parts to aluminum) is easy enough.

Making things look easy can require a lot of complexity under the hood, so to speak, or programming genius. We asked about the challenges in implementing rendering. Shapr3D licenses Google’s Filament, the C++ PBR renderer, to save having to reinvent the wheel, but still had to work out the integration on all the OSs it supports. Even for the company’s talented, handpicked developers from all over the world, it still took Shapr3D a year to work out all the kinks.

“Creating a high performance, real-time physically based rendering engine is not for the faint-hearted,” said Csanády.” Especially if you want to directly integrate it with our existing renderer. We wanted to make switching between the two views seamless. If you tap on Visualization, it immediately switches to PBR. Integrating the two renderers was definitely a challenge. So was creating high-quality materials. It took a lot of time and a lot of iterations for every material in the library. We polished the materials. There is a trade-off between performance and quality, and we optimize for both. Our textures and materials are high resolution. [Getting] visualization to work on a mobile device was our main challenge over the last 12 months. And then we had to support three platforms—initially MacBooks and iPads, but in a couple of months, Windows.”