Semi Render

[NormandC]

I model my parts and if i want presentation i have to get some nice images and ideal solution would be opening up Raytracing Workbench and easily apply some materials/colors and click on the button for Render and save the image.

This is EXACTLY what Luke is aiming for. The rest is semantics. Yet you still tell me

Not true. That topic is trying to solve different thing.

Just a reminder: you and I do not "solve things" in FreeCAD. Programmers like Luke do.

[triplus]

This is EXACTLY what Luke is aiming for. The rest is semantics. Yet you still tell me

Not true. What i was after and i am not anymore because for beginning i am not willing to spent my time dealing with you has nothing to do with rendering module from that topic. It was about taking what is already built in FreeCAD and put it together in a way one click on button gives you image of what you already see on the display with some more "preset bling".

Didn't you see the word "SEMI" in the title? No additional rendering engines or stuff like that. Just some usage of lightning, colors and maybe color algorithm applied on part that you already see on screen when you model parts and taking screenshot of that. That's all and it has nothing to do with "photo realism" or rendering beyond what u already see on the screen + "some bling". But in return it probably could work fine in FreeCAD ATM and i do believe a lot of (novice and expert too) users would use it for creating images for presentation on-the-fly.

Just a reminder: you and I do not "solve things" in FreeCAD. Programmers like Luke do.

I agree 100% you should remind yourself more often this ideas are not meant for you. They are for programmers like Luke! But true i agree forget about this idea you made it go away before you understood it and i don't care to be honest if you understand it and from my point of view i do this (partially) manually right now and other users well are on their own and i guess render module will over time give users something that will (partially) replace what i suggested here.

That said i enjoy using FreeCAD and i don't enjoy using FreeCAD forums to be honest and so I'll just leave it at that!

[jriegel]

Hi triplus,
did you know about that?:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ ... ScreenShot

I think with some additional python magic it can do what you want...

[NormandC]

triplus said this screenshot utility was crashing FreeCAD at least half the time. When I said he should report it, he declined.

[jriegel]

Mhh,
the Screenshot utility uses the OpenGL Offscreen renderer. This is a special feature of OpenGL to render to a memory buffer instead to the frame-buffer.
Some weak Gl implementation have problems with that. So problems with screenshot means most likely bad drivers!

[triplus]

Yes one PC uses Ubuntu + proprietary driver. I did get result there but it was not the same as seen on the screen (different projection) and crash happened on that PC. On other PC i use environment variables:

COIN_GLXGLUE_NO_PBUFFERS=1
COIN_GLXGLUE_NO_GLX13_PBUFFERS=1
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

If i don't then i don't get file thumbnail generated and performance in sketcher is low. I talked about this in some other topics and basically on this PC by default i don't get nothing if i use built in snapshot tool (no output at all if i use the tool). If i use environment variables i do get output but with some artifacts (not the same as seen on the screen) and this is especially true if i use transparent option for part and that is not an option.

I could file bugs but it won't matter much it's probably as you mentioned driver related and developers of FreeCAD can't do much about it. It will be fixed when drivers are fixed and FreeCAD will work just fine without environment variables enabled and this work great as workaround:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2977&sid=461c334c78 ... c3e#p23095

P.S. I just wanted to explain this a bit further because you jriegel did put some additional thought in it and to say forget about proposal an topic as i did.