We’re pleased to announce the release of ProtoTwin Radiant, our native offline rendering application. Radiant makes it effortless to render extremely high-quality videos of your ProtoTwin simulations. We use Radiant internally to render many of our videos and we’re excited to finally offer this powerful tool to our users.
You can download the latest version of Radiant through the account page.
Requirements
Rendering high-quality videos is very GPU-demanding. It is recommended to use a machine with a powerful GPU if you want to render more than a few hundred frames. Long videos may take many hours or days to render.
Workflow
Record Frames
Start by selecting to record your simulation to a sequence of GLTF frames.
Make sure that you choose an appropriate frame rate. If your simulation has fast-moving parts then you may need a higher frame rate in order to capture smooth motion.
Run the simulation and then click the stop button in the bar at the bottom to generate all the GLTF frames and save them locally to your computer.
Render Frames
You can now start Radiant and load the recorded frames. Configure the settings to the left according to your preferences.
You can click the preview button to render a single frame. Once you’re happy with all settings, click the “Render Frames” button to start rendering all the frames.
Export Video
After all the frames have been rendered, you can click the “Export” button to export a video to either the MP4 or WebM format.
Settings
There are a number of settings that can be used to control the quality and appearance of the rendered video.
- Resolution: The resolution for the rendered images. Higher resolutions can capture greater detail, but can take significantly longer to render.
- Denoiser: The denoiser to use after the image has been rendered. The standard denoiser can help to reduce noise. However, if you are rendering with a very low noise threshold and a high number of samples, it may be possible to disable the denoiser.
- Noise Threshold: The threshold used to determine when an area of the image has sufficiently low noise that no more samples are required. Larger values can speed up rendering at the cost of increased noise and reduced quality.
- Max Samples: The maximum number of samples per pixel. Smaller values can speed up rendering at the cost of increased noise and reduced quality.
- Max Bounces: The maximum number of times a light ray can bounce off a surface. Smaller values can speed up rendering at the cost of reduced detail and increased noise on reflective and translucent surfaces.
- Environment Type: The environment lighting to be used. None provides no environment-based lighting and is fast, but offers less interesting reflections. Sky procedurally generates outdoor lighting conditions. HDRI allows you to specify an environment texture, which can provide the most interesting reflection and lighting conditions but can be costly to render.
- Environment Intensity: Allows the amount of light provided by the environment to be increased or decreased.
- Environment Visible: Whether the environment sky or HDRI texture should be visible in the rendered image. If disabled, the background will be transparent or replaced with the specified background color when exporting to MP4.
- Bloom Enabled: Enables a bloom filter, causing light/bright areas of the image to glow.
- Bloom Threshold: Used to determine how light/bright a pixel must be for it to contribute to the bloom filter.
- Bloom Strength: Controls the strength of the bloom filter. Larger values will cause the glow to be more intense.
- Video Format: The format to use when exporting the video. MP4 has excellent compatibility, but does not support transparency. WebM is a modern format for the web with good browser compatibility and supports transparency.
- Video Background: The background color which is used to replace transparent pixels when exporting to MP4.