Last week I returned from my trip to Memphis (thanks, Andy! Hope Meara’s potty training is going well!) and I’ve been playing catchup ever since. I’m getting back into Fusion 360 with some more challenging projects. This week we covered how to use joints in assemblies. This is pretty wild stuff. You can download models from GrabCAD.com and upload them Fusion 360. It auto-magically converts models to work natively (with mixed results) in the work space. From there, you can define joints and move parts in real time! We did this in class using an industrial robot model. Of course, this meant the robots needed to fight…
Four robots go in, four robots come out. Because they are metal, and very strong, and even knives won’t kill them!!
This wasn’t the actual assignment. Instead we needed to create a render scene involving an earlier model from this class being assembled by robots. I was grinding away at this all day yesterday, and finally got around to rendering it. Because of the complexity of the scene, it’s taking quite some time to bake in all of those rays at HD+ resolution. Here’s the object being assembled for reference:
This is based on an existing design from a vinyl shelf I bought to keep my Laserdisc collection in prime display condition. I fantasized about having an actual product made for Laserdisc, and what that might look like. You gotta with red trim right? Because LASERS!!
Here’s a technical drawing, if you want to build your own. This will probably hold about 250 titles, based on my experience with my current shelf ( tweaked the dimensions to give it a bit more depth and room to breathe between stacks.
i’ve been taking this class as an opportunity to not only learn the software, but also to push the limits of what the software can do. For me, this practice is like cartography. I’m mapping the borders by extending to the edge in all things. With this project, I wanted to not only torture test the rendering pipeline, but also test the limits of my beefy Hackintosh. As noted previously, my CPU appears to be the main bottleneck. But I wanted to see what it takes to exceed memory requirements. For this design and ray tracing session I’m utilizing ~25 GB of memory, and cooking my poor little quad-core Haswell® chip.
Nothing cooks like CAD! Note that the temperatures reflect a system with AIO liquid cooled CPU, and nine total fans, packed into an old PowerMac G4 case. Even when protein folding on both GPU and CPU, the system usually has a CPU core temperature ceiling of about 70˚ C.
It’s been over four hours as of writing this, and the rendering has not yet reached “final” quality. Scene complexity is a huge factor in rendering time.