Render Workbench

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Introduction

The Render Workbench let's you produce high-quality images from FreeCAD models, using open-source external rendering engines.

Barcelona pavilion
Screenshot
Barcelona pavilion
Povray rendering
Barcelona pavilion
Cycles rendering
Asm V4
Screenshot
Asm V4
LuxCore rendering
Asm V4
Ospray rendering
Church of the light
Screenshot
Church of the light
LuxCore rendering
Church of the light
Cycles rendering
Car
Screenshot
Car
Ospray rendering
Car
LuxCore rendering
Brick assembly
Screenshot
Brick assembly
Appleseed rendering
Brick assembly
Luxcore rendering
Villa Savoye
Screenshot
Villa Savoye
Appleseed rendering
Villa Savoye
Cycles rendering

A pure Python workbench, Render is seamlessly integrated in FreeCAD: the whole rendering scene - objects, lighting, materials, camera, etc. - can be described with FreeCAD objects, to be exported to external renderers.

Compared with other approaches based on third-part computer graphics applications, Render aims to:

Avoid the user to learn another 3D/computer graphics software: everything you need to know is in FreeCAD.
Simplify rendering workflow and relieve user from any intermediate file manipulation - like import, export, scene retouching etc.
Make scene configuration persistent and especially prevent rework in an external tool each time the model has been modified.

Supported renderers

At the moment six rendering engines are supported:

LuxCoreRender
Appleseed
Cycles (standalone version)
Pov-Ray
Intel Ospray Studio
Pbrt-v4 (experimental)

Usage

In quick-start mode, after workbench installation has correctly been done, rendering a FreeCAD model is just a 4-step process:

Create a rendering project: Press the button in the toolbar corresponding to your renderer and select a template suitable for your renderer (you may start with a 'studio' flavour, like appleseed_studio_light.appleseed, cycles_studio_light.xml, luxcore_studio_light.cfg, povray_studio_light.pov etc.).
Add views of your objects to your rendering project: Select both the objects and the project, and press the Add view button.
Set your point of view: Navigate in the 3D View to the desired position and switch to perspective mode.
Render: Select your project and press the Render button in toolbar (also available from project's context menu).

And you should get a first rendering of your model.

More instructions can be found in the GitHub repository or the online help.

Features

Features include, but are not limited to:

Lighting: point lights, area lights, sun-sky and preset lighting templates.
Cameras.
Material management (using usual shaders: matte, glossy, glass, principled etc.) including textures.
Batch mode / UI mode.
Denoiser.
Halt condition (sample per pixel).
Meshing control: angular and linear deflections, auto-smoothing.