Part 3: Variant Sets and Interactions

Video captions: Hello and welcome to the third part of our tutorial series, Introduction to Real time and VR for Autodesk VRED Professional. We hope we could give you an overview of the basics but also optimizations of your scene in the previous parts. If you have any questions, just post a comment. A good place for questions, general exchange and feature requests is also, as already mentioned, the VRED forum at autodesk.com!

Today we will focus on another important topic where VRED can show its power, namely the different possibilities to visualize and control variants. Under this term we will deal with all interactions that can be stored and configured in the file, like color or geometry variants. And of course, the configuration of these via the Variant Sets. In the next part of this tutorial series, we will also look at functions and tools that can be used entirely on the model, such as touch sensors or the measurement tools.

But first, let's take a look at today's file! After spending a lot of time at the harbor last time, today we are in a design studio, which is very well suited to demonstrate a lot in the topic of variants and variant sets.

Similar to the harbor, we have worked out different lighting situations in this environment. However, not only the light changes, but also a lot of geometry. So, on the one hand we have a dark studio with curtains, darkened windows and a lot of ceiling lights to create nice highlights on the model. On the other hand, we have a design variant with turntables, presentation areas that can be configured and a gallery to view the top of the model. Lastly, we have another variant, the presentation room with barriers, wood panels, exposed concrete and a large ceiling panel for soft light.

What all three rooms share is the Studio_Base node, which is currently being drawed in the wireframe mode. All other assets, like presentation areas, curtains, floor variations and so on, were added modularly and stored in geometry switches. The same applies to the completely different lighting situations, which are also stored as Geometry Switches and change with the selected room concept.

But one step at a time - the three presented room concepts are each a combination of different geometry and material switches but also cameras and even independent render settings. By the way, the use of non-global render settings can be helpful in many areas - for example, you can create different settings for exterior still frames than for interior still frames - but you can also simply switch between ray tracing, OpenGL, different real-time antialiasing settings or even downscaling in presentation mode.

But now let's take a quick look at a geometry switch in the Scenetree. You can identify a switch by this symbol with the three small packages. Shortly said it is a group, whereby default only one child node can be active at a time. Think of a light switch for example. If you want to show all child nodes at the same time, you have to select the switch and enter the number of child nodes via Scene > Node Editor under Switch > Choice.

For example, under the node, Switch_Floor, there are three variants, which can be shown and hidden individually. Likewise, details such as these guides or letters can be selectively activated or deactivated. By integrating these geometry switches, which are nothing more than geometry variants, it is very easy to create larger logics in VRED, such as the room concepts presented here. But also, in general it is helpful to create variants not only in the Scenetree but also as an independent Variant Set. On the one hand, you can easily assign hotkeys for different variants under General, which is a very practical function especially for presentations! On the other hand, your Variant Sets also appear in the VR menu or the streaming app - provided you leave the corresponding function activated!

Now that we are already in the Variant Sets, it is one of the most helpful and important modules in VRED. So, let’s have a look at the most important tabs step by step and check what you can do with them!

First General: As already discussed, you can assign hotkeys here - either a single key, like in my case the keys 1-3, for switching through the three-room concepts, or a combination of two keys. Please make sure to avoid double assignments: You can find the already assigned shortcuts under View > Show Shortcuts. You can also create screenshots of the respective variants and store them locally - I think that's self-explanatory. By the way, a short hint about screenshots. With the key combination CTRL+P you can quickly and easily make a screenshot of your viewport. The screenshot will be saved under C:/vred-snapshots for you! You can also change the display mode of the variant sets to show pictures instead of the list view - I prefer the list view.

And because we’re talking about tricks during presentations, you can activate the presentation mode with this icon and deactivate all hotkeys at the same time, except the ones you defined in the Variant Sets!

Next, we jump to the Geometry tab. As you probably already guessed, you can simply drag and drop your geometry switches here and assign a corresponding status. Either you define a special child node, or you let the switch loop. It's best to test the principle - it's really easy to understand. By the way, you can also place simple geometry nodes in the variant sets and switch them visible and invisible via Enable/Disable! In summary, here you can see a combination of all our assets and architectural elements that together define our studio.

The next tab is for storing transform variations. For example, a transform variation can be a different position of the car - right now it is at the Zero-point and aligned along the X-axis. But with a transform variant we can simply define another position here without having to duplicate the geometry or even create an animation. To do this, simply open the Transform module and activate the Transform Variants under Window. Now we can simply define the origin point as the default position, but we can also easily create another variant and assign it to the car. This variant can be dragged and dropped into a variant set.

Similar to the tab, Geometry, it behaves with the materials! We can simply drag material switches into our variant set and then define a state. We can also drop our Environment material here to trigger different HDRIs!

Next, we come to the light - if you have for example different perspectives of a vehicle and you want to illuminate them individually with additional light sources, you can store them here and activate or deactivate them. Keyword perspective: Under the tab, View, you can store the corresponding viewpoint!

So, you can define, configure and combine almost everything in Variant Sets! Light, viewpoints and sceneplates make a particularly powerful combination. Via Scene > Sceneplate Editor you can also create switches of backplates and frontplates, just like with the materials and geometries! In the Variant Sets you can create completely different image configurations from these building blocks - and all that in one file.

To round things up we continue with animations: These can also be stored from the Clipmaker in our Variant Sets. You can also play animations simply via a hotkey or use touch sensors to open a door directly on the vehicle, for example! We will also take a look at the workflow for this! By the way: It's always a good idea to browse through the Example Files. On the one hand you can find a complete vehicle model with animations, variants and touch sensors, on the other hand you can find several script examples that can support you in your work! You can easily view the example files via File > Open Examples.

Behind the next tab called Analyzer, you will find the Clipping Tool, which you can also find under Interactions > Clipping. The biggest advantage of this is that it allows you to call up the clipping tool during presentations, but also to display prepared clipping plans. Of course, this could be done with a few lines of code, but with the Analyzer it is easy and visually simple to set up.

While we are on the subject of scripting, under the Script tab you can store complex codes as well as short, one-line commands. This gives you an extremely powerful interface to execute scripts through which you can access almost the complete range of functions and settings that are also stored in the VRED interface. In the example of our studio the Script Tab was used to control different render settings via the variants. But you can also actively control geometry nodes, like here to randomly enable or disable the curtains. I encourage you to check out the Scripting for VRED tutorial series by my colleague Christopher Gebhardt. You can find it on the VRED PRO Channel on YouTube.

If you have any questions or remarks, please write them as a comment! We thank you again for your attention, hope you enjoyed it and see you next time!