Tutorial 1: Introduction to VRED Core

Video Captions: Hello, and welcome to our tutorial series for VRED Core. My name is Christopher, and I'm a software engineer that specializes in 3D graphics and developing plugins and workflows for 3D software.

In this 6 part video series, I will give you an overview of a VRED Core, its main features and how to use and customize them. I will show you how you can configure your VRED Core instance, and how you can customize it to fit your needs. We will implement rendering pipelines to render scenes, convert files to other file formats, and optimize scenes. We will also discuss how you can create your own user interfaces with HTML and the new Web API. And I will give you some guidelines in developing tools with Python.

In this first tutorial, I will start by talking about what VRED Core exactly is, and what its main use cases are. We will also explore the different ways to run VRED Core and how we can load and view scenes.

So what exactly is VRED Core? VRED Core is, to put it simply, like VRED Pro, but without the graphical user interface. It contains the same features like tools for data preparation, cluster rendering, animations, remote collaboration, or web interfaces. It also includes the exact same Python API we know from VRED Pro and can, therefore, be controlled and configured using Python commands that you can remotely send to VRED Core.

VRED Core is suited for you, if you want to work with all the VRED Pro's features, but do not need the graphical user interface to build up and manipulate your scenes. For example, with VRED Core, you can set up dedicated presentation servers that are used to stream VRED scenes to multiple devices, like tablets or smartphones. These servers can be set up, so that you can reach them from everywhere in the world. Or, you set up the system and the local internet exclusively for your company.

You can use VRED Core to set up a rendering pipeline that automatically pulls your scenes from a server and renders them for projection. The same goes for an automated data preparation pipeline that optimizes geometry or applies materials to CAD models. .You also could build a powerful rendering workstation that is exclusively for rendering presentations in real-time with full GI and raytracing.

As we have no user interface and VRED Core just starts as a terminal application, we need some way to interact with our scene. To do this, VRED Core offers the same streaming app that is also included in the normal VRED Pro version. When you want to use the streaming app, on the same machine as the VRED Core installation, this is rather trivial. You just open a web browser and visit the localhost on port 8888.

When connecting from other devices, you have to connect using the IP address. With this address, you can connect from all devices that are on the same network as the VRED Core server. If you're dealing with more complex network systems, I would advise you to talk to your network administrator or contact the Autodesk support on how to achieve this.

When you are connected to VRED, you will see the interface of the streaming app that allows you to navigate the scene, set different settings, and activate variant sets. You can also send Python commands from the terminal. You can change the network settings in VRED Core's Preference Editor that I will talk about in the next video. And, if you want to learn more about the VRED web interface, I can recommend our tutorial video about this topic in our VRED Pro video series.

Our Python scripting video tutorials are, in any case, a good way to learn about the different ways to interact with VRED with Python. Obviously, the most important action in VRED Core is to load different scenes. There are multiple ways to do this. First, you are able to just drag and drop a VRED file onto the VRED Core desktop icon. This will open a new instance and immediately load the scene file you provided. But this, of course, is only an option if you run VRED Core on a desktop machine.

You can also start VRED from the command line and provide the scene location as the first parameter through the application. In this, we'll basically do the same as the drag and drop method and start the scene in VRED.

You can also load scenes using the Python web interfaces that are provided. Usually, there is a web interface open at port 8888 that can be used to send Python commands. First, you can do it manually by opening the default VRED streaming app and enter your Python code into the terminal. But for remote execution of automated pipelines, it might be more useful to send commands to the Python endpoints provided by VRED.

Here is an example of how you can load a new scene on a Linux terminal, using the Core tool. When you want to know more about using the web interface to control your VRED Core instance, you can check the tutorial about building a customized HTML interface that is also part of this video series.

Because VRED Core can be described as a VRED Pro without user interface, it also includes the same features that as the Pro version. So most of the documentation is the same for the Pro and Core versions and can be found online in the Autodesk Knowledge base. There, you will find a basic introduction to VRED Core and most of the things we discussed in this video. There are also some FAQs that might be helpful for you that give you a quick start introduction to get VRED Core running on your system.

There's also the extensive documentation about the Python API, that can be used to remotely load, manipulate, and automate your scenes or data pipelines.

In our tutorial series, Scripting with Python for VRED Pro, we cover all scripting possibilities that you have when using VRED's Python interfaces. I really recommend checking them out when you want to develop your own tools and pipelines.

Autodesk also operates a forum about all the VRED-related topics that has an active and helpful community. If you have any questions about using VRED Core or using the Python API, you can ask them there or use the Search function to look for already answered problems.

The community is very helpful, and the Autodesk staff also oftentimes answers questions directly. Just look out for the questions that are marked with a green checkmark to find the problems that have an exacted solution.

So, this was just a short overview of the VRED Core and its features and where you can find examples, documentation, and tutorials. The next videos in the series will provide even more information about VRED Core, more information about its features, and how we can build our own automation pipelines and a customized streaming app. So, be sure to check them out. Thanks for watching and see you next time.