About Updating Legacy Rendering Objects and Settings

Legacy drawings containing AutoShade content and rendering settings need to be updated to be usable when rendering the model to an image.

Converting Legacy Lights and Materials

Drawings created with AutoCAD 2007-based products and earlier might contain legacy AutoShade information pertaining to lights and materials. The lights and materials used in these older drawings can be converted to work in AutoCAD 2008-based products and later.

When the 3DCONVERSIONMODE system variable is set to a value of 1, lights and materials are automatically converted when opening an older drawing. Lights can also be manually converted using the CONVERTOLDLIGHTS command, while the CONVERTOLDMATERIALS command can be used to manually convert old materials.

Starting with AutoCAD 2016-based products, the rendering engine only supports photometric lighting. Drawings created with AutoCAD 2015-based products and earlier might need to be updated before they will render correctly in the latest release. Photometric lighting can be enabled by setting the LIGHTINGUNITS system variable to a value of 1 or 2. If the LIGHTINGUNITS system variable was set to a value of 0 in an earlier release, you might need to adjust the intensity factor for the user-defined lights placed in a drawing and possibly modify the materials attached to the 3D objects in the model to get the desired lighting effects.

Handling Scene and Camera Blocks

Drawings created with AutoCAD 2007-based products and earlier might contain legacy AutoShade information pertaining to landscape, scene, and camera blocks. Camera blocks should be converted automatically to named views and camera objects. Landscape and scene blocks are not migrated forward to newer releases of the product. Landscape can be added to a model using third-party add-ins, but scene information must be recreated with the available rendering settings and objects.

Managing Legacy Rendering Settings

The settings used by the rendering engine in AutoCAD 2008-based products through AutoCAD 2015-based products were stored as named render presets in a drawing file. A named render preset could then be set current prior to rendering or plotting a model view. Starting with AutoCAD 2016-based products, a new rendering engine was implemented and it requires the use of different render settings; these settings can also be stored in a named render preset. The named render presets from AutoCAD 2015-based products and earlier are maintained for backwards compatibility, but cannot be used with the rendering engine in the latest release.