Downscale

Video captions: Hello and welcome to the Autodesk VRED Professional video tutorial series. We will be looking at what possibilities Autodesk VRED has to offer to guarantee an interactive, real-time workflow, even within complex scenes. To explore this, I have set up a test scene, in which I will explain this process to you.

We are using a CAD model that was imported into VRED. As you can see, the Raytracing mode has been activated, meaning that all representations and necessary calculations are being handled by the processor cores of the CPU. The whole data set is sourced to the working memory, RAM, of the computer.

To secure the representation of complex scenes in real-time, it can become a necessity to reduce the display quality. VRED offers you a possibility to do this via the Downscale command, which can be found in the toolbar, below the main menu.

If we now navigate toward this command, and select with our mouse button held down, a sub-menu divided into Low, Medium, and High will expand. These categories describe how much the visual quality will be culled.

With the selection of Low, every second pixel of the viewport rendering will be processed. With Medium, every fourth. And, with High, every eighth. Thus, we have the possibility to individually adjust the visual quality to the scope and complexity of the scene. However, even with the reduced quality, valuable real-time judgement over the material look and feel with lighting is retained.

If you select Medium, respectively, the presentation quality will be culled, securing a smoother navigation and, therefore, a trouble-free workflow.

The Downscale mode is only available and relevant in raytracing, as the reduction of pixel amount in OpenGL has little impact on the performance of the scene, while the performance under raytracing is significantly dependent on the amount of pixels that are to be rendered.