Hello folks!

I started to work in the rendering department of an industrial design office early this year. Since I get a lot of solid works and alias models consisting of pure chaotic arrangements of trimmed nurbs surfaces (tens and hundreds of thousands, and in the best case they are at least grouped) I need to figure out a more efficient way how to treat and process that data until render time. the biggest problem of all are the randomly flipped (normals) patches resulting from applied boolean operations in the construction software from clients.

usually by turning on "doublesided" in the surfaces' renderstats there shouldn´t be any problem when rendering. but I extensively use mental ray + FG + HDRI + mia_material + passes and it seems that those flipped surfaces render with no reflections, dark or whatever, in any case they render wrong. so I end up alot flipping surface directions, convert to polygons etc.

has anyone of you experience with construction data and how to not waste a lot of time with the model until it can finally be rendered?

_falott