FreeCAD Render Workbench

A FreeCAD workbench to produce high-quality rendered images from your FreeCAD document, using open-source external rendering engines.

Introduction

The Render Workbench is a replacement for the built-in Raytracing Workbench of FreeCAD. It is based on the same philosophy, but aims to improve certain aspects of Raytracing:

The Render Workbench is written fully in Python, which should make it much easier to understand and extend by non-C++ programmers.
Exporters to rendering engines are implemented as plugins, which should facilitate the addition of new engines. The Render Workbench already supports several more renderers than Raytracing Workbench, like Appleseed, LuxCoreRender and Cycles.
The Render Workbench provides enhanced features, compared to Raytracing: scene lighting, camera enhanced control, material support etc.

Supported rendering engines

At the moment, the following rendering engines are supported:

Pov-Ray
LuxCoreRender
Appleseed
Blender Cycles
Intel Ospray Studio
Pbrt v4 (experimental)
LuxRender (deprecated in favor of LuxCoreRender)

Installation

The Render Workbench is part of the FreeCAD Addons repository, and thus can be installed from menu Tools > Addon Manager in FreeCAD. This is the recommended installation method.
However, alternatively, it can also be installed manually by downloading this repository using the "clone or download" button above. Refer to FreeCAD documentation to learn more.

In addition to workbench installation, you will also need to install and set up one or more external render engines, among the supported ones.

Usage

In quick-start mode, after installation has correctly be done, rendering a FreeCAD model is just a 4-steps process:

Create a rendering project: Press the button in the toolbar corresponding to your renderer and select a template suitable for your renderer
(you may start with a 'standard' flavour, like appleseed_standard.appleseed, cycles_standard.xml, luxcore_standard.cfg or povray_standard.pov)
Add views of your objects to your rendering project: Select both the objects and the project, and press the 'Add view' button
Set your point of view: Navigate in FreeCAD 3D View to the desired position and switch to Perspective mode.
Render: Select your project and press the 'Render' button in toolbar (also available in project's context menu).