Tutorial 6: Advanced Rendering

Objective: Learn how to use different rendering techniques for varying quality/performance trade-offs.

What you’ll learn:

• Rasterization vs Ray Tracing vs Path Tracing

• Configuring render modes in MetaSim

• When to use each rendering technique

Prerequisites: Completed Tutorial 5: Hybrid Simulation

Estimated time: 20 minutes

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MetaSim supports multiple rendering techniques through Isaac Sim’s rendering backend. Choose based on your quality vs performance requirements.

Technique	--render.mode	Quality	Speed	Use Case
Rasterization	rasterization	Good	Fast	Training, real-time
Ray Tracing (RTX Real-Time, legacy)	raytracing	Great	Medium	Validation, demos
Real-Time Path Tracing (RTX Real-Time 2.0)	realtime_pathtracing	Great	Medium	Interactive path-traced rendering (recent Isaac Sim)
Path Tracing (RTX Interactive)	pathtracing	Best	Slow	Final renders, sim2real

realtime_pathtracing selects Isaac Sim’s “RTX - Real-Time 2.0” renderer (/rtx/rendermode=RealTimePathTracing). It is only available on recent Isaac Sim builds; on older builds MetaSim raises an explicit error so you can fall back to raytracing or pathtracing.

Running the Tutorial

python get_started/6_advanced_rendering.py  --render.mode=[rasterization|raytracing|pathtracing|realtime_pathtracing]

you can also render in the headless mode by adding --headless flag. By using this, there will be no window popping up and the rendering will also be faster.

By running the above command, you will simulate a hybrid system and it will automatically record a video. Here we demonstrate how to use one simulator for physics simulation and another simulator for rendering.

Examples

Ray Tracing

python get_started/6_advanced_rendering.py  --render.mode=raytracing

Path Tracing

python get_started/6_advanced_rendering.py  --render.mode=pathtracing

You will get the following images:

Ray Tracing	Path Tracing