Solidworks Photoview 360 Best Settings

[Emir Ballard]

Thisis a guest post from GrabCAD superstar JE Paz. He's been sharing his models and renderings with others since first joining the Community in 2011. Now, he shares with us what he's learned to help improve your PhotoView 360 Rendering Skills. Take it away JE!

First of all we need to do a little setup, once you have an open part or assembly document go to the OPTIONS button, choose the DOCUMENT PROPERTIES Tab, and finally select IMAGE QUALITY. You will see this screen. By selecting a high draft quality you will get smoother curves in the model, as well as in your rendering.

Another important feature is choosing the right materials. The best approach to doing this is capturing the lighting in what you are rendering. Sounds odd, but remember, plastic does not always look like plastic. The color red to many people looks more like brown. It all depends on the lighting you want to show the rendering in.

For example, in the previous rendering, I knew the tires are rubber, the wheels are made of plastic (low gloss) and the nut is anodized aluminum. Those Appearances exist in SolidWorks, but sometimes the look and the color will need adjustments depending on the lighting you are using.

As you see here, a Part or Assembly Apperance is selected from the SolidWorks Taskbar. You can select a face, feature, body, part, or assembly and then add an Appearance or you can drag and drop an Appearance from the Taskbar onto a part. This applies the Appearance to the entire part.

Once you are comfortable with the chosen Appearance, we need to move on to the Scene, which adds an Environment and Background to your rendering. The scenes I recommend are Black with fill Lights, Grey with Overhead Lights, and Soft Spotlight. Each of these Scenes has its own Environment and Background.

Notice how the Background and shadows change? You need to compare which Scene best accentuates the model, the composition and the lighting. Are you beginning to see the aspects that go into producing an amazing rendering? Excellent!

Another interesting feature comes in the Advanced tab inside the Edit Scene Dialog, here you can add a little more adjustment to the Scene, setting the Environment size and orientation. All of these setting, however, will not be seen in the SolidWorks window. To see adjustment to the floor, the floor size and rotation and the illumination, you will need to bring up the PV360 Preview Window or use the Integrated Preview. Both of the options can be toggled on and off from the Render Tools tab or the PhotoView 360 menu.

You have the option in SolidWorks to adjust or create a Camera to change Target Point, Camera position and rotation, as well as your field of view. This is also done in the DisplayManager tab on the left sidebar. However, one quick way to add realism to your image is to simply enable Perspective and Shadows. To do this, go to the Heads-up Display (the toolbar at the top of the screen), and on the View Setting tab, select both Shadows in Shaded Mode and Perspective.

Under Output Image Settings you can select an image size for the final render (the higher resolution the longer the Rendering process will take!) as well as the image format and default location for saving them.

The other settings below these, like Bloom, Contour rendering and Direct Caustics are additional effects you can add to the final rendering, but are not enabled by default. Bloom ads glow around emmisive materials, Contour adds a line around your edges, and Caustics adjust the reflections of spot or point lights. Little effects that can really add spectacle to your image depending on what you've selected for Appearance and your Scene.

All of this goes hand-in-hand to help you get a sense of all the adjustments you made above to see if the outcome is what you desire. You'll find that you'll be making a lot of little adjustments, tweaking the view to get the angle just right. It's part of the creative process and is how you'll become faster and better at creating drop-dead gorgeous 3D images. Until next time!

The last few days I have considered what Industrial Designers really need when it comes to a rendering program. Just recently on Embody 3D we did a poll surveying the most popular CAD programs used in industry, and a large portion of voters cast their ballot for Solidworks. So I thought I would find the best rendering package for Solidworks on the market today.

I tested out the main 4 programs that work seamlessly with Solidworks. Two that will immediately spring to mind include Photoworks and Photoview 360, however I was able to get my hands on a pre-release of Keyshot (formerly known as Bunkspeed Hypershot) as well as the established premium program Maxwell Render. I grabbed a chassis of a motorbike from 3D Content Central and applied some different metal and plastic materials to the model. I rendered the images using a Mac Pro with 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 10GB of DDR2 Memory and a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB Graphics Card.

Please note that the above results are a qualitative not quantitative indicator of the programs performance. If one was to value one aspect, for example, final render quality in high esteem that particular user might take favour in one program over another.

Render completed in 4:30. The render was clean and reflected the original render preview I was given. Some of the metal materials appeared a little plastic-like in appearance and other metals rendered a little rubber-like, but overall the render quality was excellent. Scene setup and tweaking was approximately 3 minutes.

Applying materials to whole parts or bodies is easy, but when you need to put a material on a part that is inside something (like a display cabinet) it becomes very tricky as one has to hide and unhide parts to get inside it. There desperately needs to be a list view of all the parts and bodies (like in Solidworks) and you should be able to drag and drop materials onto them accordingly rather than having to drag and drop materials onto the model itself.

The render engine is smart but not smart enough, if your model happens to take up 90% of the screen it will take the same amount of time to render this image as it would to render the same model if took up 10% of the screen. Keyshot is a lot better at allocating processor resources to the areas of the render that require it rather than spending time on the consistent background colours and environments.

Render completed in 6:21. The render was clean and was extremely close to the original render preview I was given. The render quality is superb and without a doubt was the best render out of all the tested software. Scene setup and tweaking was approximately 2 minutes.

Keyshot renders have a variable render time, that is, if your model takes up a small part of the scene it will consequently only take a small amount of time to complete the render. Backgrounds render almost immediately which makes sense!

The preview quality is exceptional, it far exceeds all other packages in not only quality but also in how close it matches the final render. The preview quality of the renders are so good I kid you not that it is sometimes best to not even press render and just click the quick screen grab option that is part of the program! Please click here to see the 1080P preview image captured from the program!

Keyshot wont import decals from Solidworks, however its built-in material editor makes it extremely easy and fast to apply decals onto your model and adjust the alignment perfectly. Photoview 360 and Maxwell could certainly learn a thing or two from this great implementation of decal management.

You actually need to set the curvature quality and anti-alias settings within Solidworks (tools>options) before you import your model into Keyshot. If you leave your model on the default curvature settings, your circles will look like decagons in Keyshot. After the import process it should allow you to tweak the triangulation of the model; this should be an easy future bug fix.

This is not really a negative but sometimes the live preview render was so good that it was almost as good as the finished render. So in that regard it is frustrating having to wait several minutes for a render to complete when the preview render was almost as good. I am still puzzled as to how they were able to make the preview image look so good ? It is puzzling me?

Maxwell Render has some advanced scene properties like ozone, temperature of the sun etc. Tweaking the properties is fault-proof; no matter what setting you have it on it will probably look good (unlike photoworks where small tweaks to numbers can dramatically enhance or destroy your final image). Maxwell Render also allows you to adjust the lighting of a render while the image is actually getting rendered!

The material editor is fantastic in its mission but for more amateur users the settings are quite confusing as materials are built on several layers and the naming conventions would baffle a novice user.

Whilst rendering Solidworks becomes extremely unstable and the rendering process is highly susceptible to crashing if a user is too ambitious in his/her render settings. RAM Memory timeouts are commonplace so it is essential to save your work before clicking render, especially when on a slow computer.

Thanks for visiting Embody 3D and for your question. The size of the original rendered pictures was 1600 x 1000px, and all the rendering times are under each of the headings above. But I must stress that is extremely difficult to compare render times between my computer and yours even though we both have Mac Pros. There are so many factors including:

PhotoView 360 uses CPU resource however SOLIDWORKS does require GPU to display the model in the graphics area. When you fire a render the model data is first transferred from SOLIDWORKS to PhotoView 360. Once PhotoView 360 process begins it then uses the CPU resource.

When working with any rendering application we usually tweak the settings to get the final output as required. This article will help you to briefly understand some commands and settings that will be helpful while rendering.

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