Notes Design

PhotoView 360: Quick Rendering for SolidWorks Models from Solidsmack on Vimeo.
SolidWorks has just released the beta code for their new rendering tool. Josh over at SolidSmack has a good guide to what it can do and the video above shows his first attempts with the system. Essentially, PhotoView 360 is based on Luxology's Nexus real-time rendering engine and provides SolidWorks users with a very slick workflow for creating renders that look pretty cool for a first pass attempt. Research I did last year showed that there's a huge bottleneck with most rendering tools, relating to all those favourites of scene, material/texture and lighting set-up. PhotoView 360 strips out the RealView graphics from SolidWorks models and uses them as the basis for rendering - the Appearance settings are also matched, so the scene and lighting set-up is eased. you load the model (into a standalone app), change materials if you need to and the system streams the image in. Materials are linked, so you if you edit them in PhotoView, they can transfer back to SolidWorks to maintain the same look and feel. For those with HyperShot experience, the workflow is similar, but it, as yet, doesn't have depth of field and all those little tricks that HyperShot has.