Photoview 2011: Take 1

My first experience with PV360 was the dump truck, and the resulting image wasn’t very satisfying. Now a few months later I’m trying it again, and I find myself learning rendering all over again. I’ve been usingSolidWorks since 1997, and I’m still a noobie when it comes to rendering. That’s not completely because I don’t do a lot of rendering, it’s mostly because the tool doesn’t stand still long enough for me to get any traction on it. It would be ok if the tool were constantly improving, but I don’t think I can make images that are any better now than I could have a few years ago. HDRI lighting does help get smoother lights and shadows, but that’s about the only thing I can point to that has materially improved for the kind of rendering I do. I want to learn this. I feel like I need to, and I feel like I’m starting from scratch.

Today I’m working on a rendering of a mountain bike rear derailleur. Here’s a realview screen capture above to the right. This is another model for the 2011 Assemblies bible. It’s a nice bit of mechanical engineering where engineering meets nice shapes and metallic finishes. Great stuff for modeling, mechanical design and rendering. It’s missing a couple of adjustment screws, the springs, and the cable stop and clamp. The rendering to the left looks like crap, I think.

My usual workflow with rendering in PhotoWorks was to render it in the SW window, and then do a screen capture, unless I needed something hi-res, which wasn’t often. This worked ok for me, and it was fast, and it worked wysiwyg. If I needed a transparent background, I would use IrfanView or Gimp to do it.

Each attempt is getting slightly better, but the part doesn’t look to be lit intentionally. It looks like I just accepted whatever light accidentally fell on it, which isn’t far from the truth.

In PV, that workflow isn’t working for me. I find the scene business distracting in my SolidWorksmodels, so I use the setting to override scenes with a plain background color. Of course when you’re trying to use HDRI backgrounds to light a rendering, you’ve got to use the scene.

My gut reaction is to rant against this stuff, because it is so frustrating to have usedSolidWorks for so long, and still have no idea how to get a rendering to work the way I want it to. I thought PV was supposed to be like point-and-shoot rendering. I guess I’m wrong again. If I stick with it a while I’ll probably learn a few things, and find that some of my difficulty is user error, some is software that maybe isn’t exactly as straight forward as it should be, and the rest is probably bugs.

The first thing I’ve learned is that if you have lights showing, the preview window and rendering windows zoom way out and you can’t get it to render the part the size you want. It gives you an image the size you ask for, but your part is a tiny dot in the middle of it. Turn off the display of the lights, and it works the way you expect it to.

Next, I can’t get it to render and save with a background color. So far, all my attempts are giving me the transparent background, which displays as black. Sometimes I want that, but not now. I just want a picture. This seems to be fixed by using the Save Layered Image button in the Final Render window, but it also gives some other stuff I don’t want or need.

Here’s a capture of the thumbnail images I get in Windows Explorer when I use the Save Layered Image setting in the Final Render window. I get what appears to be a mask, and then half of the image I really wanted. The final color output file is actually what I’m looking for. When I open the Final Color image, it is correct, but the thumbnail is definitely wrong.

Plus, I want it to render in the SW window. I selected the option for SolidWorks Window, but I guess I haven’t found the magic word yet. I get the SW window, a preview window, and then another window where it does the rendering. So instead of 1 window, I have 3. And even though I have 3 windows, I still can’t use the SW window while the PV window is rendering.

I’ll keep plugging away at it, and if anyone has any suggestions about how to improve my renderings, I’d love to hear. Maybe we ought to do a rendering contest here again. We haven’t done one of those for a while.