SolidWorks 2008: RealView

I’m getting the controversial stuff out of the way first. The interface is going to be very controversial, especially as the software rolls into the general SW using public.    Somewhat less controversial will be the new incarnation of RealView, and how it has been applied to scenes and materials. One thing that is not controversial is the fact that the graphics really are gorgeous. An option to do anti-aliasing on things other than edges and sketches would be a welcome addition, but would certainly be another performance hog. The bad news about the new RealView functionality is that it is highly reliant on new hardware technology. If you have video cards that are more than about a year old, your cards are probably on the “works but not recommended” list. What this means is that your video performance may be choppy if you try to use the cool new features. The cards I have are both nVidias, one in a laptop, FX Go 1400, and one in a desktop, FX 3450, and they are both a bit choppy in RealView mode with reflections and shadows. For most of us, that makes up our mind for us, “Ok, so I just won’t use the cool new features”. But you will. You know you will. You will have to just try them out because they are so damn sexy. You’ll probably turn them off as soon as someone else comes in your office, but you’re gonna try it, so just go ahead and get it out of your system.Background and Scene Settings

The first thing to say is that some of this has changed through the beta versions, so if you saw an early beta, things are a little different. At first, the System Options settings for Background Color had been removed. I panicked when I saw this. This was a worse disaster than the interface changes. I don’t know if it was a mistake or just a test or what, but in Beta 2 the System Options for Background Color were added back in. This is important to me when creating images for documentation and you want to make the background of an image transparent, I usually make it some obnoxious yellow, and it can easily be removed from the image. Anyway, the settings are shown to the left, from Tools, Options, Color.

The one thing that should stand out immediately here is that you can now use a document based scene instead of the system based background. This is what is new about the background. This means that your template files will now have a scene saved in them. There are 3 different kinds of scenes, and the way the scenes react is dependent upon two settings: the Use Document Scene Background setting shown above, and the RealView Graphics setting toggle. If you don’t have a recommended graphics card, the RealView setting in combination with a reflective scene will cause choppy performance.

The 3 kinds of scenes are:

– Basic Scenes: static background image. These have names like “Warm Kitchen”, “Courtyard”, “Factory”. It isn’t obvious how the name relates to the image. This is equivalent to the existing, but little known functionality in SW07 called Select Color Scheme, although in SW07 it is a System Option rather than Document Option.
– Studio Scenes: a reflective floor image that rotates with the model and appears to find the “bottom” of the part much better than Photoworks floors
– Presentation Scenes: a reflective 360 degree wrap around image that rotates with the model, almost as if the part is floating in space and you are walking around it, seeing the room from different angles as you walk around the part

Personally, of the three I prefer the Studio Scenes because they are simpler and somewhat more convincing. The basic scenes are pretty much just gradient images, and the Presentation Scenes seem a bit creepy. Still, if you are working on anything that taxes your system at all, you are going to want to turn off the document scene and use the plain or gradient backgrounds, especially if you don’t have a recommended card.

Scenes are found in the Task Pane, on the RealView tab, and can be applied by dragging the scene into the graphics window. Once a scene has been applied you can access it and edit it in the “Lights, Cameras and Scene” folder in the FeatureManager.

You may remember that SW has long had the capability to put images in the background, but until these changes, that has always been a system option, not a document option, and those images have always been static, the did not rotate with the part.

Another change in SW08 is that RealView materials are now called “Appearances”. Whatever. Seems like an awkward name, but it was probably done to avoid confusing RealView materials with the physical materials applied for mass props and FEA properties. Appearances can also be accessed from the RealView tab of the Task Pane and dragged onto the model.

So RealView does a couple of things for you. It gives you reflective materials (appearances), and a reflective background with shadows. I see the wheels turning already. Reflections, shadows, what else do you use PhotoWorks for? RealView may be ok for a quick and dirty rendering wanna-be screen shot, but it will not take the place of a real rendering. The reason for this is that RealView cannot give high quality soft shadows, nor can it do anti-aliasing, global illumination effects or depth of field effects from using a camera. If you can live without these, you may be able to live without PhotoWorks.

Summary: This is cool stuff, but if you never use PhotoWorks and don’t have an up-to-date graphics card, then this may not make any difference to you whatsoever. On the other hand, folks who care more about appearance than performance may enjoy working like this all the time. Sexy? Yes. Useful? Possibly.