SolidWorks 2011: PhotoView 360

My First PhotoView 360 2011 Rendering

I don’t do a lot of rendering. So when I learned something in PhotoWorks, I tended to remember it and tried to reuse successful ideas. I could never seem to get much traction with PhotoWorks because it seemed they were always gutting either the interface or the underlying rendering engine every couple of releases. There was PhotoWorks, then PhotoWorks R2, and now PhotoView 360. If you just figured out how to use ambient occlusion, well, now you’re back to square one. All of your investment in learning has been flushed. PhotoWorks is no more in SolidWorks 2011.

[removed stuff about ownership of mental ray… it looks like I misunderstood a quote about Autodesk and Mental Images, sorry for the misinformation.]

Further, if you used PhotoView 360 in SolidWorks 2010, it is almost entirely different from PhotoView 360 in SolidWorks 2011. The one arguable advantage is that it is now embedded within SolidWorks. Well… sort of. In Beta 3 you still have to get a registry hack to make the preview window display in SolidWorks. The final render is still done in a separate window.

At this point I have done exactly 1, count ‘em (one), rendering project in PV360. The result, shown above is at least not a complete disaster, but there are some things I was unhappy about. I felt I could never quite get the tires to look like tires, and the overall color seemed a bit dull to me. I don’t like rendering models with mainly flat faces. It is always more difficult to get the lighting just right.  The shadows seem unnecessarily indistinct, probably because the light is so diffuse as to make the rendering look like a very cloudy day. The inability to scale the background I guess was another disappointment. Using PV embedded in SW with a camera was very difficult, I thought, because the screen split several ways and you couldn’t control the view with a spaceball, and the depth of field seemed to have very bad effects on the background. Oh, and the previews for the renderings are SLOW! Dead Slow. Ouch. In order to complete this rendering, I had to enlist the help of the legendary Rob Rodriguez. He has a video on his site that goes through some of the what’s new, plus, I gave him a call to get the real deal on a few items that were evading me.

There were also some things that were pleasant surprises. The one thing that I like about the new version is that you seem to have better control over the lighting. Also, setting up the headlights on the truck was far easier than I expected it to be.  Anyway, we’re here to see what’s new. Let’s take a look.

So, what’s new? You could make an argument that PhotoView is the biggest single change in SolidWorks 2011. If you are reading the forums, you know that the jury is far from out as to if it is any improvement at all over PhotoWorks or even PV360 2010.

For all of the disaster that current “appearances” implementation is, the Display Manager (shown to the left) is a useful tool makes some sense of it all. Rob Rodriguez says that the Display Manager is like a combination of the Display Pane (flyout from the side of the Feature Manager) and the 2010 Render Manager. You can sort the appearances by history, alphabetical or hierarchical. So far Hierarchical helps me understand overrides, when a part color is overridden by a face color, or something like that. Marlon Banta helps with a hierarchy mantra:

• default
• part
• body
• feature
• face
• component
• assembly

Read the above list with the words “…appearance, which is overridden by…” after each line. So the Default appearance is overridden by the Part appearance, which is overridden by the Body appearance, which is overridden by the Feature appearance, which is overridden by the Face appearance, which is overridden by the Component appearance, which is overridden by the Assembly appearance. Words to live by.

Applying appearances in PV360 2011 is easier than 2010. In 2010 you had the non-standard modo interface, which was not really meant for SolidWorks models, and if you had a lot of individual faces or features or bodies to apply an appearance to, it could take some time. So the integration into the SolidWorks interface is a big positive step.

The Display Manager helps you delete appearances, and even apply an existing or modified appearance to additional parts/features/faces/etc. It will also show you decals (which now work in base SolidWorks, no rendering software required), and the lights, cameras, and scenes have been moved here from the Feature Manager. Some functionality I wish existed in the DM would be to allow the user to drag the items under one appearance to another appearance. For example, the Polished Steel has a part under it. I would like to be able to drag that part from under the Polished Steel to the Aluminum Powdercoat to change its appearance.

Most of the rest of the interface has been moved into PropertyManager windows. This is a big improvement over PV360 2010 because of the non-standard modo interface. This change at least sets it all up in a familiar format.

Anyway, the original PV360 was easy to use, and had adistinctive look. It was also pretty limited. This version is somewhat less limited, I think, but it is still lacking. PhotoWorks was difficult to use, but if you used it a lot, you could learn what you needed to know through trial and error (and Rob Rodriguez’s website). The original PV360 was really easy to use, but that may have been because it didn’t allow much adjustment.

The good part about this is that it can only improve from here. The bad part is that that we have to go through the growing pains of learning all of those lessons over again, with different software, possibly with different people driving the decisions at SW Corp. Learning and relearning seems to be the way of things with rendering in SolidWorks. If the target would just stop moving around so much, maybe I could learn a bit about rendering.