[mark_melvin]

Hi Everyone,

I've been doing a lot of rendering over the last couple days and my workflow is to basically export my model from SW, and use Studio to set up materials, sky, etc. I am getting very good results, but I am finding that the lighting is inconsistent, and the direction of the sun appears to be inconsistent, even though the orientation of all of my models seem to be the same. I had a few questions about how the translation into Studio works.

First of all, how does it determine the direction of the sun in the sky? If I always use the same geographical location (New York), and my models are all in the same orientation, the sun does not appear to be consistent.

Second, how do lights work? My well-lighted model appears to have two directional lights in it inside Solidworks, but I can't see anything representing them in Maxwell so I assume they are not translated over. However, all of my other models with only one directional light in Solidworks appear to come into Maxwell darker and with more shadows. Right now I am messing around with manually-constructed emitters in Studio to try and improve the lighting in the darker models. Does Maxwell even use the directional lights from Solidworks, or am I just imagining things?

Thanks a lot,
Mark.

[mark_melvin]

Hmm... well - I just started another render and it appears that the "shadows" in the Studio aren't entirely representative of what the lighting in the actual render will be like. The lighting doesn't look too bad. We'll see how it turns out. My last render crashed after 11 hours. Man, that's frustrating!! I tried to reconstruct an image from screenshots... I guess that's one of the drawbacks of a beta program. ( But I'm not complaining! THese are some of the best images I've ever been able to make. ) I'll post some more when they are done cranking in a couple days.

Mark.

[juan]

Hi Mark,

SolidWorks lights are not translated to Maxwell. In maxwell lights are not special entities but normal geometry that emitts, as in the real like, all the lights have an area, they are not isolated points in the space, this "light point" approach is not real and gets non photorrealistic results.

As you can read in the "announcements" section we have rewritten the emitters engine and now you can use standard units (lux, candelas..etc) so you will see enormous enhancements in this ares in the next update. Also you will be able to import one emitter into your Studio scene with just one click.

Regards,

Juan

[jjs]

The sun direction can be very frustrating - I too find its direction hard to predict

My work flow is create model and emmitters in SW, create all the camera angles I want and apply all materials in SW even if they are not exactly as I want.

Export model to Studio - then the materials, camera and emmiters are already in place - as I find moving objects in Studio very bizarre.

However I can double click a material in studio and redefine it in a more sophisticated way and it is already applied to its objects so I don't have to use Studio for object selection ( its just easier in SW) .

When trying to set sun direction I just grab the 'world' and rotate it around until I get the sun pointing where I want, as I keep an Eye on the compass rose. Sometimes I end up in antarctica to get the correct sun

I find the whole object selection and rotation, camera selection etc in Studio very difficult - I think I am just too used to the way SW does it and can't remember the hot keys.

TTFN

Jonathan