[John Layne]

Eric,

I see you use Rhino and C4, what's your workflow; do you export SolidWorks files to these packages to render?

Mainly wondering what the texturing is like in these packages?

What file formats do you use to exchange data between products, do they stay linked to the original?

Do you do your surface modelling in Rhino and export to SolidWorks, if so is this a practical solution to SolidWorks’ not so wonderful surface modelling?

[Eric Lagman]

Eric,

I see you use Rhino and C4, what's your workflow; do you export SolidWorks files to these packages to render?

Only to C4d when I need to use Cinemas Advanced Render Module. It is very fast and gives good results. A step below maxwell in realisim, but when time is the enemy this is what I use. I export via Polytrans as VRML 2 to cinema. Polytrans maintains the sw modell heirarchy, and you can pick triangle groups as faces in cinema which is very nice. In other words it keeps the faces of your modell like they were in sw. So if I have a cube when I click on a face it selects the whole face. Not individual triangles that the face is made up of. This would be very handy in Maxwell Studio. For texturing your models it is very nice. As soon as the maxwell plugin gets fixed I will probably do my maxwell renders that require lots of textures in cinema. It took me close to a year to get my hands fully around cinema, and get the best results you can from it. There are way more parameters to tweak and tune compared to maxwell, and it is one of the more user friendly of the big 3d apps (max, maya, XSI) If you do want to go that route be prepared to invest some time into getting your head around it.

Eric,

What file formats do you use to exchange data between products, do they stay linked to the original?

VRML 2 works best to cinema. Polytrans can import and export just about any format imaginable. They do not stay linked to the original SW files, but it is very easy to suppress everything but what has changed and export just that into cinema. Polytrans can export the model that SW is currently using if you have sw running. In cinema you can just hide the old version in case you need it later, and drag the new materials onto your newly imported objects.

Eric,

Do you do your surface modelling in Rhino and export to SolidWorks, if so is this a practical solution to SolidWorks’ not so wonderful surface modelling?

Only if I absolutely can't get the shape I want after hours of trying in Solidworks. This rarely happens. It can be a struggle but I can usually get nice surfaces with Solidworks. Most designers who use Rhino for concepts have the luxury of "throwing their surface model over the wall" to an engineer. The engineer will then make a manufacturable part based from the designers surfaces in a parametric modelling app like Pro-E, Catia, Solidedge or SW. The company I work for is so small each designer has to do it all ourselves from concept to production. There are so many changes during the scope of a project that using Rhino would be shooting yourself in the foot because there is no history tree to go back and modify features that are driven off of input dimensions. I use Rhino mainly for fun or only on projects that are purely conceptual. It is very fun to model in, but not practical for large projects that require manufacturable parts with very intricate detail and changes. Sorry to ramble on. Im sure you probably already knew about Rhino, and were just curious as to how I used it.

I must say that Maxwell is a breath of fresh air as far as scene setup time for lighting and basic materials that don't require decals or complex texturing. I could spend hours in cinema tweaking the lighting and materials, and the quality is still not where maxwell is. With maxwell I can be much more sure of how my materials and lighting are going to look from one scene to another. The main workflow killer for the SW plugin is texturing and decals. This is something Nextlimit have no control over. I have had good luck with studio for bump textures etc, but decals can be difficult. Hope this answers your questions. Feel free to ask more if anything is not clear. Post examples if you have specific questions, and I will try to help. We can all learn from each other here.

[John Layne]

Eric,

Thanks for the detailed reply, much appreciated.

I do sometimes struggle, for longer than I think is necessary, with Surface modelling in SolidWorks and have occasionally looked for an easier solution. Having trialled Rhino for a short time I was impressed with its ease of use. However as you point out the lack of a history tree makes it almost useless for engineering data, I was hoping you would prove me wrong.

Polytrans maintains the sw modell heirarchy, and you can pick triangle groups as faces in cinema which is very nice. In other words it keeps the faces of your modell like they were in sw. So if I have a cube when I click on a face it selects the whole face. Not individual triangles that the face is made up of. This would be very handy in Maxwell Studio.

I thought about this sometime ago and have just done a quick test, you can achieve something similar with the Maxwell SolidWorks Plug-in. In SolidWorks using the Plug-in you can assign a material to a part body and a different one to a part face you can then open the .mxs file in Studio and the part will retain those materials assigned to the body and face. You can then edit those materials from within studio. You can not however assign a new material to the object, in Studio, without overwriting all the materials assigned to that object. For me, at least, it’s a lot easier than using the triangle selection tool.

Decals are certainly a lot easier in PhotoWorks (sorry for swearing). My solutions so far have been to either model the Decal, which is a real pain sometimes impossible, or offset a face (possibly after splitting a face) in SolidWorks by a few hundreds of a mm and then apply a texture to the resultant surface in Studio. I have yet to get my head fully around making transparency masks, only experimented once, but a transparency mask and texture on an offset surface should make for an effective, if somewhat slow, way of making Decals.

[Polyxo]

Eric,

thanks for sharing your experiences, interesting posting! To busy to contribute right now, but just to say thanks.

Holger

[b-kandor]

Yes, thanks for the info, especially on Polytrans, I wasn't familiar with that product. I've recently delved into modo201 and polytrans would obviously be really usefull for combining or sharing data.

John, I've been surfacing in solidworks for ages, and I actually really enjoy it. If you make good use of control sketches, in-context relationships etc. then you can build some really rock-solid stuff. I just shudder when I remember twisting vectors on augmented lines in mechanical desktop v1.0, praying for a shell command and dreaming about a fill surface command. (back then importing an iges into rhino and using drape surface was one horrible option).

Kandor

[juan]

Eric,

Thank you for sharing this info, this is very useful for a lot of people.

Polytrans maintains the sw modell heirarchy, and you can pick triangle groups as faces in cinema which is very nice. In other words it keeps the faces of your modell like they were in sw. So if I have a cube when I click on a face it selects the whole face. Not individual triangles that the face is made up of. This would be very handy in Maxwell Studio.

Have you tried switching to "expand to faced" selection mode with "F8" key? It should work in the way to want.

As John says there is another way applying a different material to single faces; therefore the selection of this triangles is very easy inside Studio.

Regards,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Eric,

Thank you for sharing this info, this is very useful for a lot of people.

Polytrans maintains the sw modell heirarchy, and you can pick triangle groups as faces in cinema which is very nice. In other words it keeps the faces of your modell like they were in sw. So if I have a cube when I click on a face it selects the whole face. Not individual triangles that the face is made up of. This would be very handy in Maxwell Studio.

Have you tried switching to "expand to faced" selection mode with "F8" key? It should work in the way to want.

As John says there is another way applying a different material to single faces; therefore the selection of this triangles is very easy inside Studio.

Regards,

Juan

Juan,

I tried the f8 method, and it works the way I want sometimes, and sometimes it doesnt. I have been doing like John mentioned where I will just apply the different materials in sw plugin to each face then export to studio. This works ok, but is not optimal. Is there no way the triangles that make up faces can be grouped or somehow knitted together as individual objects when they get exported to studio. I believe you mentioned earlier that this would get too memory intesive. Perhaps in the plugin you can "tag" only the objects you want exported this way?

[b-kandor]

Hi Juan,

Just to add to this discussion:

I have a large assembly recently that could not be exported via the plugin because the image quality was too high. The plugin would lock up with a memory error. SW controls tessalation via the image quality slider for the viewport and maxwell inherits this information for exporting.

In this case the assembly had 2500 parts. I finally was able to export by reducing the parts and lowering the quality slider to the lowest setting. This produces unacceptable meshes in studio.

Also, (I need to check this again to be sure) it seems that the plugin is using the body name for the object id in studio? Rather than the part name. Since the body name is contolled by the last feature applied to that body you get a lot of objects in studio called 'extrude2' or 'mirror1'. It would be nice to have these prefixed by the part name like 'door-mirror1' and 'door-extrude2' (in the case of a multibody part)

One last question - Do you have an idea if a modo plugin has been discussed? Just curious!

Thanks!

Kandor

[Eric Lagman]

Hi Juan,

Also, (I need to check this again to be sure) it seems that the plugin is using the body name for the object id in studio? Rather than the part name. Since the body name is contolled by the last feature applied to that body you get a lot of objects in studio called 'extrude2' or 'mirror1'. It would be nice to have these prefixed by the part name like 'door-mirror1' and 'door-extrude2' (in the case of a multibody part)

Kandor

You might have know this, but you can rename bodies by slow clicking twice on the body in the bodies folder at the top of your feature tree. I had a lot of issues putting materials on bodies in the past versions of the plugin. It would cause crashes. Does this work smoothly now?

Also a question for Juan. Will it be possible to rename objects in studio, and drag the order of objects in the object list in studio. I haven't been able to do this. It would be very helpful.

[b-kandor]

Hi Eric,

Yep, I know about renaming bodies, features etc. but I'm generally too busy especially with larger assemblies etc. That's why I was thinking that having a prefixed part name (which is usually descriptive) would help.

I do name bodies if I'm creating a derived assembly from a multibody part so that the derived part names make sense (and since sw default body names often are not valid filenames because they have symbols like < in them sometimes)

Kandor

ps. Scanner is coming soon! Still havn't decided on upgrading to premium but I think I'm going to end up with no choice in the end....

[juan]

Is there no way the triangles that make up faces can be grouped or somehow knitted together as individual objects when they get exported to studio. I believe you mentioned earlier that this would get too memory intesive. Perhaps in the plugin you can "tag" only the objects you want exported this way?

Hi Eric,

I have thought in that issues for a long time. I will try to improve it as much as possible in the next updates.

Also, (I need to check this again to be sure) it seems that the plugin is using the body name for the object id in studio? Rather than the part name. Since the body name is contolled by the last feature applied to that body you get a lot of objects in studio called 'extrude2' or 'mirror1'. It would be nice to have these prefixed by the part name like 'door-mirror1' and 'door-extrude2' (in the case of a multibody part)

Nice request, it will be done soon

Do you have an idea if a modo plugin has been discussed?

Modo is a great modeler; therefore it has been discussed indeed. We have not plans in the short term to assume the development of a modo plugin but it could be done in the future. Also we will release the sdk very soon so a modo plugin might be done for external parts.

Also a question for Juan. Will it be possible to rename objects in studio, and drag the order of objects in the object list in studio. I haven't been able to do this. It would be very helpful.

At now you only can sort it alphabetically but we might add new features to handle in the future.

The development of the plugin will not stop, we always look for ways to enhance it as much as possible.

Regards,

Juan

[John Layne]

Also, (I need to check this again to be sure) it seems that the plugin is using the body name for the object id in studio? Rather than the part name. Since the body name is contolled by the last feature applied to that body you get a lot of objects in studio called 'extrude2' or 'mirror1'. It would be nice to have these prefixed by the part name like 'door-mirror1' and 'door-extrude2' (in the case of a multibody part)

Nice request, it will be done soon


Juan

Yipppee like this one for sure

[adamwade]

Juan,

One more quick addition would be to allow groups within groups in Studio.

And as far as F8 expanding triangle selction goes, it has been un effective so far. usually I have triangles jump to a different face and have to deselect them. I gave up.

[b-kandor]

After checking again, I've realized that multibody parts are not grouped automatically. This would be helpfull as well. At the moment, I choose the part in the plugin and assign a basic mat so I can select all of those bodies in studio - but having them grouped automatically the way a sub-assembly is would be nice.

eg. I imported an assembly with several weldment parts, each part has about 70 bodies, makes for a really long list!!!!

[Polyxo]

Is there no way the triangles that make up faces can be grouped or somehow knitted together as individual objects when they get exported to studio. I believe you mentioned earlier that this would get too memory intesive. Perhaps in the plugin you can "tag" only the objects you want exported this way?

Hi Eric,

I have thought in that issues for a long time. I will try to improve it as much as possible in the next updates.

Hi Juan,
As quite a few directly supported programs work with Nurbs:
wouldn't Erics request for grouped triangles for surfaces make sense for Nurbs objects in general, not only for those, produced in Solidworks?
I would like the option to "tag" objects in the way Eric suggests in Rhinoll as well.

Holger