[mick]

Not so many when doing the background, after all I just want something to give me some nice reflections, clock dial also went in easily, suprisingly, but don't talk to me about the mahogany ... if you examine the render closely you'll notice faults in the grain direction down one of the sides at the front and it also has a repeating pattern problem . Perhaps I should just use a nice plastic ...

[juan]

Very nice model again! We are glad to have Master Mick here!

With the final release we will add more mapping tools to make your work easier. Also I am sure SolidWorks Team is working in adding decals support in the SW API and also they will provide more texturing tools soon.

Cheers,

Juan

[JesperW]

Hehe, "soon" is a relative term, which I am quite sure does not have the same interpretation in SWX Corp as in Next Limit. Unless they start adding funtionality in ServicePacks, which doesn't sound likely...
/j

[John Layne]

Soon in SolidWorks = Next Release or maybe the release after that.
Stable and usable Decal support from SolidWorks should arrive in SolidWorks 2008.

[DELETED]

DELETED

[John Layne]

Just look at the way SolidWorks have handled textures, it hasn't changed since it was introduced. It's full of bugs, since most users don't need it for machine design it doesn't get fixed.

PhotoWorks has had the same bugs for 3 years no improvements since it became PhotoWorks II 3 years ago. Hence I have given up on SolidWorks fixing PhotoWorks or Toolbox or Textures or Surfaces.

They will only add minimal increments in surfacing ability as they need to keep justifing the price of CATIA (in the $100,000's) or If Inventor increases support for surfaces.

The buggy crappy and total lack of support for PhotoWorks brought me to Maxwell.

Maxwell =
PhotoWorks =

Don't get me wrong, I do like SolidWorks in general it gets the job done and beats working in AutoCad!

[Eric Lagman]

I agree with everything you said John. That is why I have a feeling I will just be importing my models into the standalone for rendering. I just dont think they are going to do anything about the texture issues any time soon, and if they do it will be something that still doesn't work the way it should. I jumped off the photoworks boat years ago, and import my models into cinema 4d. Thing thing with that is you get good results if you can master the 100's of sliders and paramaters to get a good render. Which you can get really good stuff. Maxwell has minimal tweaking to get the image you want. I would much rather spend hours less setting up my scene, and just let it render while I do something else on another computer than tweak render, tweak render and on and on.

[mtripoli]

I've been going back and forth between using Solidworks and M\axwell, and exporting my models as Lightwave objects, and doing all the surfacing and texturing in Lightwave. This seems to work better, and once the mesh in is Lightwave, animations are not a problem.

BTW; Baren-Boym (http://www.baren-boym.com/) makes the 3D File Converter program. It allows you to save as obj, lwo, and 3DS Max objects. The only "drawback" to this is that it's actually "grabbing" the OpenGL mesh from the screen, and outputting this as the poly mesh. If you have everything "cranked" it can make an object have millions of triangles. There is a control for lowering this...

I also have PolyTrans - I have never really figured out how to get a good mesh from SW to another format. Others use it with tremendous results.

If you do try out B-B's 3D converter, there is a very easy way to control surfaces for texturing; just make them different colors (doesn't matter what the colors are). Then, when you bring it into LW for example, each surface is seperate, making it very easy to texture (or break apart to make dielectrics, emitters,etc.).

Mike Tripoli

[thxraph]

mtripoli ==> http://jfww.com/maxwell/solidworks/texture_test/

your apache isn't secure, and it is actually easy to browser subdirectories...

http://jfww.com/maxwell/test/

I don't know if you made it intentionaly, but this is a quite big security issu... you should do something for it, as assigning an .htaccess for some directories...

Pv me if needed

best regards

[mtripoli]

Hi thxraph!

Thanks for the info. I knew that this was the case; this is a "maxwell" directory. It contains a bunch of stuff that's Maxwell specific that I've posted over time. It's not a problem, "kind of" done intentionally.

Thank you for pointing it out though, I'm glad to see someone willing to help another in cases like this!

Mike Tripoli