[juan]

Very interesting tests Eric!

It is seems that there is nothing wrong in the rhino plugin, but in the Way Rhino manages step. You can see how essential is having a good geometry to get good resutls and faster renders, a lot of people do not care about that.

I am curious to know which is the issue with rhino. Have you seen how many triangles are in each case? You can see it in the scene data tab. Perhaps rhino converts the numeric values of geometric data when import step and there is a lack of precision, it is clear in the rounded surface. SolidWorks API uses to provide the highest precision (double format) and there are not many platforms that do that. this is only an idea, the most probably cause could be the different tessellation. In my experience SolidWorks is the best platform importing/exporting geometry. Traditional 3D people thinks that it is not true because it do not work with standard 3d formats like obj or 3ds, but SW is not a 3D platform, it do not work with meshes. It is a CAD, or better said, it was a CAD tool. Now it is too powerful to be named just like this. I guess the most famous 3d platform will be afraid if SW go on in the way to add more standard 3D features.

BTW the tessellation methods that the SW API provides are very powerful too. It is used not only for display graphics, but for calculate with finite element methods, where the highest precision is required.

Best,

Juan

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[juan]

but for calculate with finite element methods

i don't think it is true..the cosmosworks mesher works differently..you need tetrahedral or polyhedral meshes that fill the whole volume, not just the outer surface for FEA

Well I did not want to be too technical and I prefered not get into details, but if you want..
I mean thas SW provides very powerful methods to tesellates meshes, but obviously just the external surface. It is not enough to simulate systems where you need a partition of the entire volume, for example if you are solving a heat transfer problem with heat generation inside the body caused by example though a chemical reaction. In this case you need to mesh all the volume, in tetrahedra or other divisions. But even in this case the points of the surface that SW provides could be very useful to generate your internal mesh, your voronoi cells and all this stuff.

But also there are a lot of cases where you only need a tessellation in the external surface. For example to solve fluid-dynamycs problems without the heat ecuation coupled, you need just to put inflow/outflow conditions in the surface. Or also useful to solve this problems with panel methods (boundary methods) which are huge used in industry. In fact we are working at now in this problems and you can't imagine how different is the mesh that is generated in each platform. In extreme curved locations some platforms just kill the mesh. SolidWorks manages it really good in extreme situations. Also Sw api provides many methods to set accurately the tessellation, even methods to know the possible lacks... great, really great.

Adios!

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Good lord. I tried to map an HDRI around a sphere is Solidworks, and the texture controls are so brutally bad. There is basicly two controls scale which seems to really tile the texture, and angle which contorts the texture at some uncontolable angle. Good lord who comes up with this stuff. It makes me want to smash dielectric objects on the ground. Looks like unless you just need to tile a bump pattern or something simple we are out of luck. Guess I will be using Cinema 4d if I ever need to wrap a texture around a sphere. Maybe in SW 2010. Anyone else have better luck than I. I guess I could make a huge box instead of a sphere and slap the texture on each face to light the scene. Solidworks likes boxes.

Edit: I just tried doing a simple texture test with a hardwood floor. This is not good at all. If a scene requires any texturing mine as well forget it with the controls solidworks has built in. It seems to me that because of the poor texture controls native to the cad application the solidoworks plugin sinks down to the level of the Rhino plugin. Hopefully in the future solidoworks will add better texture control. This is not NL fault. I am hoping the standalone of maxwell has good texture controls. The pain of taking my model out of solidworks to get it in the standalone may be worth it if the texture mapping tools are good.

[juan]

Hi Eric,

Sure in next releases of SolidWorks there will be more powerful methods to manage textures. In fact actually Solidworks has introduced decals, which provide more control than normal textures. It will be supported by the API soon and Maxwell could manage that. SolidWorks always provides a huge number of new features with each new release and sure It will continue in the future.

Regards,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Hi Eric,

Sure in next releases of SolidWorks there will be more powerful methods to manage textures. In fact actually Solidworks has introduced decals, which provide more control than normal textures. It will be supported by the API soon and Maxwell could manage that. SolidWorks always provides a huge number of new features with each new release and sure It will continue in the future.

Regards,

Juan

Yeah that would be great. They already have photoworks using more advanced mapping techinques. Seems like it would be easy just to transfer those controls over to the texture tools. Maybe in 6 months they will come out with a 2006 plus that does this. They did this a few years back. They put out a plus version sooner instead of an annual release because it had more features. I dont think they add these kinds of things in a service patch which is too bad. Oh the waiting. Must be patient.

[Eric Lagman]

Any word on when the camera will be fixed. It is still very hard to get what I see in my SW viewport to render in maxwell. This makes the plugin too frustrating to use right now in my opinion.

[juan]

Hi Eric,
Sorry for the delay, I thought I had already answered and now I do not see my response
are you working with the latest version of the plugin? you have to do two essential things to adjust the camera:

- Adjust the focus with the "L" length of the field of view of the SW camera. (dragging the green square of writing a value in the field)

- Copy in the focal length field of the camera tab of the Maxwell Property manager the "lens value" of the SW camera (you can see it in the SW camera Property Manager, in the field of view group). So if you have 50mm standard, copy this value to the maxwell camera.

I know it will be easier that the plugin gets this values automatically but this is not possible at now. SW will provide this functionality in the next update.

If you do both steps you get a accurate enough adjustement. There could be little differences due to the different aspect ration in SW viewport and the resolution choosen but nothing too different. Please if you still get issues to adjust the camera please tell me. Anyway I am working in a new patch with some important advances.

Best,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Is anyone else getting a failed to save document when using maxwell, then when you try to close the file that is open SW crashes?

[juan]

Hi Eric,

In some systems when maxwell mxcl is running, the permissions or the folder where the SW file is placed are changed to "read-only" so you need to change the permissions or wait to the render finishes to save the document. We are investigating this issue to fix it as soon as possible.

Regards,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

I think I found what is causing the fail to save. If you put a material on the body of a part that is in your assembly.

[juan]

Thanks for the info Eric. We will investigate it. If you get more issues please let me know.

Regards,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Got two more small issues. Seems like the selection filter gets stuck when i check out of the Maxwell property manager from applying materials. It would be nice if it went back to the default cursor so we dont have to always uncheck selection filter.

The other thing I have noticed is that it seems we cant apply materials to features of parts yet? This would be very helpul, because sometimes there are way to many faces on a body to grab. It would be nice just to click on the features that created thoses faces and have the mw material applied to that. Faces do get selected when you click on a feature, but it seems I cant apply a material in the mw property manager to the selected entities.

The plugin is coming along nicely. I am using it on a small project at work now, and is working out quite well.

[JesperW]

I thought Juan had managed to whack that bug, but it still happends to me too, unfortunately.
/j

[juan]

Hi Eric,

I take care of your two small issues. As you say, it is very useful to apply a material to features. We will investigate it as soon as possible to provide you the best quality.. Thanks a lot for the feedback and for the comments about the plugin

Juan