[juan]

I have anothe question though - In the task bar in Solidworks the old maxwell plugin is still there - There are 2 'Maxwell' titles at he top. How do I get rid of the old one? I've uninstalled it, deleted the dll etc but it still appears.

And when you create a new material should a little preview square show up next to it? - it only seems to show when i open an existing material.

I forgot to mention that I replied Will by email but perhaps it is interesting for others.

- About unsintalling old plugins, you can unregister a plugin manually opening "regedit" in the
"Start/Run/regedit" and deleting the appropiatte entries under
H_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/software/SolidWorks/Addings. there is an entry for each plugin, you can remove the folder you dont want.

- About the missing previews, you can right click in a material and choose "Refreh preview" to reload its preview.

Kind regards,

Juan

[mtripoli]

uncheck the old plugin from the add-ins...

[Eric Lagman]

About the missing previews, you can right click in a material and choose "Refreh preview" to reload its preview.

Juan,

There is a similar issue to this when creating a new material then opening it to change properties. We have to hit save in order for the changes to take effect. I think when you open a material to modify it the changes should happen when it is closed. This would make it feel more integrated I think.

On a side note do you have any info of when we might be able to use textures inside solidworks? Is Solidworks giving you any help with this. That is the only thing keeping me from using the plugin 100%

[w i l l]

Yeah textures would be gooooooood. Its a lot of hassle to keep re-importing changed models into Studio.

[Eric Lagman]

Another downside is everytime you render through the plugin I think it re-exports the entire scene not just what changed last. This can be a huge time issue when rendering out a large assembly. When it gets into studio it only has to voxellize. I know in the rhino plugin it only exports what changed last with the model to save time. Juan is this possible to do with the solidworks plugin? Someone correct me if I am wrong here. I know thats the way it did a while back. I only use the plugin now to export out my model into studio not render directly from.

[JDHill]

Hi Eric,

To clarify, in Rhino this only works if you haven't added/removed/deleted geometry, or changed texture UVs...that is, you can change material-assignment and camera postion. Otherwise, I still have to rewrite all the meshes. I've looked into trying to constantly track every object's position, and updating it in the cached MXS if necessary, but there are so many possibilities when you look at import/copy/references, that it may take more processing time (constantly cycling through the object list to maintain correlation) than it's worth...better to have a minute or two for mesh export, than to have noticeably reduced performance during the entire modelling session.

Cheers,

JD

[juan]

Juan is this possible to do with the solidworks plugin? Someone correct me if I am wrong here. I know thats the way it did a while back. I only use the plugin now to export out my model into studio not render directly from.

Jeremy has explained it better than me
However I am thinking whether it could be possible to implement a new feature "export selection" so in large assemblies only the selected components are selected, therefore you could merge the selection with the previous model inside studio. I don't know if this is useful for you, it can be added in next updates.

Regards,

Juan

[Eric Lagman]

Export selected would be very useful. Sometimes only one of the parts I am working on changes in an assembly, but I have to wait 5 minutes for the entire model to export.

[b-kandor]

In this case I supress parts I don't want included (alternately create a configuration and then in that config supress parts you don't want). Also helps in win32 if your running out of ram when exporting (remember you can turn down the 'image quality' slider as well to lower ram (by increasing polygon deviation).

[Mike Scola]

I agree that there should be a selective export option, however it must allow for the selection of all types of entities. this would include surfaces, faces and most importantly, individual bodies within part files.

[Eric Lagman]

In this case I supress parts I don't want included (alternately create a configuration and then in that config supress parts you don't want). Also helps in win32 if your running out of ram when exporting (remember you can turn down the 'image quality' slider as well to lower ram (by increasing polygon deviation).

This is what I do now, but it can get quite tedious supressing and unsupressing many parts. I have become wary of just hiding the parts because those used to come in in the older plugins. I will have to test to see if this got resolved. Export of bodies would be very nice also. Almost every part I work on has multi-body solids or surfaces.