[ricardo]

Hi,

I was asked to prepare training for a company which is to buy Solidworks for furniture design and wishes to use Maxwell.

My question is: Should I go deep and learn a bit more about Solidworks and teach them using the plugin or is using the plugin as an exporter only a good approach.

What I need to take into account (and have no idea on how it works) is:

-There will be massive need for mapping control - projectors.
-They will render complete scenes (more than one part or assembly) at a time
-They may use wall decoration, vases and so.

I'd rather go with the export & use studio approach in this case, unless it's bad practice.

Any advices?

TIA

Ricardo

[superbad]

I'm in the same industry. Solidworks doesn't currently have enough control over texturing for furniture, because you need really good control to make wood textures look right. Studio isn't perfect either, especially if the furniture has a lot of bent curves- the cubic projector doesn't line up around bends. It's possible that SW 2008 will allow for better texturing, which would be great, because the new plugin is quite good. Some people use the plugin currently to apply materials, then just assign projectors in Studio. That might be worth considering, especially if there's a chance the plugin will soon allow you to skip the Studio step.

Also, as you alluded to, most of the useful props tend to be in other formats (3DS, etc.), because it's so hard to model things like cloth in Solidworks. There are ways of getting those files into Solidworks, but ultimately it makes more sense just to use Studio.

[rdo2000]

I've done some furniture modeling in SolidWorks, and while it's great for the most part I almost always end up having to export to another program for rendering. As the previous poster pointed out, SolidWorks' UV mapping controls are not very good, and what's more they aren't well exposed for plugin development. Studio is an option if you don't need things like UV unwrapping, but lately I've found 3ds max to be a good rendering environment with full UV controls in addition to the ability to add details like cloth, cushions, etc. There are (commercial) exporters that will bring your SWx files into Max.

Having to export to a separate environment for rendering does create workflow issues, but unfortunately SWx just wasn't designed with rendering as a high priority.

- rdo

[ricardo]

Thanks for the inputs. So it seems that the user may use the plug-in the much he wants, but final rendering will happen in studio (with this kind of product). I'd better be brief with the plug-in and explore studio deeper. What's learned is studio can be used in the plug-in anyway (since it's available there).

Really what I expected to learn, thanks.