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Hi,

I'm working on a rendering of a large assembly (components, not size). I opened it as lightweight and tried rendering. Nothing showed except the background which was set to resolved (which I guess I understand - sort of). I then set everything to resolved and rendered again. Everything rendered but without the materials that had been assigned. I closed the whole thing and re-opened in large assembly mode (no lightweight components). I then checked with the Object Properties and all the materials were there. I rendered and everything had the materials that had been assigned and rendered correctly. I opened it initially as lightweight becasue it's easier to move the components around. Is this something old that I never have seen or is it a bug?

Hi Mike,

You may indeed see strange effects when working this way. By definition, if you resolve a lightweight entity and the plugin says there's no material on it - there is no material on it (the data involved is very small, just a unique ID similar to this: {CBC92704-3626-4efc-A0AD-D6857DB2F767}...this points to some material in your database). So this appears to be an issue with how SolidWorks 'dehydrates' things during the resolution process - if it does not correctly bring in all of the data which was previously attached, then there is nothing for the plugin to read, and therefore, the plugin will think it has never seen these entities before.

The reason why it cannot directly export a lightweight component is that the component is not actually loaded into memory - if I attempt to read data from these items, the SolidWorks API call I would use would commit an access-violation (this happened in the first version of the plugin), so I just have to skip them. I am not sure if I could automatically make SolidWorks resolve them during the export, but I probably would not choose to do so if I could, since this directly counters input you have explicitly given - that the components should be lightweight.

Cheers,

JD

Thanks JD!