[rccohn]

Hey guys, I got the tip to try blender for UV wrapping. It seems to be working decently, but I'm getting some weird striations in the render. Wondering if it's something from the mesh? Maybe I need to up the mesh resolution? If so, it starts to become a lot of clicking to define the edges of the UV, at least in Blender. I have to do a few of these.

Modeled in Solidworks > STL > Blender > Manual Unwrap > OBJ > Maxwell.

The texture I'm using is from the library, Nylon Strap by DVC3D.

Here is what I'm going for:



Here is my mesh:



Here is the render:




Thanks!

[Polyxo]

I am not currently a Solidworks-User but some comments on this.
Stl is a very poor triangulated format. If somehow possible you should try to get out a quad-dominant mesh out of SW, as an .obj for instant.
For the cable you should even try to get it exported as all quads. This might be possible if you delete the front caps of the cable.
As all quads the mesh will behave much nicer when unwrapping and the front-caps can easily be recreated in Blender.
When UV-ing in Blender you might be able to use the rectangular island of the Nurbs-Patch, given that the SW-exporter packs UVs at export
to mesh-formats. Otherwise you might be able to use a cool function called follow active quad which allows you to quickly uv such curly stuff.

This all said: I've read several times that Blender doesn't handle Normals well of objects which were originally created in Nurbs.

Hope that helps some.

[hatts]

Blender appreciates the VRML format when coming from Solidworks.
Keep in mind the mesh resolution is (stupidly) determined by the "image quality" settings of the Solidworks preferences.