Round your corners for a better render

PhotoView 360 uses simple drag and drop methods to create very realistic renderings with very little work.  There are many settings that can be tweaked to create just the right image.   A new setting that I found in 2013 is setting an appearance to round corners.

One trick to making your rendering more realistic is to round all sharp corners.  This only needs to be a thousandth or two.  Traditionally this had to be done using fillet, but the downside of this was the performance.  Having many small fillets will really slow down your performance.

This example shows how this setting is applied to a cube.  You can see that the large fillets do not produce a real high quality round, but I wanted to exaggerate the fillet so you could tell how effective when you are only trying to round off a thousandth or two.

The appearance will not eliminate your need for fillets.  To get a cleaner render, use fillet for larger radii.  Below is the same model rendered with true filets.

Hope this little setting helps you create better renderings.

Bryan Pawlak,

CATI

How to Configure Your SolidWorks Workstation from BOXX

Adrian Fanjoy and myself were recently asked to team up with our friends at BOXX to help them out with an article they were working on about what hardware to consider when looking for a workstation  for SolidWorks.

The article starts by asking you three questions about your workflow.

1. How big are my assemblies?


2. How complex are my parts ­les?


3. How many geometric surfaces do I have?

Based upon your responses to those questions, you can begin to formulate a plan. In your plan for considering new hardware the article takes you through several different areas that you will want to consider and it starts with the number of processing cores in you workstation as well as the BOXX advantage of overclocking. They continue with the topics of RAM, Graphics Cards, and the gain in performance from using SSDs. The article concludes with a case for dedicated rending when your workflow includes a significant amount of rending your designs.

To get a copy of the full article select the link below

How to Configure Your SolidWorks Workstation from BOXX

Josh Altergott

CATI Support Manager

Maximizing SolidWorks Performance (MSWP-12-#8)

Number of Cores and SolidWorks

The number of cores that a workstation has is critical for use of SolidWorks -- but only to a point.  Since SolidWorks can only take advantage of 2 cores itself, the numbers of cores needed is determined by how many other activities the workstation is going to need to perform while SolidWorks is operating.

The graph above reveals that when SolidWorks is the only application running on a workstation, anything more than four cores is simply overkill.  We recommend that before purchasing a new machine you evaluate your daily use to make sure you are getting all that you need from a single multi core processor.  If you are utilizing the workstation for SolidWorks Simulation Products, Photoview360 or other applications that can take advantage of multiple cores then it may be worth the investment in a second processor to gain the additional cores.

If you remember from our first article; our test baseline had a runtime of 5:01:35 and we measured time for the areas of Opens, Rotations, Modeling, Rebuilds, Switching Sheets, Saves and Closes.

We saw an improvement of 6.4% going from 1 to 2 cores, we gained another 1.2% going from 2 to 4 cores, and an additional improvement of 1.1% going from 4 to 12 cores.

Overall we saw a 7.6% improvement gain going from 1 to 4 cores and 8.7% going from 1 to 12 cores.

If we take the best case and run our macro with 12 cores our macro ran in 4:04:54, this had a noticeable effect in the areas of Opens, Rotations, Modeling, and Switching Sheets.

This change gained us a savings of 0:56:41 or 18.8%.

Number of Cores and PhotoView360

If you are Photo Rendering, multiple cores are essential.  This graph illustrates very well the impact that additional cores can have on a render job.  The most dramatic increase in performance is between one and four cores when the curve seems to "flatten out".

This can be a little misleading because the dramatic 64% improvement between four and twelve cores is overshadowed in this graph.

Viewing the result between 4 and 12 cores only can give a more accurate visual of what can be expected when adding a second processor and significantly increasing the capabilities of a workstation.

Please check back to the CATI blog as we will continue posting our series of articles that goes further into the details of each of our tests. All of these articles will be stored in the category of Maximizing SolidWorks Performance and links to each with their release date are listed below:

• Maximize SolidWorks Performance White Paper (7/2/12)


• MSWP-12-#1 Introduction (7/9/12)


• MSWP-12-#2 Windows Visual and User Settings (7/12/12)


• MSWP-12-#3 SolidWorks Options Set to Optimal (7/17/12)


• MSWP-12-#4 Graphics Cards (7/19/12)


• MSWP-12-#5 Turn Off SolidWorks Add-Ins (7/24/12)


• MSWP-12-#6 Processor Clock Speed (7/26/12)


• MSWP-12-#7 Reducing SolidWorks Mates and Rigid Subassemblies (7/31/12)


• MSWP-12-#8 Number of Processor Cores (8/2/12)


• MSWP-12-#9 SolidWorks Graphic Settings (8/7/12)


• MSWP-12-#10 Network Storage and Anti-Virus (8/9/12)


• MSWP-12-#11 Level of Detail (8/14/12)


• MSWP-12-#12 RAM and SWAP File (8/16/12)


• MSWP-12-#13 Hard Drives (8/21/12)


• MSWP-12-#14 Lightweight and Large Assembly Mode (8/23/12)


• MSWP-12-#15 Optimal Configuration and Conclusion (8/28/12)

Thanks,

Josh Altergott, CATI Support Manager

Adrian Fanjoy, CATI Technical Services Director

Rendering Settings – DPI vs. pixels

Had a question today on how to set the DPI settings for PhotoView 360...

Good question - not really sure…

Off to the SolidWorks Knowledge Base…

Bottom line?  There is no way to set the DPI in PhotoView 360 (or PhotoWorks for that matter).  The concept of DPI is only relevant to printing, not on-screen images.  

Here is the SolidWorks solution that explains it all…

 

Solution Id: S-02581  

Question:

Regarding the PhotoWorks/PhotoView 360 image resolution, rendered output is always 96 DPI, even if set much higher in PhotoWorks/PhotoView 360.  Why?  

Answer:

If the user checks the file properties of their rendered image in Windows, they will see 96 DPI.  This value is saved in most bitmap images, and is generally irrelevant to image processing.  DPI is actually meaningless when referring to on-screen images, these are defined purely in number of pixels.  PhotoWorks allows input of size and DPI settings to help the user generate an appropriate size image.  The following settings would all give an identical output:

20in x 20in at 50 DPI

10in x 10in at 100 DPI

5in x 5in at 200 DPI

1in x 1in at 1000 DPI

These would all produce an image of 1000 x 1000 pixels, with identical file size and detail – the files would be indistinguishable. 

Where the DPI setting is useful is if the user knows he/she wants to print an image 6 inches x 4 inches at 600 DPI, SolidWorks can take this information and calculate that it needs to render an image size of 3600 x 2400 pixels.  The user can experiment with this by inputting a size and resolution in the Render to File dialog, then switching back to Pixels to see what size image will be generated.

 

Nathan Brunner, CSWP

Technical Analyst

Computer Aided Technology, Inc.

Maximizing SolidWorks Performance

Well it's that time of year again and my team and I are preparing for SolidWorks World 2011.  My team is doing several presentations this year but the one closest to my heart of course is the one Josh Altergott and I are doing together called Maximizing SolidWorks' Performance.  This is the sequel to a presentation that we did last year that was very well recieved.

The premise is this; we got a very nice brand new Dell Workstation to test on.  We built a very large assembly as a test subject.  And finally we wrote a macro that would do a bunch of different operations to the assembly and components to the assembly.  All of these items establish our environment.  The stats are listed below:

Baseline Machine

• Dell Precision 5500


• 6GB RAM


• Dual Core Processor


• 7200 RPM, 1 TB Hard Drive (For file storage)


• Nvidia Quadro FX 4000 Graphics Card


• 3 10000 RPM, 320GB Hard Drives RAID 0 (For OS)

The Baseline Assembly

• 6637 Total Components


• 5862 Parts


• 775 Sub Asseblies


• 170 Top level mates


• 13011 Bodies

What are testing consist of, is changing just one aspect of the environment or modeling methodology and measuring the time difference that is takes for the macro to run vs our baseline.  Our baseline test took 7 hrs and 50 mins to complete.  We are also able to breakdown the benchmark into different categories of operations to better tell what changes effect what types of efforts in SolidWorks.  Aspects that we are measuring include: file opens, closes, saves, modeling, rotations, rebuilds and others.

Some of the things that we are comparing are:

• Different amounts of RAM and different numbers of processors and cores. 


• 2010 vs 2011


• having files saved in the old version vs the new version


• Verification on rebuild turned on vs off


• Files stored on the network vs local


• lightweight vs fully resolved


• optimized user settings vs default


• Different hard drive options


• Different RAID options


• differnt modeling methods


• and much more....

As you can imagine, we are learning a lot from this effort.  We are very excited to present our findings at SolidWorks World and we are hoping that, if you are coming to the event, you will join us for our little portion of it.

Maximizing SolidWorks Performance

Tuesday, January 25, 2011 @ 10:30am in Room 202

I hope to see you there

Adrian Fanjoy

Technical Services Manager 

Render Contest.com a fun competition

 This last month I finally got make a submission to the PhotoWorks/PhotoView 360 Rendering contest at www.rendercontest.com.  This contest used to be hosted by Rob Rodriguez at http://robrodriguez.com. It is now hosted by Chris Thorn, a SolidWorks user for several years.  He like your feedback on contest.

 

With that, more about the contest.  Each month a SolidWorks model is selected to be rendered in either tool you would like in the SolidWorks suite of tools, PhotoWorks or PhotoView 360.  You have 30 days to render and submit your models.  At the close of the contest there is five days of voting open to the public.  The winner is then announced and the winner's entry is placed into the Winner's Gallery.

I've done my share of rendering over the years in SolidWorks, 3d Studio, Maya, POV-Ray and many others.  With that I've acquired a pretty good knowledge of the technology and techniques used in rendering.  So, today I'm starting a new category here at blog.cati.com, PhotoView 360. 360 will be our vessel of choice over the next few months, but the topics will lean more towards rendering in general.

We are going to cover topics such as preparing your model, materials, environments (HDRI and Non), outputs, and post production. I hope you enjoy it.

At the beginning, middle, and end of this I hope you take the time to download and try these techniques on the models at www.rendercontest.com. Upload your images, get feedback, and be creative.

I'll close with what James Cameron (YES the AVATAR guy) said at SolidWorks World this years. Follow these and submit your renders.

Hope is not a strategy

Luck is not a factor

Fear is not an option

By the way I WON!!!!!