Page 641 - 02. Subyek Computer Aided Design - Beginner’s Guide to SOLIDWORKS 2019- Level 1 by Alejandro Reyes

Animation and Rendering

Chapter 7: Animation and Rendering

SOLIDWORKS Professional and Educational editions include

PhotoView 360, an integrated software used to generate photo realistic

rendered images of parts and assemblies. Photo realistic images generated

before a product or design is finished can be very useful; for example, we can

show a potential customer how the product would look, prepare advanced

marketing campaigns ahead of manufacturing, promotional videos, etc.

The resulting images can be of such a high quality and realism that

they can (and often are) confused with pictures taken in a professional photo

studio. PhotoView 360 allows us to select component materials, colors,

backgrounds, light sources, shadow settings, reflections, and many advanced

lighting settings. To master the rendering process and obtain high quality

images takes time and patience, since we need to experiment with many

settings, render a test image, adjust, and repeat.

To obtain high quality, photo realistic rendering results, the user will

usually have to make multiple iterations, changing and fine-tuning different

settings in each pass, especially lighting. In this lesson, we'll cover the basic and

most commonly used settings to help us understand their effect and obtain

acceptable rendering results.

The animation is used to show assemblies in motion, to help us see

and understand how they work in real life, animate exploded views and collapse

them, for example, to explain how to assemble or take a product apart. Also, not

only can we animate an assembly, we can change a component's visual

properties including transparency, appearance, display settings, hide and show

them, etc. to better illustrate their operation, inner workings or highlight features.

After an animation is completed it can be saved to a file as an *.A VI

video or a series of pictures to be used in third party video editing software. At

the time of saving the video we can choose to create the video using the

SOLIDWORKS screen or a photo realistic animation using PhotoView 360. In

the second case, the result will take considerably longer to generate, as each

frame of the animation will be photo realistically rendered, and depending on the

rendering settings, the length of the animation, and the size of the image, this

can take a long time to produce.

To practice, we'll produce renderings and animations of the parts

and assemblies of the gear box and the engine we have completed so far.

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