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Archive for August 13th, 2008

What’s the only good thing about having a spouse who travels the world all year round, I mean besides (emergency) chocolate from Switzerland and gold plated figurines from Japan? Frequent flyer miles! Thousands and thousands of them! This year, instead of me traveling to Mexico with the kids, Keith decided to take some time off from work, take some of those miles, and head over to Orlando, FL, for a much needed vacation with the whole family. We leave this weekend, and I still haven’t managed to put a suitcase together. I know, this has nothing to do with SW, but I just wanted to give you the heads up that it’s going to be pretty empty and lonely around here for a whole week, but that I’ll come back soon (yes, I will come back, you haven’t got rid of me yet) to continue blogging about SolidWorks and whatever’s new in the community.

In the meantime, check out all the other blogs for very interesting articles about SolidWorks 2009 and perhaps even about all the preparations for SolidWorks World 2009. I know, it seems a bit far away, but believe me, people are already getting excited about it and planning for it. With some effort and a bit of luck, you could even get to go for free.  I still don’t know if I will be lucky enough to attend this one. I really wish I can go, but it’s too early to say. At least, one thing I know is that, so far, I’ve got the airfare covered. Plenty of flyer miles to spare!

See you soon!

PhotoView 360 was made available for download today, August 12^th, and, of course, I had to go and try it out. I must tell you, never before today had I attempted to render anything, but I’m really amazed at how fast and easy it is to use, and how great the results that can be achieved, even by a complete novice, such as me. It was as simple as choosing a material, a scenario, and that’s it, in less than a minute, I had my first rendering ready.

Of course, more experienced users can make it as complicated as needed, by modifying the properties of the materials and environment, but I’m just a newbie, so I was glad with my small achievement… at least for now.

These are some of the renderings I made using PhotoView 360. This is a little practice piece I had.

The soup ladle from Matt Lombard’s new book.  Hope that Matt doesn’t mind that I borrowed his model to practice rendering, but it was the only one I could think of that was readily available and had some interesting shapes, without being too complicated. All I had was too boxy.

And this is another boxy piece that I “made” out of wood, just for fun. I like the way it looks around the fillets.

What do you think? Not so bad for a first timer! 

Although the beta still crashes a lot and I wish for more variety of materials and colors, as well as some improvement when it comes to changing the view orientation, I really like PhotoView 360. I like it because it’s easy. However, after this first experiment in rendering, I feel even more like buying Rob Rodriguez’s book and learning how to do rendering properly.

Aha! I think Ricky Jordan just put up another post about PhotoView 360 with videos and all the trimmings. Don’t miss any of it! If you still don’t have PhotoView 360, go download it today from the Downloads area at the Customer Portal. And don’t forget to check out Ricky Jordan’s and Rob Rodriguez’s blogs, because they’ll have a lot to say about it. This is really good stuff!