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Archive for November, 2008

Well, the PhotoWorks/PhotoView  Rendering Contest is over and a winner has been declared… and of course, it wasn’t me. Congratulations to Cilas Gimenez for a super cool render! The really sad part for me is that I got even less votes this time than the last one. Well, guess I have to practice a bit more!

This is my entry to the contest, by the way. I only got three votes for this one this time. Do you think it was that bad?

Check out the rest of the entries and, of course, the winner of this month’s contest, at Rob Rodriguez Blog.  In the meantime, I’ll keep trying and perhaps someday I’ll get lucky!

As I mentioned previously, setting lights in PhotoWorks still seems tricky to me.  You can usually get by just using the light schemes pre-set in each scene, but if you want to add a special effect or get the shadow and shapes of objects just right, then you usually need to work with lights. SolidWorks has different kinds of lights available to customize and “play” with. There’s the ambient light, directional lights, point lights, spot lights… I’ve been playing a bit with point lights, trying to set something that may look a bit like holiday lights.

This is a simple assembly of several instances of one same light, such as this one.

After arranging the lights in the way I want them to go, comes the fun part of setting lights. But before that, I selected a scene for my rendering. I wanted something dark, to make the lights more obvious, so I chose Reflective Floor Black from the scene editor. You can access this scene editor by right clicking the scene folder in the PhotoWorks tab or by clicking on the scene icon in the PhotoWorks toolbar.

I made a few modifications to this scene, however, that will affect the lighting and reflections in the rendered image. For instance, in the Room tab of the Scene Editor, I changed the floor to Dark Room Floor, with no reflections, and used a gradient from black to dark gray as a background in the Back/Foreground tab.

And now, let’s work on those lights! Notice that there are already a couple of directional lights listed under Lights, Cameras and Scene. If you right click the folder in the feature manager, and select Show Lights, you will be able to see their exact location in the graphics area. In my case, the colorful dots are the point lights I added to my assembly and the other two that seem to be floating in the air are directional 1 and directional 2. These are similar to the lights in a photo studio that aim at the subject from different sides and angles, in order to create or eliminate shadows and define shapes.  They can be modified to change their location, color and brightness, for instance. It is also possible to add more of these directional lights, as needed.

The point light, on the other hand doesn’t aim the light in any specific direction; it’s like a ball of light, shinning in all directions. This is what makes it perfect for what I had in mind. So, I added my first point light to one of the little light bulbs in the assembly, by right-clicking the Lights, Camera and Scene folder and then selecting Add Point Light from the menu.  I used the coordinates of the location of the center of the circular edge shown in the graphics area to define the position of my light. These coordinates, by the way, are very easy to obtain by using Measure. I modified a few properties of the point light, like its color, which I changed very easily by clicking on Edit Color in the property manager and picking a new one from the color palette. In this particular case, it was green.  I also changed the brightness of the light, moving the slider from 1 to 0.16, because holiday lights aren’t really that bright.

Next, I modified the PhotoWorks properties (switch to those by clicking on the button that says PhotoWorks properties at the top of the property manager). First of all, I made sure this light would be on in PhotoWorks.  I also selected Keep Light, so it won’t be lost in case I experiment with different scenes and backgrounds, and added a bit of fog light, since this “fog” is what will allow me to see the light and not only the shadows it makes. I just need a little bit, though, or else my rendering may end up looking like in this image, where the value was set to 0.8.

That’s why I set it to 0.015 instead.  It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out that I didn’t need that much!  The rest of the lights were added in the same way, changing the color of each to match that of the light bulb.  Just the right kind of rendering for the holiday season!

And speaking of renderings, have you visited Rob Rodriguez blog lately? He just posted the entries for the November rendering contest. I entered one myself, and I thought I was going to win for sure, until I saw the entries I was competing against. Now I don’t really think I have a chance, but it will be fun to see how many votes I can get this time around. Wow! Lots of great stuff in there! Go check them out and vote for your favorite today, because voting ends this Friday!

Remember that movie with Jack Nicholson? That one where he plays the part of a famous writer that suffered from OCD and hated everybody in his building, but ends up adopting his gay neighbor and the neighbor’s dog, and falling in love with the waitress that worked at the restaurant he ritually visited every single day? At the end of the movie, he conquers many of his obsessions, such as washing hands frequently or stepping on cracks, but he then becomes obsessed with self improvement, and as he kisses the girl he says, “Wait, I bet I can do it even better!” 

Well, I certainly don’t suffer from OCD, but lately I find myself thinking precisely that: “I bet I can do this even better”.  I think it’s the only sad consequence of learning; the more you discover and the more you get into it, the more obsessed you become with getting it right, and the easier it is to identify your own mistakes and limitations, as well as those of others. It is sad because you are not as easily impressed as you were in the beginning, and, if you are like me, you may even dwell on it for a while or become obsessed with finding out how to do that what you don’t know how to do yet.  Even if you don’t know why, you will feel that it’s not quite right, and even if you don’t know how you could fix it, you’ll become obsessed with “making it even better”.  Have you ever felt this way?

I’ve been feeling a lot like that during this week. While going through stuff I’ve modeled since I started learning SolidWorks, looking for models that could provide interesting examples for rendering, I often find myself examining the features I used back then and feeling that, for some reason or another, the models are just not good enough, not accurate enough, or that I could’ve done better.  And I notice that I’m not only critical of my own work, but I’m likely to spot areas in need of improvement in the models made by other people, as well. And please, don’t take me wrong, because I don’t want to come across like someone who feels as she knows it all. No, nothing could be further from the truth. I still have lots to learn and I suspect I’m not even halfway there! It’s just that in the beginning it used to be good enough for me when I could get something that “looked like” whatever object I was trying to model, and now I’m more and more concerned with creating models that could actually be used to manufacture the object.

At times this is quite overwhelming, because it uncovers all the areas you are lacking in, like when you want to model some simple household item and you would like to make it as accurate and true to shape and functionality as possible, but you lack the knowledge about surfaces that you would require in order to do it, for instance. However, it is true that at times it can also be a boost to your self-esteem, like if you happen to run into a model full of errors that you know how to fix, or one that includes a hundred different features and you know a way to do the same with only ten.

I wonder if I’m the only one that feels like this… I might as well suffer from MOD (modeling obsessive disorder), because rather than saying “this is as good as it will get” or dwelling on my poor skills and thinking there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m becoming obsessed with finding ways to improve, with learning about new ways to do stuff in SolidWorks and even outside of the CAD, in the real world. And just like Jack Nicholson in the movie, I bet I can do this even better the next time.

The more I learn about PhotoWorks, the more I like it, even when some of the options can be quite tricky or require extra effort, like when setting up lights, for instance. It can be hard to figure out exactly where to put them, how many and how bright, but it’s a real advantage to be able to set those lights in the first place.  I must say of all the different options there are, I really like the ability to place decals on your rendering, especially the ones that map to the geometry like a label. It’s almost like placing a sticker on it! And with the use of software like PhotoShop or even Paint, to create masks, almost anything can be a decal!

This is one that I made using another rendering.  It’s a simple jpg file.

I applied the image as a decal to the face of this mug, by pre-selecting the face and clicking on the New Decal icon in the PhotoWorks toolbar.

This will open a Decals property manager on the left, and a collection of available decals on the right. You don’t have to limit yourself to these few decals; simply click on Browse and search for the image you want to use as a decal. In my case, I’m using legocolor copy.jpg as my decal.

Notice how it first appears distorted. That’s because it’s being mapped cylindrically to the face of the mug.

What I really want is for the decal to be placed on the face of the mug like a sticker, so I have to go to the Mapping tab in the property manager and select Label under Mapping. It looks a bit better, but I’m still not done. By dragging the edges of that blue and pink rectangle that appears on the graphics area, I can adjust the size of the label. I can also do this directly from the property manager, by entering numeric values for height and width under Size/Orientation. I can also adjust the location of the image on the face by dragging those green and red arrows on the graphics area or by entering numeric values next to the red and green arrows in the property manager.

Once I’m satisfied with the size and location of my decal, there’s one more thing for me left to do:  get rid of that white area in the label. Now, this is a step that you may or may not want to do. You may decide that what you want is a decal that includes the white area, like many stickers do, but in my case, I really want to get rid of it, so I’m going to use the following image as a mask for this purpose.

So I go back to the Image tab in the property manager, select Image Mask File under Mask Image, and just as I did before, browse for the image to use as a mask. Notice the red lines on parts of the decal preview in the property manager. They indicate that some areas in the image will not appear in the rendering. These areas correspond to those in black in the mask. Think of the mask as a stencil. It is created from the same image you are using as a decal, but in black and white. The white area gets to appear in the label, the black area appears as transparent. The greatest thing is that you don’t need to resize or move or adjust the image you are using a mask, like you did for the one you’re using as a decal. Notice the result on the graphics area.

And this is what it looks like once rendered.

By the way, you would never guess what I used to create the image I used as a mask in this case! Well, I used PhotoView 360. I rendered the image using All White studio shadow as the environment (it also works with others such as Black Studio shadow and HDR studio shadow) and saved the final color output to use as my decal and the Alpha Output to use as my mask.

As I had mentioned in my previous post, by the time I was finished with this little piece of fence, I had already collected twenty five bodies that appeared listed under “cut list” in the Feature Manager. How can this cut list be used as a mean to convey information about the model? Well, first of all, it needs to be updated, which means that all the members in the weldment that are similar will be grouped together in folders. In order to do this, right click on Cut List in the Feature Manager and select Update.

As a result of updating the cut list, we now have six different folders of cut list items, each containing the members of the weldment that are the same. Notice that the number in parenthesis indicates the amount of items in each folder. Placing the cursor over the name of each folder or item lets you see which item it is in the graphic area.

The next step is to customize the cut list, so it can become really useful for us. The first thing we may want to do is to give each item in the cut list a more meaningful name by renaming the folders, like I’ve done in the image. To rename the folders simply click on their names once, wait a bit and click again, then the text will show up inside a white box and you’ll be able to delete the old name and write your own.

Once we’ve renamed the items, we now proceed to customize the properties of the items as we want them to appear in the cut list. Right click on any of the item’s name (the names of the folders) and select properties. This opens the following window. As you can see, Length and Angles have already been assigned and calculated by SolidWorks. To add another property to the list, click on an empty cell under Property Name and select from the different options, in this case I selected Description, to add a short name to identify the item.  Notice that whenever you use a weldment profile supplied with SolidWorks, there’s usually already a Description of the item, inherited from the profile. In my case, I didn’t have a description for my profile, so I’m adding one this way, instead.

On the corresponding cell, under Value/Text Expression, I wrote the short name/description that I wanted to associate with that item.  I could’ve also linked this value to a dimension in the weldment profile, for instance, by double clicking on the dimension in the graphics area. The Evaluated Value shows the way this information will appear in the cut list when you add it to a drawing document. It is also possible to add other properties, like Weight, Volume or Surface Area and let SolidWorks calculate them for you.

After adding all the properties to every item on the cut list, it is finally ready to be inserted in a drawing document. In the drawing document, select the view that will be associated with the cut list, then click Insert, Tables, Weldments Cut List.

A property manager will show up. It allows you to customize a thing or two about how the cut list is displayed in the document.

After you are done customizing, click OK and drag the table to wherever you want to position it on the sheet.

Finally, you can change the size of the table by dragging its corners, just like you would do with any other window. Notice how all the properties we specified appear in the table, except for the Angles.

I must admit that this is not precisely what I had in mind when I first heard about weldments in SolidWorks. I actually thought that it would be like a representation of the different kind of welds, but all I’ve seen on that is the Fillet Weld. It doesn’t matter; I think this way makes a lot more sense.