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 tim...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 wi...

The house I grew up in was a Mexican colonial style, with beautiful wrought iron fences and gates surrounding the yards. There were also wrought iron details on stairs, windows and doors.  Here in my neighborhood I’ve found only houses with backyard fences made out of wood, and no fence in the front yard. They look nice, but at times I kind of miss the elegance of the wrought iron fences of my ...

OK, so I’m trying really hard to stay away from Twitter, but I must admit that every now and then you hear about good news or something interesting that you never even imagined.  In my case, I heard, or should I say read, Jeff Ray make a casual comment about him attending an event for MATCH, a charter school in Boston, MA, where volunteers are working hard with kids that have come from very...

Even though I’m the one who usually takes most of our family pictures (which also explains why I hardly ever appear in them), I can’t tell that I’ve ever been handy with a camera. If you don’t believe me, just ask my son Andrew. This is what he’ll probably have to say about my skills as a photographer. Anyway, even when real life cameras can sometimes be quite frustrating for me, I mu...

This part is an IGES file that is included in the SolidWorks 2007 Sheet Metal Training Manual as one of the examples on how to convert an imported (dumb) part to sheet metal. According to the explanations in the manual, this can be done as a two step process, by first using the Rip feature to select edges or corners that will be cut with a small gap in order to allow the part to be flattened as...

The winner of the contest has finally been announced over at Rob Rodriguez Blog. No, it wasn’t me, of course. It was Fabien Bernadet, with a really awesome image of an autographed football helmet inside a glass display. Really nice job! I don’t feel so bad myself, because I managed to get six votes. That means at least someone out there thought it was good! And I’m only a beginner… The mor...