February 8th, 2009 | 
Author: I was lucky enough to get myself into a couple of focus group meetings here at SolidWorks World. These are meetings that DS SolidWorks organizes with the intention of getting feedback from users of their product, what is working, what is not, and what could be improved. This morning I attended one of these focus group meetings about PhotoWorks, PV360 and Animator. There wasn’t much talk about Animator, though. It seems the one person that was very interested in it had to leave the room in a hurry and didn’t come back. There was a mention about some bugs that some of us have encountered while using the Animator, so hopefully our feedback will be used to fix those issues in a future service pack or release. Anyway…
Present at the meeting were Mark Biasotti, Product Manager of New Product Concepts for DS SolidWorks, Marlon Banta, Senior Product Definition Engineer for DS SolidWorks, Ron Bates, Manager of Graphical Applications for DS SolidWorks, and Jacob Johnson, who is part of the Lab group for DS SolidWorks. We were a small group, but I did see a couple of familiar faces, more specifically, Rob Rodriguez and Matt Lombard.
Great part of the meeting was devoted to finding ways to improve the rendering products already available, without necessarily making them more complicated to use. Making learning resources available to users was one suggestion, as well as giving PhotoView 360 more options for a better integration with SolidWorks, without turning it into PhotoWorks, of course, but in order to provide the user with more control of the render: How about we add a feature manager to it so we can easily select from the model, and also view and modify the appearances we have applied? How about giving us some control over lights that are not dependent on the environment? How about more backgrounds or the ability to use our own?
The way SolidWorks handles appearances in hierarchies and RealView were also discussed. Some pretty innovative ideas about the use of layers or something similar as a way of customizing the order of these hierarchies was mentioned. I still don’t understand how that would work exactly, to tell you the truth, but it sounds interesting.
In the end, we all want the same: a better, more reliable and easy to use rendering software, so I think having these meetings with the users is a really good idea. I only wish more people would show up and provide their feedback, because the more SolidWorks hear from the users, the more likely it is that all those suggestions and great ideas will actually become a reality sometime soon.
Posted in 
Tags:
[...] GabiJack var varsarray=[]; varsarray[0]=’10649′; if(!token) {var token=’0′} else {var [...]