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Archive for the ‘PhotoWorks’ Category

Dear readers,  you know I’m not the kind to rant about life or even cry “bug” when things don’t go my way with SolidWorks. Well, OK, there was that one time when I wondered about the bug in SolidWorks Motion, and recently when my brand new razors broke,  but other than that, well, you know I don’t usually do it. I just don’t rant… Those of you that have talked to my husband, don’t believe him… he’s just making up stuff…  He’s probably been under the sun for a long time… Yes, let’s go with that!

 Anyway, I guess this is sort of a rant, but mostly a “Huh?!”  moment.  It happened late the other night, when I was trying to complete the animations for my previous post, the ones for the flashlight and the holiday lights. I had already produced an animation using full frames (uncompressed), instead of a compression codec, simply because I liked the way it turned out: much better than with any of the codecs I tried before. I made some changes to the settings in PhotoWorks and was getting ready to render the animations again, but it was late and I was feeling tired. That’s when I saw the “schedule” button in the  Save Animation to File window and had the brilliant idea of scheduling the animations, instead. That way I could go to bed, rest and relax, and find them ready and waiting for me the next morning.  Perfect!

I must confess I had never in my life scheduled anything in SolidWorks. I was a bit worried at first, wondering how it would all get done, but went to bed, anyway, and had a hard time settling down, all full of anticipation for the animations that were being taken care by the Task Scheduler during the night. 

Now I know better. It was not anticipation what I felt, but the premonition of the horrors that awaited me. My AVI files were ready in the morning, but the results were less than I had expected. It seems that, for some reason, the animations had been produced using some sort of compression codec, instead of being uncompressed, like I had specified. They looked terrible! All full of streaks and not at all like the ones I had produced myself previously.  But how could this happen? 

My first thought was that, being as tired as I was the night before, I had made a mistake when I scheduled the animations and used some compression codec instead of choosing for them to be uncompressed, so I went to schedule them again and, after making absolutely sure I had chosen Full Frames (uncompressed), I clicked on a button named “View Settings” and discovered this:

That doesn’t look good, does it? So, does that mean that, despite whatever I may specify, my animation is being scheduled to be produced using  some undetermined codec and 84% compression? Based on the results, it sure looked like it.  Funny thing is that this doesn’t happen when you simply save the animation, when you don’t schedule it for later, and it seems like it only happens when you schedule AND choose Full Frames as the compressor. I checked it out using the Cinepak codec and it seemed to work fine, no settings had been corrupted and the results were as expected.

So, tell me do you use the Task Scheduler for your animations? I wonder if any of you has noticed anything like it. I’m using SolidWorks Premium 2010 SP4.0.  I know it can’t just be me… I mean, why would the Task Scheduler hate me so bad? Right? Right? Just say I’m right…

 

 

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend and avoided making wacky searches you may soon regret. I spent some time of my own weekend toying around with PhotoWorks and the Motion Manager, trying to create some cool animations using lights.

I learned from the book Creating Animations with SolidWorks that using lights in animations is not really hard to do. Basically, you have your lights set up in SolidWorks, then you create a new motion study and the lights show up in the Motion Manager tree. Then, you can move them around, change their properties or even turn them on and off throughout the animation, creating all kinds of different effects.  Like with many other elements in the animation, every time you change something about a light, a key point will be created and you can drag the key point to a different location in the timeline, copy it, or even change its interpolation mode (the way it changes from key point to keypoint), just like you would do for a motor or a change in color or appearance.

So I started with this model of a flash light that I found at the 3DContent Central. The model was made by someone named Matthew Nestor and the moment I saw it I knew it was just perfect for my purposes. My idea was to add a spot light and locate it in such a way that the light seemed to be coming from inside the flashlight, like the light bulb was really on.  Notice the light in the image below.  I made it visible in SolidWorks so you can appreciate what I’m talking about.

 

While you don’t need PhotoWorks to add a spot light to the animation, you do need to have PhotoWorks for what I did with this particular light in this animation, so I’m going to assume you understand that none of this is useful to you if you don’t have PhotoWorks as an add-in and activated.

To create the effect I wanted with this particular light, I made it a fog light. What this does is create an effect similar to what it would be having some fog, mist, or light rain, allowing the beam of light to become visible. I won’t go into much detail on this, but you can learn more about how to use fog lights in the book PhotoWorks, a step-by-step self study guide, also available from the SolidWorks online shop.

 

If you notice, there are other lights, as well: there’s the ambient light, and a couple of directional lights that came with the choice of scene. I turned Directional 1 off and diminished the brightness of both ambient and Directional 2, so they wouldn’t overpower the spot light.  At zero seconds in the animation, ambient, spot1 and Directional 2 are on and Directional 1 is off.  At 1.5 seconds into the animation, however, Spot1 is now turned off, as you can see in the image.  As soon as you turn the light off  in the animation( by dragging the time bar to 1.5 seconds, selecting the light, right clicking on it and selecting Off), a key point will be created at 1.5 seconds. If you hover your mouse over this key point, you will see all the light’s properties at a glance.  The empty light bulb icon indicates the light has been turned off; if the light was on, the light bulb would be colored yellow.

 

Something else to keep in mind is that, unless you specify otherwise, the interpolation mode is always linear, which means that the light will go from on to off in a linear fashion, little by little, instead of turning off all of a sudden at 1.5 seconds. This will become an important factor for this animation. You’ll see that in a bit.

Due to the amount of time invested in rendering every frame for the animation in PhotoWorks and the fact that there’s 7.5 frames being generated for every second of animation, I meant for it to be very short. This particular one lasts less than two seconds, but it took close to 40 minutes to render and complete. I added an extra key point at 1.8 seconds, that was basically a copy of the one at 1.5 seconds. I just wanted to have at least a fraction of a second to appreciate that the light had, indeed, turned off.

One thing to keep in mind is that you will not be able to see the effect of the fog light on your screen when you calculate and run the animation in SolidWorks. You will only see it when you either render the image at a particular time in the animation or produce the animation as an AVI file using the  PhotoWorks buffer.  Taking this information into account, I set up all my options in PhotoWorks and test rendered the image at zero seconds and again at 1.8 seconds. I liked the way the renderings looked, so I decided to save the animation as an AVI file and this is what I got.

If you notice, right at the end of the video, after the flash light has turned off, it almost looks like it’s turned on again.  I tried a few things, tweaking the other lights in the animation and such, but it didn’t help, so I decided to change the interpolation mode for the Spot1 light, instead, from linear to snap. This new interpolation mode makes the Spot1 light turn off instantly, instead of linearly.

 

I rendered and produced the AVI file one more time.

Unlike before, now the flash light turns off instantly and it doesn’t look like it’s turned on again. I don’t know about you, but I think this animation looks a lot better than the previous one.

I know, I know… This is getting long for a blog post, but just before I go, let me show you just one more of my whimsical experiments with lights in animations. Some of you may remember this model. Some time ago I made a cute rendering of some holiday lights using PhotoWorks.  Now I’m going to use the same model to animate those holiday lights. As you can see in the image below, there are four point lights of different colors, strategically located to make it look like the light is actually coming from the light bulbs. I’ve made them visible for you to appreciate them; they appear in the graphics area as dots of color over the light bulbs. The black dots are lights that are turned off at that moment.  I’ve altered the color of each of them to make them look like holiday lights. 

As you can see, these are also fog lights, just like the previous one.

 

For my animation, I alternated turning a couple of them off and leaving a couple on every 0.5 seconds. First, the green one and the orange were on.

 

Then the red and the blue were on, while the other two were turned off. I used Snap as the interpolation method for all the lights.

 

I copied and pasted some of the key points to turn the lights on and of again and make the animation last for 2 seconds, then checked my PhotoWorks options, did sample renderings at zero and 0.5 seconds,  and produced the AVI file. This is what I got.

Not bad for an experiment, huh? There’s tons more to learn about lights and animations in SolidWorks. If you’re curious, check out the books offered by your local VAR or go to the SolidWorks online store and start experimenting today.

I originally posted this in my Spanish blog as a response to a question I got via email from a reader who was trying to produce a rendered animation and wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. I usually try not to repeat posts in both blogs, but then I thought that someone else could benefit from this same information on this other side of the language barrier, so here it goes.

My reader complained that he would render an image using PhotoWorks only to have it go back to it’s original  state as soon as he tried to rotate it or move it. So, how could an animation be created if this kept happening? I’m not exactly sure how he was trying to capture the animation, but truth is that a rendered animation can be done easily by combining PhotoWorks and SolidWorks MotionManager.

First of all, you need to have PhotoWorks add-in loaded. If you don’t, go to Tools, Add-ins and select PhotoWorks  from the list of available applications. Once you have it loaded, proceed to apply appearances, scenery, lights and/or decals to your model using the options available in PhotoWorks. I won’t go into detail here, since I’m assuming you know how to do this.

As a quick example, let’s say I have this model of a pair of scissors. I’ve applied a few appearances and a scenery. Nothing complicated. I tried to keep it simple to minimize the amount of rendering time. Plus, the image you see here is not rendered yet.

Once you’re satisfied with your rendering options (try rendering the image to check), you can proceed to create the animation. Click on the tab that reads Motion Study 1 at the bottom left of the window to use MotionManager. For this example, I used the Animation Wizard to create a simple animation of the model rotating around it’s Y axis. Of course, you can do any other sort of more complicated animations if you wish. This is just a quick example.  If you are not familiar with SolidWorks MotionManager and you’re not sure what to do, just follow along the steps. First, click on the Animation Wizard button (the one that looks like a little camera). A dialog window will open prompting you to select the kind of animation you wish to create. Since we don’t have any exploded views of the model, the option of rotating the model is the only one available and is pre-selected. Click Next.

Another dialog window will open and you will be prompted to select the axis of rotation and number of revolutions. I selected the Y axis and  decided five revolutions would be more than enough. Click Next.

A third window will open, prompting you to enter a duration for the animation in seconds and a start time. I decided ten seconds was all the time I wanted my animation to last and it would begin at zero seconds. Click Finish to create the keys for the animation and then calculate to see it on the screen. You should be seeing the model rotate five times around it’s Y axis in ten seconds.

Once all the steps for the animation are ready, we can produce the rendered animation, which was the original goal. This animation, however, we won’t watch on the graphics area in SolidWorks. This animation will be saved as an AVI file and in order to create it, PhotoWorks will produce a series of still rendered images of our model in the different positions it would assume during the rotation. This series of images will then be put together, in correct order one after another, just like the frames in a movie. The larger the number of frames, the better the quality of the resulting movie, but the longer it will take for the whole animation to be completed and the more computational resources that will be needed, of course. To produce the rendered animation, click on Save Animation.

A dialog window will open and prompt you to select options to save your animation to a file. From this window select where to save your file, give it a name and make sure to choose PhotoWorks Buffer as the renderer. From this same window, you can also determine how many frames per second you wish to have and what portion of the animation you will save, if not the entire animation.  I decided to go with the default number of frames per second of 7.5 and to save only the first two seconds of the animation.

Another small dialog window opens, this time prompting you to select a compressor. Depending on the kind of compression you select, your file size will decrease, but also at the risk of affecting the final quality by adding artifacts, for instance. I chose to leave it uncompressed, but to each their own.  Press OK.

Photoworks will now proceed to render each of the frames and then the AVI file will be generated and saved in the location you previously indicated. Depending on the size of the animation and the options you selected in PhotoWorks, this process can take a few minutes or several hours. You can then take this AVI file to an application such as Camtasia or Pinacle for post-processing.  Neat, huh? I know PhotoWorks will not be around next year, but I hope this information can benefit those of you who still aren’t ready to upgrade just yet.

It is with great sadness that I pass this news over to you. I’ve just read Rob Rodriguez announcing the 36^th PhotoWorks Rendering contest, which will also be the final one.  I feel a bit bummed out, I can’t deny it.  I mean, the rendering contest is a really neat idea and I wish it could continue to be, somehow, that someone could take over and host it for Rob, I don’t know… I even considered offering to host it myself, just to keep it alive, but I know I’m being selfish. It’s a bummer, yes, and I’ll miss it, but I do understand Rob’s reasons for not hosting it anymore, and so, although sad,  I also feel tremendously grateful for all the time he devoted to it over the last three years,  and for all  his hard work and dedication  to the SolidWorks community. I only got to participate in the contest a couple of times, and I never won anything, but I had lots of fun, learned a thing or two, and was always amazed by the creativity of the other contestants. To Rob, here goes a huge THANK YOU from a new PhotoWorks user that was inspired by his work and has learned tons from him. Thank you, Rob!

This is meant to be just a quick post to answer Chris’s question about the color effect on the front of the Mach 4 image that was my entry for last month’s Rendering Contest. 

In short, that effect is achieved by using a solid color as a decal and a mask, only instead of black and white the mask is a gradient of grey tones that act pretty much like a sifter, allowing more of the color to be seen in the areas where the gray is less concentrated, thus creating the effect that the color is more or less intense on one side and then goes gradually vanishing until it completely disappears.  I took the idea from the Step-by-Step PhotoWorks Self-Study Guide. At the risk of sounding like a commercial, yet again, I strongly recommend you get yourself a copy of the book. It’s really good!

While I’m not a PhotoShop expert, I can at least create a gradient and a doodle with an airbrush. This is more than enough (for now) to explain about this kind of use for a decal and a mask. The decal can be a solid color or a Photoshop (or any other similar software) pattern or texture.  The mask can be a gradient such as this one.

 

Or it can also be a doodle like this one that I made in Photoshop by using an airbrush tool and blurring it a bit afterwards.  My idea with this one was to create an effect of graffiti over a wall.

So, as a decal I used the following image, which is merely a 2 in x 2 in square of solid color.

 

And my mask was the doodle show previously. Notice though that I had to invert the mask in the decal property manager. This is because Photoshop will only let the color through the white or lighter areas in the mask.

The effect kind of looks like a wall that got scribbled with graffiti, doesn’t it? At least a bit?