I must admit this time around I haven’t been experimenting with the Beta as much as I would’ve liked. I guess you can say I’ve had a lot on my plate. To those of you who sent emails and other messages expressing your good wishes and prayers for my son: Thank You! The surgery went well and he’s recovering nicely. Even though I’m a bit envious of the other bloggers that got to visit SolidWorks headquarters this year, I’m definitely glad I stayed behind and was able to be here for him.  Anyway, I did get to test one or two things in the Beta version and was hoping I could find some time to blog about it.

I guess it is somehow obvious that since I had spent a bit of time playing with animations of lights in SolidWorks 2010 and rendering the animations in PhotoWorks, I would be curious about how all that would work out in SolidWorks 2011, now that PhotoWorks was out of the equation and PhotoView was the new rendering software. I guess in my mind I had this image of the “old” PhotoView and how it used to work as a stand alone application. I had no idea how it could replace PhotoWorks or even work out with the Motion Manager to produce a rendered animation, for instance.

So,  I tried it and was pleasantly surprised by all it can do now: you can add different kinds of lights and modify their intensity and color, apply special effects, modify the quality of the shadows they produce,  add decals, and much more  . In fact, even though I know it is PhotoView, the capabilities, the user interface, and the fact that it runs inside SolidWorks  makes me think a lot of PhotoWorks… only somehow simpler. It seems faster too, and more convenient. At least I don’t feel so threatened by this change, because what I already knew how to do in PhotoWorks translated really easily into this new PhotoView.

In this image you can see this extra tab called the Display Manager. From here you can access appearances, scene, lights, cameras and decals. If you look carefully, you will notice that each one of my lights exhibits two icons. The one of the left means that the light is turn on in SolidWorks, while the one on the right means that the light is turned off in PhotoView. Turning the lights on in PhotoView won’t show on the screen at all, because rendering takes place on a separate window.

So I turned all my lights in PhotoView and proceeded to create a preview render, like you see in the image. Oops! That’s not right!  Well, it makes sense that whatever settings I had for PhotoWorks won’t really apply in PhotoView, so I had to take a closer look to the lights and the new tools available in order to create a similar fog effect as I had in PhotoWorks.  By the way, while the rendering is taking place in this window, you can simply minimize it and continue working. It doesn’t leave you hanging there, waiting for it to be over. Isn’t that cool?

So I discovered that I could easily edit the PhotoView settings for each of my point lights. To achieve an effect similar to what I had before in PhotoWorks, I had to uncheck the option Shadows and check Fog. The fog option works in a way very similar to PhotoWorks, allowing the light to be visible as it would be in a room where there’s fog or light rain. 

 It took a little experimentation to find the right values to make this work, but the cool thing is that by leaving the preview render window open I was able to see the result of my adjustments to each setting instantaneously. I didn’t even had to check OK and or finish the command. I loved that!

After adjusting some of the settings of my two directional lights, I tried generating a final render using a better quality than the preview. You can adjust the quality of the preview and final renders, among other things, by accessing the PhotoView options. Notice how a second window opens on top of the preview one. In fact, even if you didn’t have the preview render window open to begin with, both windows will open whenever you do a final render. You should, however, still be able to minimize the final render window and continue working in SolidWorks. I think this part needs a bit of work, though. I was able to minimize the final render window, but the preview would not minimize. However, I was still able to open a different file and, after a few seconds delay, the preview window finally got out of my way. It wasn’t immediately, but it did happen.

Then I took a look at what happened to my lights inside the animation I had for this particular model. I noticed that all my lights were still off in PhotoView inside the animation and not only that, but the settings hadn’t been updated either.

I was a bit discouraged by this because that meant I would have to repeat all my work adjusting the settings, but then I realized that it makes sense that you can have lights for each animation that are altogether  independent from what you have for the model or for a different animation.  I also noticed that if I started a new study, then my lights would inherit the settings I had in PhotoView for my model. Interesting.

Here is another example of the use of fog in lights. This is a spot light that I added to the model of this flash light, remember? See? Too large values for fog distance and quality produce a beam of light that almost makes it look like a ray gun instead of a light. Lower values produce softer, more natural results in this case. It’s a bit of trial and error, I think, and it’s really nice to see it all change practically at the same time you do the changes.

And of course you can also edit the scene. This user interface seems to me like a nice mix between what it used to be with PhotoWorks and what’s new with PhotoView. It’s easy to use. Ah, did you notice that little pink handle near my cursor? I’m not sure what to call it, but if you click on it and drag it you can actually dynamically adjust the location of the floor in the scene.  That’s really neat. And it’s all taking place right in front of your eyes, in real time. No more guessing!

To be brutally honest with you, I was kind of bummed out that PhotoWorks was being replaced with PhotoView because I didn’t quite like the “old” user interface that was first introduced and because I felt kind of cheated for all the time and effort I put into learning PhotoWorks in the first place. I felt it had been a total waste of my time, but you know what? After checking it out I’m actually feeling much better. I really like what they did with it and I feel like my time spent with PhotoWorks wasn’t really a waste, that it will pay off after all. What do you think?

 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…

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.

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.

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.