4yr user of SW, any tips on starting to use Photoworks?

We have had Photoworks as part of our SolidWorks package for years, but
no one ever really used it. After seeing some pretty amazing
renderings at SW World, I want to try and start using it. We do mostly
sheetmetal machinery. Is there a template of some sort that I could
transfer all the photoworks settings to one of my models and render?

Any tips/suggestions/comments welcome. Thanks

 

Buy the PW step by step guide from your VAR. It's a very good learning
tool.

 

I'm not much good at using PhotoWorks either, but you might try the
following sites:
http://www.bxhdesigns.com/
http://www.robrodriguez.com
In Rob's site there is another PhotoWorks tutorial under "SWW Presentations"
that is probably the first one to go through.

Mark Biasotti also gave a presentation at SolidWorksWorld on PhotoWorks. I
am guessing/hoping that he will make it available to those who didn't go to
SWW as well.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

This is actually helpful for starting out. For me it's always getting
the lighting right that is the hardest.

http://www.productdesignforums.com/index.php?showtopic=781&hl=photoworks&st=0

KM

 

Ken,

The easiest and most realistic way to light a scene in PW is to enable
indirect illumination and use an hdr image on a spherical background.
You will be amazed how well it works. I should write a tutorial on
this being its a more advanced technique and not really explained
anywhere.

 

My advise, listen to whatever Rock Guy says. He is a PW guru!

 

Thanks Mike.

You know what they say about guru status. It can quickly turn to urug!
lol

 

I am up for learning anything. What is HDR?

KM

 

High Dynamic Range. You can use an HDR image to light your PW scene.
I'd explain it better but I'm no expert either. I basically have the
general concept and I know how it works within PW. Its really easy to
set up and in produces great results. I won't say its perfect because
there is still some tweaking that needs to be done to achieve something
close to perfection. When I get some time I'll do a tutorial on how to
set it up in PW and where to find some HDR images. Check
www.robrodriguez.com in a couple weeks for it. If I get it up before
that I'll post a notice here.

 

This tutorial has been bouncing around for a while

http://www.triaxialdesign.com/Tips_tricks/Tips&Tricks AUG-2004.pdf

really good stuff inside. but as anyone who will tell ya, renderings is
art as much science

 

ok. I have found some HDR images and am trying some renderings right
now. One question. The HDR image I have does it need to be spherical
as well as picking spherical environment or can the HDR image be flat?

KM

 

That is a good tutorial. It was written by Mike J Wilson. His website
is amazing. The HDR image works in a similar fashion but it's more of
an on/ off type setting, there are really no settings to control the
image unless you decide to use a background color. In which case some
of the information in mike's tutorial applies.

I also agree that rendering is as much art as science. It's very
subjective to opinion and everyones opinion is different.

 

You know, if anyone was going to win a Joe Pesci look-alike contest, it
would be good ol' Mike Wilson.

I really miss Mike. I'm wishing he would surface again. At SW World I
was sitting at a table with 3 people who had worked with Mike at 3
different places. He's really a creative genius, and this NG is getting
a little boring. Time for some alien landings and government
conspiracies! Let's all put on our tinfoil beanies and see if we can
get Mike Wilson to pay us a visit!

matt

 

Go to the background/forgroud tab in the scene set-up manager. In the
environment area check "enable sherical environment (on right half way
down the dialog box). Then you have the option to the left to use
background color. You can do this or you can uncheck that box and use
the browse box to browse to an image. You can find a number hdr images
here http://www.debevec.org/Probes/ . I have downloaded them all.
Each one will produce a different effect.

Next you will want to enable Indirect Illumination under PW options. I
would also recommend unchecking the default radius box and choosing
your own radius value, I typically set it to a large size (1000').
Also turn off all your lights in PW so only the image and ID are
providing light for the scene.

Render and see what happens. If you use the background color option
you can adjust the color settings to adjust the lighting. You can also
add the normal lighting in SW/PW (or turm it back on) in conjuction
with the image lighting. The normal lighting settings will probably be
very set very low. I have found this method really speeds up my
lighting set up and also achieves a more realistic looking image.

let me know how it turns out.

 

I had already downloaded those probes from debevec. The part I had
open to mess with was supposed to be white plastic so those probes
don't offer much when trying to do white plastic. I will be interested
to see what happens when working with chrome parts. Most of my
renderings are not in a natural scene so I will probably stick to the
solid colors but it's always good to learn more. I will be interested
into seeing your tutorial. Maybe with your website you could start a
photoworks rendering contest and have a common part/assy that everyone
can do. The winner gets to upload his settings for his render to your
website for everyone to study. What do you think of that?

KM

 

Great idea, I should work on that!
If your going for white plastic you'll probably want to stick with
using a background color for your sphere setting. White can be a tough
one. I like the hdr images for reflective materials because the
reflection will show in the nodel. The colors don't work so well for
that. Food for thought, you can save any rendering out of PW as and
HDR image.

 

The rumor I heard at SW World was that Mike is no longer working in the "if
I tell you anything I'll have to kill you" job. If the rumor is right, then
it seems likely he will show up sooner or later. Preferably sooner! But
couldn't we channel him better without our tinfoil beanies?

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

1. I strongly agree that the single best way to start a good rendering
is to turn off all the lights and use a surrounding background image of
some sort for general illumination - which you can get by enabling
indirect illumination. You will be 80% of the way there just with
this. I often have to tweak the background image a little to get
certain results when i am finicky (done in PhotoShop if I am using
'enalbe spherical environment', or by changing the mapping settings if
I am -ugh- using the spheres in the scene dialog).
This also eliminates the need for a 'key' light, whose only function is
to get illumination from behind which the background image will give
you for free.
When using indirect illumination, I find that I have to reduce the
'diffuse' value of materials down to around 0.5 or 0.6 or the colors
will get washed out when I add the next important element, which is:
2. I always have to add at least one light to get 'farkles' and other
highlights on the model. I choose a directional light because they are
easiest to, um, direct. I keep reading tutorials that suggest using a
point light for specular highlights, and frankly I can't understand
that because the highlights created by point lights are so much harder
to control precisely.
Remember, Indirect illumination does not create specular highlights,
only diffuse illumination. The only time where it won't matter is if
you have a hard edged object with no curves - PWx can't create specular
highlights a crisp edge so there is no point in adding he light. But
crisp edges without highlights are not very realistic - even a crisp
machined part will usually have a highlight on its edges, unless it is
razor sharp (my Dad taught me to that the way to tell when to stop
sharpening a knife is when there is no highlight along the blade, but
almost no objects I am likely to render are that super sharp) Every
hard edge on my models gets a nominal fillet (.005" or so) just to
create highlights

Also, the directional light will add some, er, direction to the
representation of the model. Folks who did marker rendering will
remember that you always want to have one side of an object brighter
than the other to help the object 'turn the corner'. This principle is
also backed up by photography books, and if you intend to do much PWx I
strongly recommend that you go to your library and check out a book on
beginners photography - the more closely you set up your scene and
lighting as if you were making a real photograph, the more
photo-realistic the rendering will be. Yeah, that sounds like
stupid-simple advise, but I swear that most of the time I help people
who can't get the images they want out of PWx the real source of their
problems is just that - they are not trying to set up the lights and
scene as they would for a basic, real-world photo. They think because
its softtware for some reason the same rules don't apply!

Good luck - its fun when you creat that first kick-ass rendering
-Ed

 

Wow - thanks for an awesome reply!

I'm in the same boat as the original poster - after attending SWW and
seeing some of the amazing renderings and models, it's really inspired
me to get off my ass and get back into designing things that DONT go
inside some piece of industrial equipment (my day job).

I finally have some horsepower to run photoworks at home and this has
been something that i've been wanting to do for a long time now.
Thanks for the good first step.