photoworks: HEEEELP

ok, I'm confused. I've got the tick-box for 'display photoworks materials in
Solidworks' ticked. My product looks the correct colours. But the render
turns everything to chrome or some similar material.

I go into the sub assembly level. The material list in the tree shows the
correct materials and the parts highlight when I click on the materials. But
when I render they're all CHROME again.

I go into the part level. The material list shows the correct material. But
when I render the part renders CHROME.

Please please help. This was workign last night, but I've re-opened since
then, and I admit, I've 'updated' to SP2 SW2007 since things we're looking a
bit strange: I left a render running all night and it it took four hours to
render the bottom left corner and the rest was left BLACK.

I set up as follows:

I have a top level 'studio' assembly, which has lights, cameras and a floor.

I have a product sub assembly which I drop into the Studio assembly.

I apply materials at PART LEVEL and then save&close before returning to the
STUDIO assembly.

I have CNTRL-Q rebuilt my parts.

Where are my materials? I want to enter the Solidworks design competition,
and it says the product should be rendered using Solidworks (so I cant give
it to our Studio Max guy to do a this simple job in a couple of hours....)

Please help!

 

OK, seems to have been to do with using the 'link' material tick box for
custom materials. I unticked this on all the materials and now they appear
to be rendering properly. Any further stuff on this would be greatly
appreciated.

 

Lee--

I've had a similar problem with setting up scenes in assemblies for
Photoworks.

In SW 2006, I set up 212 separate items all in different configs, so
when I rendered each part in it's respective config it would have the
same lighting and such as the other 211 parts.

Thing is, when I assigned the materials at the part level they would
only render with their proper materials after a supress and resolve on
the part in the assembly tree.

The idea for all this pre-production scene setup was to allow me to get
universal results across the board, because these images were going to
be used in retail sales brochures, POP sales materials, advertisements,
trade manuals, web, and possible television ads. Similar aesthetics
across the line of products was critical.

I had a lot of help and was given a macro to render each config to a
file of desired resolution and type, which helped tons. Still though,
the improper material thing killed the whole proposition, and would
result in my missing my deadline.

What ended up happening is my VAR's allstar VB guy tossed in a line of
code to supress the active part and resolve it again before the macro
would render to file.

Works really slick.

Hit the button, go home, 18 hours later I've got 212 tiff files
rendered at 2"x4" x 1200 dpi.

Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate it!
--Matt Schroeder