Hey,
About car moddles, I found this the other day
http://www.productdesignforums.com/index.php?showtopic=2221&st=0
Might help a bit.
About the animations for testing your card, Try just making a modle that has a lot of surfacing and render it with Global Ilumiantion and Caustics on. Be sure...
Yeah, SW is parametric, so we have tools like equations and design tables, however something like CATIA is more parametric in that it can also control complex relationships in parts. CATIA supports the whole Product Lifecycle Management system; every aspect of a product, from original design...
Well at 120 seconds with 24 fps, that is 2880 frames, they only have to take 1 and a bit minutes each for the render to take 60 hours. GI was not available at that point so I was just using the basic Indirect Illumination for images of about 768 lines.
They seem to often use CATIA or other full PLM packages. It is also common for companies to developed in house packages if they need them. SolidWorks is not used for this kind of thing because it does not have fully featured PLM control and it is not robust enough to deal with such complex...
60 hours usually obviously depending on complexity and number of frames.
I have used this technique in earlier versions of SolidWorks where you had less control over the render able time frame. There was a command to reverse the animation so I set up two computers, on rendering forward and one...
