solidworks 2004 photoworks

[G1DESIGN]

anyone know if theres a renderer in 2004 if so ?
Is it going to be a major improvement on 2003 pw2
I seriously hope so as to be honest with you photo works was the only real functionality stopping me from going back to pro e. pw2 really sucks

 

[SBaugh]

I'm sure they are not going change PW2. Maybe they will any bugs that maybe in it now.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
When in doubt, always check the help

 

[G1DESIGN]

The major bug at the moment is its slooooooooooow
this is fundamental with any program that uses mental ray or potrtions of the code in mental ray as a third party renderer the code was never a core part of sw and so will always suffer from this problem in short were stuck with it

just a question 2004 beta 1 uses textures ,shaders and can also has added assosciated dll or cg files but for some reason they fail to function am i to assume to negate the problem of slow rendering that solidworks has implemented similar kinds of technology already used in high end rendering packages or that they are using textures and shaders for graphics card with shader and cg support
as a get around

 

[NathanN]

PhotoWorks is a software renderer. If you want to make it faster, get a new CPU. A new video card will have no effect at all. It is probably quite possible to do this sort rendering on a dx9 video card though, so there may be some significant speed increases in the future. I'm pretty sure SWX 2004 will not solve your problems. I haven't seen anything in the "What's New" that looks like it will solve your problem.

My advice is to get the fastest CPU, motherboard and ram combination you can.

 

[G1DESIGN]

Im fully aware that solidworks is a software renderer and at the moment we have changed to a third party renderer purely because rendering now takes as long in solidworks as it does in maya.
The downside to this approach is that we take the data out of the solidworks pipeline and then import into maya removing the assosiativity from the data set
This means that as the model changes the render has to be done again with re exported data.
as you can guess we dont relly want to do this as its basically a bit of a PITA

The results however speak for themselves as we have significantly more animation control and also the rendered animation and images are significantly better, but here is a point where the time taken to achieve this is not worth the effort and this is why we would like to stick with solidworks.

The ability to do everything in one system was the major draw to solidworks and meant that we could live with its shortcomings in engineering as the benefits out weighed them

whilst installing beta 1 I came across some maya png files and also a folder called textures and shaders which are also found in our maya hardware texture files (not exactly the same admittedly)
this left me wondering are they going to implement some kind of hardware rendering support in pw2 as part of the rendering process as this does lead to significant time reduction in rendering if you have the right hardware

we use fx 2000 cards in all machines and an art pure card in the xeon machine only for maya rendering and animation
Maya supports hardware texture and shading the benefit has been the hardware render time is now shorter than software rendering ie the mental ray engine
At the moment we use 3.06 ghz cpus and a machine with twin 2.8 xeons

As i see it at the moment there arent any bugs in the pw2 renderer at the minute just the same problem of implementing the mental ray code they use for GI that has been seen in every other package that has mental ray as a plug in they are just slow

I could see hardware render support as speeding up render time and that was really the point will it get any quicker

 

[NathanN]

Your hardware certainly is up to spec. You could reinstall SolidWorks 2003 with PhotoWorks1 one, but this is hardly a long term solution. What about RealView in 2004? Would that produce an image of acceptable quality? I have no idea what you're rendering, so I'm just throwing out ideas here.

Nathan

PS Sorry for sounding so abrupt in my earlier post.

 

[JNR]

Hmmmm..... Well now, Mental Ray was used to improve capability! Improved capability in rendering, etc. = slower (relatively speaking). Unfortunately for you the average user does not do as much rendering as you and is more able to accept the speed -v- quality trade-off. On the up-side, typically the first shot of anthing from SW (specially something that appears in an SP rather than the intial release) is slow and limited, then sees a major improvement at the next full release. This is stated policy to get stuff out ASAP to you and see what you want to do with it. So tell them - nicely - and as specifically as you can through the enhancement request process on the support web page. Then keep your fingers crossed. Having said that, it would have been nice if they could have supported PW1 a little longer in parallel. Probably a licence agreement issue - those business types are killing us Engineers again!!!.

3/4 of all the Spam produced goes to Hawaii - shame that's not true of SPAM also.......