Hello comunity.
I will start to work in a new company in a few weeks and they say that their engineering and design departments work with Solidworks to create and design their products.
I will make realistic renderings for marketing department but they want that I will use the models made with solid and if I will create any model these departments can use it too.
Then I need to create a workflow that includes Solid and Blender (with some addon maybe), but that it not break the mesh to use the UVS and textures and the product is not seen with artifacts.
I don’t do “product design” as such in Solidworks, but we automatically derive production drawings based on customers room sizes with our equipment changing sizes. Well, it’s a “little more” advanced than that, but yeah, simple stuff.
Whenever I render, it’s basically an STL export of a simple room with our models in it, and our models are simplified mockups for resource reasons.
After import in Blender, it’s usually cleaning up the room geo and replacing the mockup equipment in given position with real equipment models that took time to convert and is not error free (but usually unnoticeable).
It depends on the model. Solidworks exports (.stl, haven’t had success with anything else) as tris, which are a nightmare to handle. If you can, plan your solidworks model in advance; model it such that bevels, chamfers, radiuses, holes etc can be suppressed before export, without anything being dependent on them. Then in Blender you have less tris to worry about and spend less time cleaning it all up. But you do have to add in those features as Blender geo. Unless extreme closeup, use/bake the bevel node instead of actual bevels/chamfers/deburrs.
Solidworks doesn’t have UVs afaik, although I’m on the standard version.
It’s hard to give any advice without knowing what kind of products you’re talking about. And unless you do simple rooms I doubt I’m the right guy to ask However, I would be very interested in hearing how it goes.
Personally, if the product is complex machining and surfacing with lots of smooth curves, I might try out Keyshot or Modo even over Blender. Since I’m on Solidworks Standard, I can’t try it’s own renderer (Visualize?).
Thank you for comment.
The products are bathroom complements like faucets, bathtubs, shower columns, sinks, toilets, etc. and generally all have curves and design forms.
I found this addon but we need to try it.
Exporting to fbx will speed things up. But the files from solid will have to be cleaned up drastically to be used with Uvs and rendering.
I work with a company that has an engineering department that supplies files for me in solid. I work with the simulation team, and there is also a marketing department where they have some Maya guys. And they provide 3D renderings of the products. I provide game-ready versions. I have had many conversations with these guys also.
Bottom line. There is no getting around spending a ton of time refactoring these models to be used with rendering.
I hope your company appreciates the difference and understands that these are two different worlds. And that your process will take days even weeks for some models.
Are they expecting your models to go back into soild?
That part I have no idea about. But I would assume it would break any of the key manufacturing features they need to preserve.
Did this with Solidworks over the past decade or so before retiring. Tech Illustrator for manuals and part’s lists. Used early days of blender Freestyle line render. Could get close to what Solidworks Composer was good at. Was working in Composer one month after Solidworks purchase of Seemage from French company and made it 3D via Composer [ 3dvia] It’s called Composer today. You can download a demo even today and learn it.
In blender early days of Freestyle, I could make very good shots to line. Company was not interested in free software and spent 47,000 on several seats of Composer.
Even today, I shoot line work same in Blender. Great for manuals, advertising and RPSTL’s.
Purchased RightHemisphere and could do it there too… as good or better than Composer. A few years ago started to upgrade RH to find that SAP bought it.
Glad to have Blender, it is a great companion for me. Enjoy hours of pushing and testing things. Always amazed at what it can do… more and more.
I didn’t know it existed. However, every time I try to activate the add-in, my Solidworks Standard just crashes immediately. I’m not on AMD though, but on Nvidia Quadro M4000. That said, my windows install had a major update this morning (about an hour to do, many restarts), and then also Solidworks 2019 SP2.0 installed without me telling it to.
Whenever I receive a STEP/IGES file I use MOI3D to convert to poligons - best tessellation algorithm I found around - and using OBJ, as intermediate format. Only limitation is that being MOI3D a 32bit application, you can run into memory limit problems. In those cases exporting in multiple steps does the job.
Dunno much about UV translations though, as materials setup is all up to me, so i do all of them from scratch.
However, I would be very interested in hearing how it goes.