Animator PW2 and SW2004

Mike,

Yes. I have also had this problem since Beta 1 of 2004. I reported this as a bug and received confirmation from SolidWorks. I have not received any information on it being resolved. I have been holding back on installing

2004 and this was one of the specific reasons. Unfortunately I don't know of a work around. I really wish a third party would develop a high quality rendering and animation program that worked seamlessly with SolidWorks.

Rob

Thanks for replying Rob. What can I say? This totally SUCKS. SolidWorks has had PLENTY of time to fix this and now I'm totally hosed.

There you have it folks! A typical example of what happens when you risk using an SP0. I envy all those that recommend 2004 whole heartedly. Must be nice not experiencing a catastrophic failure.

I guess I could export my files as Parasolid, rebuild my assembly in SolidWorks 2003 and use PhotoWorks 1.

Mike Wilson

PS: My X-Ray Vision technique is STILL BROKEN in 2004.

Hey Rob,

Have you been seeing some of the great features in the render/animation packages lately!? LightWave version 8 will be showing up soon and for $1,500.00 it's production capable!! If there was a interface to tie, LW (or Inspire), Cinema 4D or even Maya,.. it would be kickass!!

SW Corp and Immersive Design, what you have is a interface which does not have the ease of use fun factor which is neccesary too get the users excited and involved with animations, motion or mechanism studies.

..

Hello Mike,

I do not have Animator and I am not familiar with it´s functionality, but I used a lot of different animation software (most on Mac platform). On most animation packages was the possibillity to export as ".avi" or ".mov", etc but also to export as single frames in ".tif", ".jpg" etc. These single frames can be easily imported in an authoring-software like e.g. "Macromedia Director". There you can easily add sound, add transitions and loops and export it into any movie format you like. Using single frame export has also several major advantages:

- You can resume rendering at any point and add more scenes later

- You can fiddle around with different compression-types when exporting as movie. So you can choose the most efficient compression in sound and movie for your specific kind of project.

- You can easily add sound, transitions and other effects to make the movie even more exciting.

- You can save the project and expand it to any desired length later.

So I instantly hope PW2 does a good single frame export ;-))

Good luck and best regards

Jochen

"Mike J. Wils> > Yes. I have also had this problem since Beta 1 of 2004. I reported this

guys this might be a memory problem though i cant be sure

I use maya for rendering and animation and mental ray as our primary renderer now there are a hell of a lot of quirks even in the full blown seat of mental ray but they are livable as i recall and the main reason we ditched pw2 is that it uses a very cut down part of the gi code from mental images, now a common problem in mr is that of flickering when animating large images using gi,(indirect illumination in sw) this is down to geometry and the renderer and may be causing your problem THIS MAY BE MANIFESTING ITSELF AS YOUR PROB

cant be sure but maybe

"Paul Salvador" wrote in message news:...

I'm going to say this as constructively as I can. After trying to work with Solidworks management on PW2 for over 2 years, I have had to abandon it to get my work done at IDEO. In my opinion there is a fundamental flaw in the management of this product inside the company. I'm sorry to have to say this for those of you SW people listening (please dont' be offended, I still consider you my friends) but you just haven't listened to Ed and I and many others, and too many months have passed to say silent about this publicly. It is also 180 degrees from the way I feel about the core product.

Hew! Now that that is off my chest, I'm currently using Lightwave 7.5 and building all my models in SWX. I use BaronBoym's 3D file converter to get them over to LW natively. I works pretty well. Rendering and animation are awesome. I also have 50 of our machines in Palo Alto setup on a render farm. For those of you who saw the "Kill another CAD" movie at SolidWorld, all of these models, including the Vanquish were built in SWX and ported to Lightwave and then rendered and animated on the "Farm". If I didn't have the farm, you would have not seen the movie when you did. I saved me hundreds of hours, literally. In 2004, there is the added benefit of refined faceting under tools/option/performance/"optomize edge length" which prior to 2004, was a problem especially on cylinder like shapes. Anyway, I'm really happy with LW, although for ease-of-use, I'm leading an effort to get a group of our designers on 3Dmax for consistency's sake. Lightwave meets all of my needs, but the interface is not the best and I still have to take the time to convert to polygonal-mesh. I also have to do some polygon management and fixing in Lightwave on everything I bring in but it doesn't take too much time. The things that are really important to me, LW can do, like burred metal, accurate placement of textures and decals, keyframe spline interpolated animation, area lighting and radiosity, render farm etc, texture layering. Of all of these the materials are the most important. In my line of work, I can't simply apply almost any PW material and show it rendered against corkboard and a gridplate floor and say that's okay. If that works for engineers and designers, that's wonderful and the product works really well, but as soon as you start trying to customize your own materials and scene, it get really hairy! I still can not get my most prolific material, texture plastic (which was really good in PW1) to look right because of the procedural texture is to awful. What is really tragic, is that PW1 was useable, but the quality of shadows and lighting wasn't the best. Dumping Lightworks and switching to Mental Images was a great move and my hope was to "do it right" and not just copy PW1, but for reasons I won't go into, that didn't happen and it turned out that some changes were made but it was NOT a comprehensive evolution which it needed to be. With PW2, the shadows (especially with indirect illum.) is super, but the rest of the product is almost unuseable because of the unresolved bugs. Now you don't get a choice. I can't speak for other users and there corporation's use of the product, but it might suprise you that many of our engineers in IDEO are trying to use the PW product and are failing. It's not just a product for ID's.

Flame off.

Mark

HEY PAUL SOMEONE OUT THERE THAT THINKS LIKE ME

sw is a great package but when you are after the top quality the add ons just dont cut it like they used too things are changing too fast glad to see someone who isnt in the fold of sw and is scared to speak out

sorry to repost also

the problem is as paul salvador mentions is export of cad info to either lightwave max or maya if your in the top ten per cent of design and vizualization companies things will get more competitive and quality will go up we evaluated all three max maya and lightwave all will do the same only differently and its just which interface you get on with(softimage need not apply this is for tv and fx and i know dyson did their tv ads on this package but this is the kind of vizualization we are tlking about)

lightwave maya and max are all good however you need to sort the import pipeline for these packages if you sort this stage you will never look back

Mark Biasotti wrote on 20.9.2003 18:19

Thank you for that excellent flame!!! Absolutely spot on!

I had absolutely the same reaction when I first heard that MentalRay would be integrated. But seeing the current implementation is beyond sad - it is a truly tragic destruction of a powerful product. I think your indication that they have used a subset of the full mental product would partly (partly) explain why it is so bad. I just do not understand how SW could logically introduce a new version of photoworks that is basically a non-functional verson of a great product.

I just hope your friends at SW do read these messages and get it loud and clear: we want a the outstanding world class rendering technology, but we would actually like it to be easy to use and work too!

There is so much that is excellent about SW, it is a shame that this component is what it is.

Daniel

Yes thats what it hink to Paul!!

All we need is a GOOD way to get ou tmodels/assemblies into other 3D rendering programs with teh same quality they are within solidworks. NOt to import them "dumb" but to have parts recognised as parts in exported assemblies. To have control over what layer parts import to in which ever 3D app we want to go to. Perhaps to have joints exported as well. This isnt that complex.. look at the huge array of addins and plugins availabe for 3D applications. And look at the capabilities themselves. We dont ask for a full app... just a converstion done proplerly.

I really really really really wish i coudl get my models and assemblies into 3D Studio MAXIMUS to render with VRay. yes it can be done.. but the 5 steps i have to take end up to pain.. to long.. and for no point anyway as large models are impossible to import, handle, refine, animate, fix up.. you get the point.

Is it to much to ask to simply export an already drawn and defined model or assembly... import it into another program quite capable of "knowing" what its importing... and simply aplying materials and rendering? I think not...

here here mark and daniel.

Is no one using polytrans to move models around from program to program?

Arthur Y-S,

We use PolyTrans to move files from SolidWorks to 3dsmax and Maya for animation and rendering. It works quite well, and only usually requires minor tweeking to clean up the transfer.

-brian hill

yep polytrans here too

Mark,

Thanks for making the (obviously painful) effort to get PW2 implemented right. Too bad the idiots at SolidWorks (I'm not as polite as you are and don't have any personal relationships to lose) didn't listen to you. They can't have a clue if they ignored your inputs. What a waste!

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems