Blender rendering coming along

How do you interface with solidworks models?

Johnny

you need to export SW bits as VRML - give your SW assy parts individual colours -makes life easier later when you assign textures etc. and you need to auto smooth the objects when in Blender. Blender takes a bit of getting used to and playing around with -its main weakness presently is the lack of good info for new users -which may put people off- not ideal but hey its not bad for free.... I have thought about writing a tutorial for SW users purposes -maybe I'll do this early next year

Sweet! The mini cooper renders are way kewl!!

Hi,

I've spent a lot of time recently coming up to speed with this software, in particular, linking Solidworks -> Blender -> Crafter ->

Yablex -> Yafray to create the type of raytraced images they show on in the Yafray gallery.

I found that rendering in Blender can produce nice results, but the clunky approach to creating reflections etc is very painful.

I have a feeling that for simple presentations, Blender's "toon" shading with black outlines may be useful, so will investigate that more (a lot like Rhino3d's 'Penguin').

Have yet to produce anything spectacular, but am slowly getting the hang of it. Would be interested to see your results...

Regards,

Anthony

Anthony,

I have not used Blender in years.. last I tried it out it was painful then so, I would not expect it to be a lot better (hey, it's a free tool)?

I may play with it though.. do you have a simple procedure you can share here?

thnx..

Anth>

Paul,

I saw your latest post via Mailgate, but it hasn't shown up on Google Groups yet (my usual newsreader - what do you use?)

No, I don't have a simple tutorial on how to get all of this running together. I'm planning to write one, so that the experienced posters to this newsgroup can leapfrog me and show us all how to do the really cool stuff.

In the mean time, please look at:

The basic steps are:

1. Export model out of Solidworks as VRML, then open in Blender
2. Set up camera angle, light positions, ground plane etc in Blender
3. Run the Yablex script from within Blender, and use it to assign general material qualities, specify nature of each light etc
4. Create special materials in Crafter, and pull them into Yablex
5. Use Yablex to create an XML file of the scene
6. Open Bagisas and use it to run the render (Bagisas is an interface to the XML file, offering the kind of benefits a good HTML editor offers over, say, Notepad).
7. Bagisas calls on Yafray to do the rendering
8. Tweak lighting, image size etc in Bagisas and re-run rendering

Its not essential to use Bagisas, since the latest Yablex scripts will generate the image automatically if you choose to. However, I've found it quite a handy tool for fine tuning.

Have seen UV mapping used to good effect, but am personally used to more simple 'projection' and 'cube' based mapping.

Hope this helps, curious to know how you get on.

Regards,

Anthony

This is a little off topic, but there is a guy, Andrew Prousalis, that is working on a rendering add-in for SW. Here is his original post from the SolidWorks forum...

"Is anyone here interested in the ability to render directly from solidworks using Prman, entropy, bmrt, AIR, 3Delight, aqsis, pixie, or (insert favorite renderman-compliant renderer here)? If so, respond listing what features of these renderers you think would be most beneficial to you."

His last post (Oct 28, 2003) indicated his software would be "available soon". I'm wondering if anyone has anymore info regarding his add-in.

Mike Wilson

----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----

---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

there was actually a discussion in the Blender developer community about the same renderman compliant renders however I don't think there was a lot of enthusiasm for it.

Andrew just posted this...

"Phew! finally. I have an Alpha done..."

There are more infos in the forum on how to test it.

Mike

----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----

---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

sorry Name, I cant find it ,can you be more specific about location please