Photoworks floor offset investigation...

All;

Playing with the photoworks studio, I have always had the same issue complained about here by others:

The floor when set to an offset of 0, is not touching the parts.

Playing with this further, I found that it has to do with the for lack of a better term, "bounding box" of the parts in the scene. Unfortunately, when you use the default studios, it constantly readjusts your floor offset to 0, so you can't workaround the studios with using a negative floor offset from what I can tell. So, that forces us to go back to using the standard rendering procedure.

Here's what I mean in regard to the bounding box issue:

If I lay a cylindrical object on the top plane of the assemly I intend to render, and give it a floor offset of 0, and the cylinder is perhaps mated tangent, and is free to rotate and translate, if it is oriented such that the corner of the bounding box protrudes through the intended floor, it sets the floor to that lowest point, making things look like they are floating.

This is all pretty unscientific, and not always a "feature" that I can turn off and on at will, but it does behave this way most of the time.

Just some thoughts for discussion...

--cutthroat

Reply to
cutthroat.trout
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Keep it simple. Make your own floor.

KM

Reply to
ken.maren

I hear ya, but it would be nice to be able to use this functionality. I can create floors better than the studio floors, but when I get a quick rendering project to do, call me silly, but I would have thought this would be fixed by now.

I'm on 2005 SP 3.1, how does 2006 work in this regard?

--cutthroat

Reply to
cutthroat.trout

cutthroat - I am sorry to say you are under the delusion that anyone at Solidworks cares about Photoworks 2 :-) It has been full of bugs from the day it was launched and nothing has changed in years.

It just is easier to make your own floor. If you get used to anything in PW it will be smashed in the next release . Nothing in its functionality can be taken for granted from one release to the next.

I have switched to using Maxwell and now no longer need any medication before starting a rendering. Maxwell has just gone through a traumatic release of its latest beta and it is by no means perfect - but its still is so much better than PW - I can forgive it almost anything.

TTFN

Jonathan

Reply to
jjs

For me, the floor offset problem has been going on for so long that I just have my rooms created. You have more control over the overall rendering, at least in the sense of where the model is in the room. (ie models are always in the middle of the floor.)

Saves on headaches of waiting until the fix happens.....

Reply to
modelsin3d

There is a tuturial somewhere in Phiotoworks. In it they set the offset to -59 not zero. I can't find the tutorial I thought it was in Photoworks Help Topics. Try setting the offset to a negative number and approach -59. I think you will find that your objects will approach the floor.

Reply to
George

I found it!!!

SW2006 has Task pane on the right side of screen (I can't remember if it was in SW2005). Quick check is to put your mouse up in the tool bar area on top and right click for list of toolbars. Look for Task Pane, enqable it, click on the icon that looks like a house. This is Solidworks Resources. Select Online Tuorial and then Photoworks. A few pages into the tutorial is where you set up the room.

********* Set Floor offset to -59. When you set Floor offset to a negative value, the floor moves up so the coffee cup rests directly on the floor. ********* The Help file within Solidworks says; Floor Offset - sets the position of the floor relative to the SolidWorks model. TIP: Decrease the value to move the floor closer to the model. ********* But it never says to keep decreasing past zero!!!!!
Reply to
George

The only reason I used the Solidworks floor was to retain perspective without the flattening associated with creating your own floor. The camera feature in 2006 was built for this reason (and for compatibility with other programs like Maxwell). So I would suggest building your own studio with associated materials and creating a set of cameras with a few good perspectives.

Reply to
parel

PhotoWorks has been kind of the runt of the litter, but I believe that things are going to improve. I have great faith in Mark Biasotti and I think that he will see that the PW user interface improves substantially. (That isn't based on any "inside" knowledge, but Mark has never touched a CAD program that didn't get substantially better and he obviously has an interest in PW.) Mark has only been at SolidWorks for a year or two. You would be amazed how long it takes to turn a program like SolidWorks. Software is the hardest thing in the world to change.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

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