Photoworks in 2004 & general opinion?

I'm about ready to suggest the "wait till SP3" routine...

I've been experiencing some of the most unusual quirkyness I've ever seen in SW. For example, sometimes when I use the Move Component command, SW will ask "Save the assembly?" every time I move the component. This happens at random.

On the plus side though, I haven't seen anything catastrophic... yet.

Mike Wilson

That's been happening to me in 2003 since I've loaded my Spaceball back on my system. I had done without it for quite a while because of quirkiness in 2001+.

'Spork'

"Mike J. Wils>

Hi Toby,

Given that PhotoWorks is a must for your work I'd strongly recommend sticking with 2003 and PW1 especially as there are no usable avantages of PW2 over PW1.

In my experience PW2 in 2004 is still riddled with bugs and SW don't seem interested in fixing them. I get at least one crash a day in PW2, when I'm forced to use it. Plus the Mental Ray rendering engine in PW2 is half the speed of Lightworks engine in PW1. After 8 times of having had to leave the sluggish PW2 to render overnight only to find it crashed in the morning I'm staying with 2003/PW1 and waiting until SW2005 before I move up!

JayB

"....waiting until SW2005 before I move up!"

If a someone was interested in using SolidWorks for industrial design or for working with imported surface data what you wrote above makes a lot of sense to me.

You have to wonder how much longer this is going to go on ??? I guess the answer is when D-Cubed delivers a much more robust 3D DCM or when SolidWorks Corp. decides that being to dependant on third party components is having too much of a negative effect on the product.

jon

in SW 2004 and PW2 you cannot render models with no PW data.. so if you have some legacy parts wich have only correct color on them, PW2 in SW2004 don't respont to "use Solidworks materials" option... it only makes them gray..

...big thing when you have a freaking big assembly in wich you have 1 or

2 components defined in PW and others just in "right color" and you need to get a somewhat nice picture with shadows out of it..

really great, but what are the main problems/bugs people

it or any improvements?

upgrading to a richly featured, new release, low sp SW

As usual, you don't have a clue.

Any clues what it is?

Like 3D DCM?

Where's that clueless moron that was raving a few weeks ago that third party compnents were the wave of the future?

You'd like the idiot.

I resisted changing to PW2 in 2003 but I had no option with 2004 - WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP! All of my current assemblies (carried over from 2003 or earlier - unfortunately this includes a huge standard part & assembly library that I use with just about every project) will only render grey and I don't really feel like @*!!?ing around with it any longer. All I want is a quick render using the colours that I had set - now all I can do is a crappy screen print to JPG.

NOT HAPPY JAN!!

Merry :-)

looks really great, but what are the main problems/bugs people

with it or any improvements?

worth upgrading to a richly featured, new release, low sp SW

Solidworks says this is fixed in 2004 sp1, but as of last Friday my VAR didn't know when that will be out.

Richard PMSC

Isn'nt SolidWorks built ENTIRELY on third party components?

"jon banquer" skrev i meddelandet news:bklc66$2jmf0$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-168325.news.uni-berlin.de...

Thanks all for your posts, they are very constructive.

I have come to pretty much the same conclusions, although I was also about to get a few animations underway until reading Mike Wilsons' post above : Animator PW2 and SW 2004. Looks like another wait! Me thinks we might be playing with Lightwave next.

regards

Toby

Well seeing as how I have been working around long enough in both PW1 and PW2....it really is 6 in one hand...blah blah blah.

Now stand point 1....SW is an engineering program and has been implementing new functionality and features every year. One thing that I remember thinking was "hey I would like to to render with the program" We bought PW1 and WHOOO was I let down in regards the quality, since I was use to the much higher level of quality from programs like Alias or 3Ds. But I though hey, PW1 communicates to the clients what is whatin regards to materials. It might not be "glass" but hey I am CAD junkie not a rendering "have to make everything look pretty" junkie. Even in teaching the program, students would always import thier models from SW to somewhere else.

Stand point #2 I want X,Y, and Z from SW and I want it now.You can even see posted in the UG today how ppl are asking for better control over certain aspects of the program. (ie animation, better renderings back when it was PW1) So SW emplored Mental ray to do up their graphics engine and thus we have PW2. IMO it give a much higher level of quality over PW1. With this higher level of quality comes a price. How could it not? That price is more time to render. I am not happy about this by any means. Should I go out and get a better computer to help offset this? or better yet should I set up a render farm?

It seems like in some ways ppl will never be happy. Some like the old ways others the new. Cant please everybody. If you render PW2 at its lowest quality it is pretty much as fast as PW1.For me I just became content, there is no one program that has ALL of the answers, but it seems like SW is trying to move towards that goal. Is that a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

I am in agreement with a few of the guys around here, the animator needs a complete overhaul, or at least alot more control that what is given right now.

My point would be that SolidWorks Corp. depends much to heavily on third party components rather than doing what the companies who develop SolidEdge, Vision, thinkdesign / thinkshape, etc. do... which is rely less on the third party component developers to come up with all the needed solutions.

I have no problem with using third party components. The problem I have is that SolidWorks Corp appears to wish to save R&D money in a way that other companies do not.

jon

Working in the programming development departments of all those firms are you now?

Here is a list of about 40 posts by jb extolling the use of third party components as the wave of the future:

(If that's the future we are history [stolen outright from a cartoon comercial].)

I'm certain that there are many, many more in a similar vein using other buzzwords than "components". I think he wondered about the compiler vendors as well .... components everywhere .....

AND he's promoted various systems just because you can buy your points form one vendor and lines from another (almost) ....

HTH