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TIP of the DAY: Poor Man's Rendering Method

Suppose you need to get a decent image of your assembly on disk at a resolution acceptable for Tech Pubs. You don't have PhotoWorks and if you did, you wouldn't have the time or patience to set it up. What to do?

Believe it or not you can use a drawing to get a really respectable image file. The steps are as follows:

  1. In part or assembly mode orient your model the way you would like to see it.
  2. Save the orientation (Space Bar, Create Named View)
  3. Start a drawing and bring in the model. Turn off the sheet format. Pick a scale to fill the sheet.
  4. Save As to a tiff.
  5. Using the options pick color, PackBits and set the dots per inch. This may need to be varied depending on the amount of detail. There is a bit of trial and error. 300 is a good starting point.
  6. Scale to fit.
  7. Save out the image now.
  8. Using your favorite paint program (I like GIMP), check that the jaggies are down to an acceptable level (remember this is a raster image.)
  9. Crop away any uneeded white space and save to a file.

Done.

An even quicker way to get a fairly good graphic if you are running a high resolution monitor (1600x1200 or above) is to orient your model on screen, hit the save screen image once, hit F11, use the Shift key and middle mouse button to size to fill the screen and then RMB to get recent commands and again use the save screen image command. Then using your favorite paint program (GIMP?) paste the clipboard image and save to a file.

And before actually rendering it is a good idea to adjust the lights to get the detail you need without washouts or shadows.

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I just cheat, and use Snag It on a 1900 pixel screen for the quickies, not that it is the best but it is quick.

Bo

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Bo

Another method is by grabbing snapshots of the screen with the screen capture icon. To overcome the limited resolution of the screen, I zoom in by a factor of 3 or 4 and capture a grid of multiple screens, let's say 4 rows and 4 columns. For that I need to pan around with the arrow keys and count the strokes to get even spacing. Afterwards I assemble the tiles in Photoshop and get a huge image. For example, with a 1600 x 1200 screen each capture is already close to 2 Megapixel (minus the borders), and 4 rows x 4 columns x 2MP =

32MP. My own screen has 2560 x 1600 pixel, so I need fewer tiles.

Afterwards you can downsample the image to 50%. This smooths out the jaggies and makes the file size more managable (32MP become 8MP - still very nice).

When using the RealView display in SW2008 the rendering quality of the dynamic display is already presentation quality, and it is also very quick to adjust the lights.

Note: For the tiling / stitching method 3 things are important:

1) Overlap the rows and columns slightly (5 - 10%). 2) Don't use the perspective display mode; the tiles would not match, as with each new panning position the vanishing point changes relative to the model 3) Don't use any of the gradation or cloudy backgrounds; only the model itself will pan and zoom, the background always remains stationary. Any plain color background is fine, though.

Wilfried

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wilfried

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