solidworks quality effects render/keyshot?

[Robert V.]

Hi all,

I rendered my coffeemaker, but I wasn't happy with the AA effects.
Even though I had set the AA option to 8 in keyshot, I still got aliasing.

Then it suddenly struck me, I modelled my coffeemaker with the perfomance and image quality setting at medium. I set every option at max, and the model looked far better in solidworks (of course!!!). However, when I saved the model, keyshot wasn't able to open the *.sldprt file anymore. (when I used the keyshot plugin I got an empty scene.)

Now I'll show the elimination of the settings, so that I exactly know which option is the faulty one...
These settings are the settings I changed:

First, "performance tab", below "curve generation": "level of detail". I set it to "more" (effected file size only with a few kb... Keyshot could still open the file)

Then I increased "shaded and draft quality HLR/HLV resolution" to max setting (the "red zone")
File increased with 111mb, keyshot gives an error message and quits.

And to check the last setting, I decreased the last option to medium again and I set "wireframe and high quality HLR/HLV revolution" at max.
This didn't effect the filesize at lot (again, only a few kb), and keyshot could open the file.

I found out that when you are in the red zone of "shaded and draft quality HLR/HLV resolution" the file size didn't increase a lot at the beginning of the red zone.

I have to say that the model did look better when I set the "shaded and draft quality HLR/HLV resolution" option to something near the max, the model looked much better in keyshot as well!



In the end, I just decreased "shaded and draft quality HLR/HLV resolution" with one click at a time to see at which point keyshot was able to open the file. Just three clicks from the max, keyshot was able to open the file. It had an insane amount of triangles and verticals. Now it's a BIP file of 394mb!
But it took at least 5min to open.

(ps, these "clicks" are done by using the arrow keys left and right, of course just pressing the arrow key one time = 1 click)


I hope I could help you (in the future) and if you have any tip for me, please reply.

[guest84672]

Hit "H" and see how many polygons you have in the scene.

The current importer is only 32bit - that's why your scene is empty when the settings are too high. You run out of memory.

Thomas

[Robert V.]

this is the amount of triangles:

4554194

I do have 8gb of DDR3-1600, is that not enough?

[JTrusty]

I set every option at max, and the model looked far better in solidworks (of course!!!).

Increasing the tessellation is the only thing you can do to rid yourself of rendering artifacts. However, regardless how high you up the tessellation you will never rid yourself of all the rendering issues surrounding Solidworks meshes. The problem lies in how Solidworks generates the mesh. The SolidWorks tessellation engine is mainly set up to display the model on the screen as rapidly as possible. Mesh quality does not factor into the equation. As such it often generates long, skinny polygons and other irregular polygons. These irregular polygons produced with imperfect or inferior Mesh generation software, will cause rendering artifacts and the resulting image will have flaws. For the highest quality images, the mesh has to be uniform.

You can read more on this subject http://www.caduser.com/reviews/reviews.asp?a_id=224

[Speedster]

Thanks so much for the link to this really important info.  I've never had this exact problem (blank .bips), but my SolidWorks models seldom exceed 2.5 million polys.  However, I do see some tessellation at times, especially on round parts.  I set my AA level in SW to just left of the red "warning" mark.  Of course, much of my stuff is so large the AA is not noticeable.

But, this also begs the question.  Is there a "smoothing" app that can work with SW?  I've also considered a conversion app like Polytrans, so I can take SW into 3dMax, or create, say, .obj files.  I wonder if this would help? 

I attended SolidWorks World this year, but did not think to explore the options.

Bill G

[guest84672]

8GB of RAM are great - but as I said the SW importer is only 32bit for now. You can download the 64bit importer as posted in the download section.

[Robert V.]

Didn't want to start a new topic...

On 1 pc I have Solidworks, on the other keyshot.

If I copy my solidworks file to my "keyshot"-pc, does that automatically import at 64bit? (of course keyshot 2.1.25, 64bit W7)

[guest84672]

No - the new SolidWorks importer coming as part of the next update will be 64bit, though.

[Robert V.]

nice!