Use caution when "red-lining" Image Quality in SolidWorks

[Speedster]

Hi all;

Just a cautionary note if you chose to "red-line" the Image Quality in SolidWorks, to improve tessellation quality or other reasons.

Last week Rex was giving the webinar on Preparing your Portfolio, and mentioned he usually shoves the Image Quality slider all the way to the right, in the red zone.  This is fine with smaller parts or assemblies, and those with few polygons.

But I sure learned my lesson, hence this warning!  I have a large assembly, and one part demonstrated excessive tessellation.  So I decided to put the slider in the middle of the red zone in an attempt to iron it out.

BIG mistake!  Took about an hour as it recomputed, on 8 cores and using a full 16 GB of RAM.  And the 43 MB SW assembly went to 807 MB!

But the kicker was when I DnD imported it into KeyShot 4.1.  The original import had resulted in a 415 MB .bip.  The new import took 5 hours to import, and the end product was now 17 GB!  The 31 million poly count ballooned to an unbelievable 347 million polys!!

So this AM I backed out the Image Quality slider to my normal "right edge of the slider just to the left edge of the red zone", all is well and I'm happily rendering away.

Hope this helps keep some of you out of trouble.  And let's get on SolidWorks to improve their tessellation quality!

Bill G