Trick! Adding linework to a KeyShot render

Started by Speedster, December 04, 2017, 12:08:15 PM

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Speedster

Hi all;

I'm creating drawings of my Steam Launch for a magazine article, and came up with this slick trick that may be of use to a lot of us, so I'm sharing it.

I've always wanted to use color for my scale drawings, but they tend to be quite "flat" without linework, and difficult to measure for a model or whatever.  The linework adds a lot of "snap" to the images, and will print well.

I've long looked for a way to do this, but it wasn't possible until KeyShot 7.  Prior, an "orthogonal" view was not really true ortho, but a really long focus length.  There was still some perspective distortion.  But KS7 presents a true ortho, dead "flat" so to speak.

So it dawned on me that I could comp a KS under a black-line drawing.  Tested it, and bingo!  It worked!

So I did my to-scale drawings (.007 line weight) in SolidWorks and saved them as .png's. SW generates highly tessellated lines, but it works well for this application, so no matter. Also, SW does not generate an alpha layer, so I took them into Photoshop and dropped out the white background. Duplicated the layer.

I then brought in each of my KS renderings (under the layer copy) and carefully lined them up to the drawings.

Done!  Ten minutes!

For the ISO view I used the drawing .png as a backplate, and carefully lined up the model to fit, also using an ortho, not perspective, view.

First image is with the lines, second without.  The third shows the ISO in place, with the fore and aft views waiting for their respective images.

Neat trick!

Bill G