A new Material for illustration

[Ballista]

This is probably a big ask ,but could a Material be created that can produce a image that can be used to  for patent applications ,as this is an area of my work I really struggle with.

[guest84672]

You mean like an image that looks like a sketch, or a cartoon?

[Ballista]

Hi Thomas

If you look at a Technical illustation that has come from a cad package they do a fair job ,but all the ones I've used required quite alot of cleaning up, removing loads of curves and lines, thickening others ,trimming and blending etc. pretty tedius work! You can end up with a pretty clean illustration. But the images can end up with very little shape , especially if the model has large areas of surfaces that curve in both directions .
Compare this with illustrations drawn by the best technical illustrators who can define shape through shading with only arcs and lines.
The type of Material I'm thinking of would have to be a white and/or transparent material that could display a shadow as a series of lines and curves ,and have control over the line weight .It would also be good if the image could be outputed as an alpha channel tiff with an outline.
I have no idea whether this can be done .I can only Ask ?

Andy 

[quigley]

Funnily enough this also applies to technical illustration for things like instruction manuals which tend to be printed on cheap stock in black ink only - hence clear line drawings using the traditional "Thick and Thin" line types. As I am in the middle of a rather large, rather complex project right now doing this, this is close to my heart and believe me I've tried everything on the market to get decent automatic results.

First off, you really need vector output rather than raster, so that in itself probably rules out Keyshot. But even if you could get raster output there are a few niceties to be observed.

I've been using Deep Exploration v6 CAD to test out generating thick n thin type artwork from SolidWorks and CATIA CAD data. I've also trialled Quadrispace. Deep Exploration produces a FAR superior .ai vector from CAD files. Key points are:

1. The boundary (the THICK) line can be set to any point size and type desired
2. If the model is an assembly DE breaks this down in the .ai file as layers so each layer is a unique component from the model - this is  HUGE timesaver.
3. There are no duplicate lines hidden under the thick boundary curves
4. The curve quality is excellent - very crisp and clean

Taking this as a starting point for KeyShot's Thick n Thin rendering mode, item 1 could be a render setting, Item 2 could be layers in a .psd file, Items 3 and 4 don't need to apply to rasters.

How about it?

[Oliver]

Love it! As a half-way measure, how about a material or a render mode that gives a B&W cell-shading effect plus outlines?

Something that results in a 20% and 60% grey flat shading, plus heavy outlines, and light internal lines (tangent lines optional)?

Output on separate layers. As we can dial-in the render resolution, I wouldn't have too much of a problem if they were raster rather than vector images.

We create lots of 2D line-art from CAD data, and have a well established workflow (SolidWorks drawing exported as PDF, brought into Illustrator and tidied up) but it's still pretty time consuming - and generally over-kill.

SolidWorks' Photoworks has a "render with edges" mode that goes some way towards this, though that never made it into our workflow for many reasons. There are other workarounds e.g. Photoshop post processing, that make this possible now, but workarounds tend to be fragile and time consuming...