From Artist’s Concept to Production Design

Often times, designs originate as a sketch on a napkin or as a marker rendering. Sketch Picture, allows you to easily capture this information and build a 3D concept, referencing this information.

What is even more powerful is the ability to customize the bitmap image to allow for better visualization when using it in conjunction with sketching and building your surface and/or solid model. SolidWorks gives you the ability to place as many of these Sketch Pictures as you require, on any plane in your part. You can scale them, move them and even mirror them. What makes them uniquely qualified for conceptual design, is how they can become the basis of and accurate reference for sketching SolidWorks geometry. Take the case of the stapler design above. The Industrial Designer’s sketch of the stapler’s top and right side view were opened directly into the SolidWorks part.. If the designer uses a paint program like Adobe PhotoShop or Corel Draw, they can save the scanned image as a .png or .tiff format and the transparent mask layer, known as the Alpha channel, is recognized by the Sketch Picture feature and incorporated. If the designer does not have the luxury of preparing the imaging and saving it with a mask, then Sketch Picture still offers the user the ability to automatically recognize the background to be transparent.

All of this capability is made available to the designer who needs to transfer design intent from the traditional, yet very pervasive, hand drawn sketch. No other MCAD software makes this kind of capability so easy and useful.