Realistic renderings bring your design to life

As a dyed in the wool engineer why should I render my designs? Surely everyone can see how great they are using standard materials. But let’s face it they can’t, so if you are ready to share your great new design idea, or need to review possible design variations, rendering is the perfect tool to promote or evaluate a design and ensure that the best decisions are made and everyone fully understands your intention.

Simply put, rendering can take your design from this:

To this in a matter of minutes:

For great renderings there are some important steps that are useful to know when using SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer:

Set up scene and lighting

Rendering in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer has a realistic lighting engine which enables you to create photorealistic images without having to spend your valuable time choosing and changing lighting settings to get your model to look right in a scene. Using HDRI images as scenes automatically shows your models in context of a scene and in the right lighting.

Apply materials

Applying materials is one of the most important steps as this is what defines each component’s look and feel. The ready-made material content in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer can speed this process, but having the ability to quickly edit those materials and create new versions enables you to get you design to look how you want it to in no time at all.

Set up camera (model view)

Setting up the camera is a made easy with the camera overlay. Using common camera settings you can easily and dynamically adjust the depth of field, amount of perspective and the amount of light through exposure and shutter speed. These views can be saved and accessed at a later date to automate batch rendering of multiple images.

Render and repeat/tweak previous settings until you are happy with the image!

Rendering is an iterative process, it can be used to make early visual design decisions or to help present your designs for review or tender. For whatever reason you are rendering, SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer provides a seamless rendering environment that will enable you to great visuals in minutes.

So the answer to my earlier question “Why render?” is that rendering enables all project stakeholders and buyers to make their decisions on your designs in an enhanced 3D environment. SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer delivers a powerful rendering solution that provides focus and gravitas to you designs, helping everyone understand the decisions and ideas behind your design and give relevant feedback.

Read more about the capabilities in SOLIDWORKS Industrial Designer in the white paper, “Increase Innovation and Improve Industrial Design with SOLIDWORKS Industrial Design Software.”