Correcting Model Alignment and Creating a Studio Backdrop for Rendering in the General Assembly

In this video we are going to prepare our model for the rendering phase. Now here I have the general assembly open and I've noticed that since we've increased the thickness of these beams there has occurred a misalignment in the chain set. We can fix that right now.

Let's go ahead and open our master model. Let's find where that chain set was created. Okay, there we are.

And we'll take our blue bar and drag it above that particular feature. So this is where the issue happens right here. During the rotate, it rotates around an axis that doesn't exist or around the wrong axis.

We're going to correct that by adding the correct axis. Move above that move copy body feature, then go to 3D sketch, grab a line,  find the center of this circle, the center of the circle, the center of that line,  and then bring this down along the X-y axis. There we are.

Then go back into move copy body. It's performing a rotation but we have to assign an axis. We'll highlight this box,  assign this as the axis, reset the 90 degree rotation, close it out.

Let's right click on that 3D sketch, configure the feature, and make sure that it is unsuppressed in both of the configurations. We'll drag this all the way down and watch our master model update. All right, that looks appropriate.

Go ahead and save your work. You can minimize this or close it out. Click yes, and let's find the updates in the general assembly occur.

Let's give it a second to update. There are a lot of parts that are updated as a result of this. All right, that looks pretty good.

Now since we added that axis,  any time we make a change to the thickness of these beams, these chains should update just fine. Go ahead and save your work on the general assembly. We'll give it a second to update.

All right, the next thing we're going to do is add a ground plane or a platform for this to sit upon. There's something in rendering called the infinite backdrop, and that's a ground plane that slowly transcends up and creates a backdrop around the entire piece, basically duplicating a studio environment. We'll do that by creating a new part.

Let's go ahead and go to a sketch on the top plane and start a circle on the very center. Let's bring that circle out,  and let's give the circle a very large diameter. Let's call this 80 feet.

Beautiful. Close out the sketch. Set our measuring system to inches.

Let's save this as infinite backdrop. Beautiful. Then let's go ahead and extrude this.

It doesn't have to be extruded by a lot. I think one inch will be just fine. Beautiful.

Let's start a sketch on that top surface,  and let's grab an arc tool. We'll do a center point arc. We establish the center first,  then one point, then bring it around to the other point.

All right,  let's go ahead and set an angle here. We'll call this 100 degrees, and we'll bring this all the way down. I'm using center lines to make these equal to each other and also equidistant from the center.

Here we go. There. Perfectly defined.

Let's offset the entity of this arc,  making sure to offset on the inside. We'll do that just by an inch, and then we'll use a line to close the sketch on both sides. Here we are.

Now we can extrude this also to a very high amount. Let's go ahead and extrude it to, say, 50 feet. All right.

Next, we're going to add a fillet, and this is going to be a very large fillet. Let's make this a 100-inch fillet. Beautiful.

All right. Save it. Go back into the General Assembly.

Insert your internet Backdrop. Here we are, and let's go ahead and rotate it. We want to be able to get a nice camera angle viewing the playground from this angle, so the Infinite Backdrop will need to rotate just a bit.

We'll go ahead and free float this and just establish some mates. Bring it right underneath the bottom there. There we are.

And why don't we establish a parallel relationship between those two surfaces. Let's take a look at our perspective view that we created previously,  and let's create a new perspective view. I'm just tapping the arrow key down once,  and we'll set this as Perspective 2. All right.

Let's make sure that went through okay. Beautiful. Okay.

So this is essentially what we'll see when we're doing our render. All right. Now, the last thing we need to do to prepare for our render is establish some materials to our model that we have here.

Now, we can do that in SolidWorks Visualize, but I find it's a lot easier just to get started in a General Assembly and then bring the General Assembly along with its materials into Visualize. It is easier on the system,  and it tends to be a bit of a time saver too. Plus, I think the user interface in an assembly for materials is a little more user-friendly than it is necessarily in Visualize, but that's a personal preference that I have.

So for instance, I'm going to go through and maybe grab a wood, in this case, a satin-finished ash, and establish it to that particular part. Not the assembly, but the part. I can then go through, click, and drag that to all the items that I want that here.

I might have to do it from here. That are going to have that finish. Now, normally, I would highlight one of these finishes and add these bodies,  but what I'm actually doing is assigning material preferences to the parts themselves,  not bodies within the assembly.

That's why we're seeing the same material stack on top of itself each time it's getting used. Let's go ahead and finish up these last few beams. I encourage you to go through these materials,  find some that you really like, and assign them to all the parts that you have here in your general assembly.

Once that's done, be prepared to move on to rendering,  because that's where we are going next. Thank you.