Discover how to render a 3D model in SolidWorks Visualize successfully, including the steps to adjust perspective, enable visualize, and select the appropriate render selection. Gain insights on enhancing the image quality of your model, and navigating through the user interface as you prepare for the final rendering process.
Key Insights
- The SolidWorks Visualize tool is used to render 3D models. The process involves assigning materials to parts, enabling visualize from the options menu, and using the custom view created for rendering purposes.
- The ‘render selection’ button is used to preview what the final rendering would look like. It is possible to adjust the maximum resolution to enhance the image quality of the model on the screen, although it might slow down the machine's performance.
- The final rendering process involves selecting the output format, setting the resolution and print resolution, naming the rendering, and choosing a location on the computer for the rendering. The time taken to complete the rendering depends on the machine's performance.
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In this video, we're going to finally render our model in SolidWorks Visualize. Since the last video, you should have assigned materials to each of the parts in your general assembly. This also includes your infinite backdrop.
I've assigned that a white soft-touch plastic material. All right, next thing you want to do is make sure that you're in your custom view that you've made just for rendering purposes. This is the perspective I'm looking for.
Perfect. Next, we need to enable visualize. We'll go up to options, go to add-ins, scroll down to SolidWorks Visualize, and check the left-hand box.
Once you do that, a new tab should appear in your command manager who says SolidWorks Visualize. If you don't see it after a few minutes, go ahead, go to tabs and select it here. Now, select export simple.
This is going to bring our general assembly into SolidWorks Visualize with the materials we've assigned to it and in the current perspective that we have it in, which is the one that we chose for this rendering. It may take a minute for it to load. Beautiful.
So here is our model in our rendering viewport. I'm going to use my scroll wheel to zoom in, try to get it more or fewer towards the center. If you need to, you can activate any one of these movement buttons to move your model in 3D space.
There we go. Get just the right shot that you're looking for. Next up, go to this button called render selection and select fast.
What it's going to do is it's going to quickly show you what your rendering is going to look like once it's outputted. It's very helpful as we're creating our rendering from scratch. Moving on, we're going to go to tools, options, 3D viewport, scroll down to maximum resolution.
Now, you may have noticed that your model might be showing up as a very small image on your screen or maybe like a thumbnail image. If you want to increase that size so it's easier to see and easier to work with, simply just pick a larger resolution. It's going to slow down the performance of your machine, but increase the size of your model on your screen so it's easier to see.
All right. Next thing we're going to do is go to view toggle easy mode. I find for beginners, this is a much easier user interface to operate with in general when you're working with SolidWorks visualize.
If you were to be creating a rendering from scratch with no materials and no models loaded in, you would basically move through each of these buttons from left to right and create your rendering until you finally get to the render button here. What we're going to do is go up to tools, render, and navigate through this menu. Allow image to be the bubble that is checked here.
Click next. Next, it's going to ask us what our output format is. JPEG is fine.
Let's click next. It's going to ask us the resolution of our final image. Right now, I have mine set to 1280 × 720 at a print resolution of 96.
Just so you're aware, a print resolution of 96 is an appropriate print resolution for anything you want to show digitally or maybe share on a presentation or over an email. I'm going to go ahead and leave these settings the way they are. You can too.
Let's click next. Let's click next again. Let's give our rendering a name.
I'm going to call mine rendering 2 since I've already completed 1. Let's give our rendering a location on our computer. There we go. Then once that's all done, click render.
Based on the performance of your machine, it may take a few seconds or a few minutes to complete the rendering. Once this green bar is filled up, your rendering is complete and that JPEG image is available in the folder that you saved it in. Thank you.
