TriMech Blog

Chances are you watched the Olympics from the comfort of your own home. Well, what if you could experience the thrill alongside these athletes? Picture looking down the barrel of the half pipe during the snowboard finals or sitting in the middle of the pack of the fastest speed skaters in the world. Wouldn’t that be awesome?! With a virtual reality headset like Oculus Rift, HTC Vibe or Google Cardboard, you can feel the action. 

The 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang have come to an end. I'm not an Olympic Athlete, but I wanted to participate by more than just watching the games from my couch. With the many SOLIDWORKS products I have installed on my machine, I figured there was bound to be something I could create. With SOLIDWORKS 2018, each seat of Professional and Premium comes with a free seat of SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard, so I decided it was time to explore!

SOLIDWORKS Visualize is famous for its ability to give designers a photo-realistic view at their design animation before ever being finalized and manufactured. And while it is already hugely beneficial to the design community, SOLIDWORKS 2018 out-did itself with the latest update to Stereoscopic Virtual Reality (VR) Rendering.

To honor those who have served our United States Armed Forces this Veteran’s Day, I’ve modeled the Anthem Veterans Memorial, located in Arizona, which has a unique feature that is perfect to demonstrate the scene lighting and animation capabilities of SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional. To do this yourself, read our tutorial and watch the full demonstration in our video! 

One of my favorite design features inside SOLIDWORKS is configurations. I love the ability to edit and revise properties without affecting the original model. What some people may not know is that you can utilize configurations with SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional as well. 

SOLIDWORKS Visualize has taken renders of SOLIDWORKS designs above and beyond what PhotoView 360 was ever capable of. By tweaking the appearance settings like Tile Value, Roughness and Index of Refraction, it’s much easier to control exactly how materials will appear in the final render. Let’s take a look at an example.

In this blog, we show you how to create beautifully smooth animations in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, giving your designs the precise representation and attention to detail that they deserve. They can rotate as desired in a smooth animation that will showcase all angles of the design.

In my last blog article, I showed how we could adjust the appearances on our rescue spreader to make it look more life-like in our final render. Let’s continue to work on those renders and add some dimension and drama with our camera settings in SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Our QA blog series looks at different members of our team and their perspective on the most current 3D printing and CAD technology. This month’s QA features Chris Mowatt and Visualize.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize is an exciting new way to show off your designs with photo-realistic renders. However, sometimes it can be daunting to get started with all of the import options that Visualize offers.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easier way to get that CAD data from SOLIDWORKS into Visualize? 

SOLIDWORKS Visualize can show off your designs with photo-realistic renders, even when it comes to rendering transparent liquids. To demonstrate the beauty of such a realistic rendering of liquids, see how we created the perfect margarita glass step-by-step to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

When working with 3D models in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, there are many ways to control and modify parts. Working with parts can consist of using symmetry, controlling vectors and even using a special feature to split models and parts. In this blog, I want to talk about a particularly useful feature I discovered while playing inside SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional called "Extract Part".