Customizing Decals and Scenes

Often times you have a great idea in your head but you are not sure what it will look like in reality.  SOLIDWORKS is a awesome tool for getting you to that final output, but maybe you do not want to, or have the time to, put in all those fine details before realizing it all needs to chage.  Luckily there are a lot of tools in SOLIDWORKS that can help you do just that.

Using decals and scenes can often help quickly portray the idea you are trying to convey, without having to model every detail.  In honor of Memorial Day, I will do this to see how putting a new flag pole in the backyard would look.

I will start off by creating the flag.  While it technically is pretty easy to draw in Solidworks, just a few lines, rectangles and patterns, it would take some time, especially applying colors to all of the faces.  Also, we would want to give it some contour, not just a planar image, for a more realistic look.

I started off by utilizing the ‘Equation Driven Curve’ command to get a nice smooth sinusoidal contour, to represent the flag blowing in the wind, and extruded a surface from it.

I then did a quick Google search to find an image of a flag that I could apply to this surface, and created a new decal from it.  From there, its as easy as dragging the new decal onto the face and mapping it to the correct size.  I now quickly have a nice detailed, realistic model of a flag, without having to create all of that detail myself.

With the flag assembled to a quickly modeled flag pole, the last thing needed to be done was apply it to the yard to see how it would look.

Similar to the decal, I took a photo of the landscape and created a custom scene to apply to the model.  After a render using PhotoView360 (Yes, this is still a great useful tool, even with the new addition of VISUALIZE, for those images of still-changing designs and quick screen shots), I now have good idea of what the final product would look like without much effort on my part.