PhotoView 360 Tips

PhotoView 360 (only available in SOLIDWORKS Professional and/or Premium packages) is an amazingly easy way to extract even more value out of your 3D models.  Having already modeled your entire assembly, you’re only a few clicks away from a stunningly realistic photo quality rendering.  Without any knowledge of the product, you can create a render using the simplest of workflows:

1.  MAKEUP:  Apply materials/appearances to each of the parts in your assembly
2.  LIGHTS:  Select a scene and rotate the environment until a desired lighting (and shadows) is acquired (I usually rotate the environment by 15 degree increments until I achieve the desired results in the preview)
3.  CAMERA:  Activate the perspective view mode, and modify it to a lower value for a more dramatic view (I prefer a value of 0.5)
4.  ACTION:  Click PhotoView 360’s final render button

Also, notice that you can complete steps #1-3 with the Standard version of SolidWorks.  The only step that requires Professional or Premium is #4.

For those of us that enjoy using the right side of our brains, there are a ton more options than what’s listed above.  These options can allow our imaginations to run wild as we use PhotoView 360 to create completely customized renders of any object in any setting.  To preview some of these options, you can view the presentation I used in a recent webinar below. This presentation will be updated over time, so feel free to bookmark it.