Rendering realistic chrome with SolidWorks

Crispijn — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:11:16 +0000

Starting with PhotoWorks, the render engine from SolidWorks that creates photo realistic images, was a really big step in the past. It was very tuff and time consuming process when you wanted to create a photo realistic image of a model you created. Nowadays, it’s very simple to create a image that look almost photo realistic but how can you make them 100% perfect?

Note that this tutorial is only a detailed guideline. There are always different parameters such as model geometry, lights, material etc.

Create your 3D model

I’ll start with a render of a couple of steel balls also known as the witch is also used in the logo of this blog. I’m not showing how to model these, it’s just a standard modeling process.

Tips:

Add a fillet over all the sharp edges (a custom curve is even better)
Make sure you have a small space between seperate

Add a camera

Camera’s are great to create a nice view. You can play with the focus so you can make nice blurry effects.

Materials

I’ll choose for the materials orange plastic and chromium plate for the balls. The cords are made of black low gloss plastic. To add these materials to the parts you’ve got to select the parts, and apply your appearance. Â In this case its a three step process.

The appearances are shown in the feature tree beneath the PhotoWorks tab.

The first render

When you don’t change anything in the PhotoWorks options and press the render button for the first time you will see something like this:

Uhr… Not perfect right? Go to the next step of this tutorial.

Scene selection

When you’re rendering chrome it’s important to see that is chrome. Not only by the color, or the shine but chrome is like a mirror. It reflects the environment. So lets add an environment to our assembly. On this step you have to play with the scene. Some things witch influences the render:

Room tab: The floor offset
Room tab: The floor rotation
Environment tab: The reflection (amount of environment detail witch you will see in the products)
Environment tab: The Diffuse Appearance Brightness (the higher, the lighter the products)

In this case I’ve chosen the conference room because of its great light fall and not to much details in the room.

Do mention the war floor!
Occasionally when you’ve build up your model and start rendering the floor of the scene is cutting up your model.

Variables

To make a really sharp render you’ll have to set the PhotoWorks options. Go to “Document Properties” and set the “Anti-aliasing quality” very high.

Change the tab to Illumination. Enable indirect illumination. Here are to renders with this option on and off. Can you tell me where it’s on?

Yes… the image on the right is rendered witch indirect illumination on.

Adjustments

Now add some motion into the image. In this case I simply blurred the orange ball with Photoshop and here we are. A nice render with chrome balls.

Young Dutch Design » Materials