The Javelin Technologies Blog

If you like my previous post about a rendered cruise boat video, you should see this one too.

Javelin office just moved to a new location earlier this year, so I decided to make something interesting about the new office building.  Please take a look at the video below.

Here are some rendered images of the animation:

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In past versions of SolidWorks inserting a background image into a model was a fairly difficult operation requiring changes to system options, creation of special files and normally at least two cups of coffee.  The new “Display Manager” introduced in SolidWorks 2011 however makes it very easy to superimpose your SolidWorks model on any image of your choice.

Background Image Applied

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When you have layers of transparent materials in your model (like a glass containing water), you get a better result when rendering with PhotoView 360 if the “liquid” body interferes by a small amount with the “glass” body.

Take a look at two renderings showing both results. Fig. 1 shows the real-life condition, where we have just “contact” between glass and water, while fig. 2 depicts the case where there is a small “interference” between the two. Which one do you like more?

As a side note, you should never leave a gap between the two transparent bodies.

Fig. 1 - Contact between glass and water

Fig. 2 - Small interference between the glass and water bodies

A very short tip that can save you a lot of time:

If you use the Preview Window in PhotoView 360 and you find out it takes too long to finish rendering, you can “brush” with your mouse over areas of interest and they will get priority over the rest.

Apparently this new functionality was added in SolidWorks 2011 SP 4.0.

"Brush" over areas of interest to speed up the rendering

Getting your Expert Certification in SolidWorks (CSWE) can be compared to winning a Gold Medal in a top competition!

There is only one very small, but somewhat important difference, though: Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation will not present you with an actual gold medal. Nope, no medal for you!

I suspect that is not because they do not have the resources for coining the medals, but because they know how hard it is to please you, their user. Give a SolidWorks Professional a medal and, instead of smiling for the camera, he or she will analyze its imprint, check its reflectivity and, after a while, will say ‘Thanks… but I can design a better one’.

Knowing that, SolidWorks gave you something better: the tools to “coin” your own medal. Remember the PhotoView 360 video posted by our guest blogger Rob Rodriguez? All these tools are described there in great detail.

As you know, my colleague Andrew Lidstone is Javelin’s newest CSWE. Why don’t you practice coining a gold medal to celebrate his achievement? This way, when you get your own CSWE, you will know how to do yours. Something like this:

Fig. 1 Gold Medal for Andrew

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One of the most underutilized feature sets of PhotoView 360 is the appearance surface finish tab.  Why is it underutilized?  For a couple of reasons I think, those being:

• It’s found in the appearance advanced settings that some users may never activate.
• Most users don’t fully understand the settings and controls found there or how they can be used.

I could explain surface finish with text and pictures here in the post but I thought the best way to show the controls was to create a short video so you could see them in action.

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Blog Address: http://robrodriguez.com/wordpress/

Author: Rob Rodriguez

Author’s Description of his Blog:

RobRodriguez.com is a way for me to give back to the SolidWorks community in the forum of tutorials and information revolving around visualization.  Most engineers lack the experience or know how to effectively communicate their designs to the rest of the world.  I provide them with information they can use to effectively reuse their engineering CAD data as a visual communication tool.

Three reasons why we read the blog:

1. We always want to learn from the best and Rob is the uncontested Rendering Guru of the SolidWorks community. He was actually hired as a consultant for the two major rendering books SolidWorks released in the past 3 years:
   • the old: PhotoWorks Step-By-Step Self-Paced Learning Guide
   • and the new one: 2011 Photorealistic Rendering Using SolidWorks and PhotoView 360
2. Everything on his blog is current and up to date. When the 2011 version of PhotoView 360 was released, there was almost no documentation available. The only place that had an in-depth expert dissection of the new software was Rob’s blog. At that time, whenever a customer asked about what is new with PhotoView, we would direct him or her to http://robrodriguez.com/wordpress/Video/PV360-2011-Sneak-Peak/PV360-2011-Sneak-Peak.html .
3. You cannot just write about rendering tools and techniques, you need to demonstrate them. Rob created a large library of videos covering most of the workflows available in SolidWorks and PhotoWorks or PhotoView 360. Watching these videos is like having a personal tutor guiding you through all the trails of the rendering world.

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Yes, it’s true.  Javelin is moving.  On April 1st we will be operating out of brand spanking new offices at 3457 Superior Court in Oakville.  We are all very excited about the move and looking forward to the change since we have been at 700 Dorval Drive in Oakville since 1998.  Superior Court is located off Burloak in Oakville just south of the QEW.  Our new office is almost 12,000 square feet which is double the space that we have now.

We have contracted with Style Construction for project management and On-Sight Design for design services. Frank, Penny and Wendy are all working hard to ensure that the build goes smooth.  The space that we have leased is flexSpace and it is the first development in the Great Lakes Business Park.  Our next door neighbors are Canadian Tire Financial.

The space is brand new so we have had the pleasure of designing our own layout.  Wendy (our designer) has provided us with a great deal of advice and guidance on best practices for efficient office layout.  We have used Draftsight from DS SolidWorks (free and downloadable from the Javelin website) to view all of the plans to help make decisions on the new space layout.  See below.

Draftsight is being used to edit and review DWG files

Of course, as the leading 3D design software company in Canada we needed to have our building design as a usable 3D solid model.  Our team has used SolidWorks 2011 as well as BuiltWorks to model up the building and the structure. We have been using eDrawings and PhotoView 360 renderings to help us with decision making along the way in the project.  We will be doing more work using SolidWorks Simulation to model and test the interior, exterior and other aspects of the building.

New Javelin office modeled in SolidWorks 2011

You will notice a different logo over the front.  That’s new also.  The Javelin team has also undertaken a project to update our look and brand.  We will provide more information about that in follow-on posts.

We are hoping that you’ll come and see us in the new office.  In future blog posts I’ll share some great reasons to visit.  Some of them will be about awesome new technology we have and some of them will be just for fun.