Hump day is upon us and, as promised, I am bringing you the next exciting installment of Indulge Your Sweet Tooth. This series explains the steps to creating a photorealistic image of peppermint candies. The first two parts of this series explained the process for modeling a peppermint candy and how to use appearances in SolidWorks to give the candy its look. If you missed any of the two previous posts, you will need to create the model before continuing on here. You can find the two previous parts here: Part1 Part2. After you have completed Parts1 and 2, you are ready to build the scene that will be used in PhotoView 360.

To build the scene, we will be creating an assembly with multiple instances of the peppermint candy created in the previous parts. As you go through the following steps you will notice that there is very little emphasis on being precise. That is because we are just trying to create an image that looks good. That is not saying that you cannot not choose to create an accurate scene with every component’s position fully-defined but I feel like that time would be better suited for created the actual image. Without further ado, let’s jump right in and get to work creating the scene.

Creating a Scene

1. Open a new assembly file.

2. If your assembly template is not set to start the Begin Assembly command automatically when creating a new assembly, you will need to launch the Insert Component command. If you are prompted with the Begin Assembly PropertyManager, you can skip this step. There are a few different ways to launch the Insert Component command I am more partial to using the Shortcut bar. Press S on your keyboard to show the Shortcut Bar. In the Shortcut Bar, click the Insert Components button.

3. In the Insert Component PropertyManager (or the Begin Assembly PropertyManager), click the Browse button in the Part/Assembly to Insert section.

4. In the Open window, browse to the folder that contains the peppermint model you built earlier. Select the part model and click Open. The Peppermint part model will now be displayed in the Part/Assembly to Insert section of the PropertyManager and will be shown in the Graphics Area.

5. Even though the peppermint part model is shown in the assembly it is not official inserted into the assembly.  To insert the part, you can just pick a point in the Graphics Area then use mates to fully define its position in the assembly.  For our purposes here, we will instead insert the model using the position defined in the part model. By clicking the green check mark in the PropertyManager instead of selecting a point in the Graphics Area, the peppermint will be placed in the assembly fully defined. The part origin and the assembly origin and the reference planes (Front Plane, Top Plane and Right Plane) will be automatically made coincident.

6. Save the assembly.

Add Instances of the Peppermint in the Assembly

Since we are creating a scene that will be used for the rendering, we need to add more instances of the peppermint in the assembly. You can just repeat the previous steps but there is a quicker way to create more instances of a part that is inserted into an assembly. The following steps will describe the process:

1. Press and hold the CTRL key on your keyboard.

2. While holding the CTRL key, move the mouse pointer to the peppermint in the Graphics Area. Click and hold the right mouse button and move the mouse pointer away from the peppermint. Holding the CTRL key while selecting and dragging a component in an assembly will create a new instance of the component. Once the candy clear of its older brother, release the mouse button and the CTRL key. A new instance is now inserted into the assembly.

3. Using the same process, create an addition four instances of the peppermint model in the assembly. Do not worry about the locations at this time since we will be define the locations with mates later. Just make sure that you have create six total instances of the peppermint in the model.

Define the location of the Peppermints

If we were to fully define the location of the peppermints in the assembly, it would not allow for the flixibility of modifying the scene. Instead we will apply the minimum number of mates require to ensure that the resulting image shows the peppermints in a realistic manner. For one, the peppermints that are shown lying flat in the image should all be placed on the same plane otherwise it will appear as if the candies can float in mid-air. Next we will need to define the position of the candy that is shown leaning against two candies.

To ensure that the candies are all lying flat on the same plane, do the following:

1. Click the Plus (+) next to the second instance of the peppermint in the FeatureManager to display the features for the part.

2. While holding the CTRL key, select the Top Plane for the second instance of the peppermint and then the Top Plane of the assembly.

3. With the two planes selected, select the Mate button in the Context Toolbar that is displayed after releasing the CTRL key.  If the Context Toolbar is no longer available, press S on your keyboard to display the Shortcut Bar. In the Shortcut bar, select the Mate command.

4.  After initiating the Mate command, the Coincident mate should be the Mate automatically selected by the PropertyManager to apply to the selected planes. If that is not the case, click the Coincident button in the Standard Mates section of Mate PropertyManager. Click the green check mark to apply the mate to the peppermint.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 for three of the remaining instances of the peppermint. The last peppermint will not be lying flat on the same plane as the others, that is the reason why the last instance will not have the same coincident mate.

6. To avoid being accidently selecting the last instance of the peppermint that was not previously mated, I suggest dragging the instance far enough from the other five.

7. Change the view of the Graphics Area to the Top view of the scene. If you are using Mouse Gestures, press and hold the right mouse button then move the mouse pointer in the direction for the top plane. If you are not using Mouse Gestures, just press CTRL+5 to switch to the Top View.

8. Arrange the candies in the view till they appear somewhat what the view below shows. There is no need to be exact.

9. Press CTRL+4 to switch to the right view of the assembly.

10. Move the mouse pointer to the peppermint that did not receive the Coincident mate earlier. Press and hold the right mouse button with the mouse pointer directly on top of the model. While still holding the right mouse button, change the orientation of the candy to be shown standing up at close to a 50 degree angle as shown below. Once again, since this assembly will only be used to create an image, don’t worry about being exact. All we should care about is that the scene looks good when it is rendered.

11. Release the right mouse button and select the model again but this time by pressing and holding the left mouse button. While still holding the right mouse button, drag the candy to just in front of the rest of the instance. Even though we will apply a mate to the candy to make sure that it is sitting on the same plane as the rest of the candies, try to at least get the bottom part of the candy close to the same elevation as the rest, as seen below.

12. While holding the CTRL key, select the Top Plane for the assemly in the FeatureManager and select the curved face of the candy to is closest to the bottom of the candy.

13. After selecting the bottom face of the candy, release the CTRL key and select the Mate button in the Context Toolbar. If you missed the Context Toolbar, initiate the command by Pressing S on your keyboard and selecting Mate in the Shortcut bar.

14. In the Standard Mates section of the Mate PropertyManager, click the Tangent button if it is not already automatically selected. Click the green check mark to apply the mate, then click the check mark once again to exit the Mate PropertyManager.

Loking from the side, you will see that the candy now sits on the same plane as the rest of the candies. This will ensure that any shadows cast by the candies will all be uniform.

15. Switch to the Top View once again.

16. Select the angled candy but clicking and holding the left mouse button. Drag the can to in front of the candies to a location that makes sense. Since it is unlikely that your candies are placed exactly as mine, only you will know what looks good. Just use you artistic eye.

17. Once placed, you can switch between the various views to see from all angles how the scene looks. Make fine adjustments to the locations of all of the candies until you are content with the scene.

18. Press and hold the middle mouse button or scroll wheel and rotate the view until you find a good camera angle. We can also do this in PhotoView 360 when we create our final scene but I often like to have a good view set in SolidWorks when saving the file. That way when I am browsing through my SolidWorks files, the preview image will make it easier to me to tell what was the purpose of the scene. Save the part and exit the document.

More to Come…

Now that we have created our scene, we are ready to open it in PhotoView 360 and create our rendering. Come back Friday morning for the next part in this series or you can just sign up for my RSS feed and know that you haven’t missed a thing. As always, I am open for questions about this or any of my tutorials.

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