Today we will conclude the Indulge Your Sweet Tooth series with an extra long post about PhotoView 360. If you are not familiar with PhotoView 360 (or PV360 for short), you do not know what you are missing. PV360 is a simple but powerful rendering package that installs along with SolidWorks Professional or SolidWorks Premium. I like this software because of its over all ease of use. In just a few steps, a photorealistic rendering can be made. Sometimes the whole process can take as little as a couple of minutes. And the best part is that quality is not sacrificed. I confident that if images created by professionals such as Rob Rodriguez were put up against images from other packages, the average person would not be able to tell which one was created with a high end rendering package.

Today we will only be concentrating on only the areas needed to create the rendering of the Peppermints scene created in Parts one, two and three of this series. But luckily, I doubt this will be my last article about PhotoView 360. We are just going to create a variation of the image shown to the left. I am taking the opportunity to introduce you to a couple of new functions that were added to the 2010 release of PhotoView 360. If you have an earlier version, you will not be able to find a couple of areas discussed in this article. But you should still be able to create an image that is comparable to the image shown.

Opening PhotoView 360

1. Locate the PhotoView 360 link on either the desktop of the SolidWorks 2020 program group. Launch PhotoView 360.

2. Click the Open File button in the PhotoView 360 Task Toolbar. Browse to the folder that contains the peppermints assembly created in the last post, Indulge Your Sweet Tooth ~ Part3. Click Open.

After loading, the last saved scene will be displayed. Since we set the scene in SolidWorks, there is not need to make any adjustment other then zooming into the image. We will be discussing the adjusting of views in next week’s series.

3. Zoom into the scene by spinning the scroll wheel backwards.

4.  The buttons on the Task Toolbar are pretty much laid out in the order of the steps needed to create a rendering. This would normally make adding Appearances the first step but since we added the appearances at the part level of the assembly,we can skip that button. Instead, click the Environments button in the Task Toolbar.

5. In the Environments window, locate the environment named Studio Room Shadow. Select the environment by clicking and holding the left mouse button. Drag the environment into the Preview Image area. Release the left mouse button and the preview image will update to show the newly applied environment.

After applying the environment, click the red X in the upper left corner of the window to close.

6. Now it is time set up the scene for creating the final rendering. To access the options available that can be used to improve the rendering, click the Settings button in the Task Toolbar.

7. In the Settings window, click the Environment tab to access the options available for making adjustments to the active environment. The first adjustment we will be making will be to the Ground Height. Looking at the preview image, you will notice that the candies appear to be be floating off of the surface. Changing the value of the Ground Height option in the negative or positive direction will be the ground up or down in relation to the models in the scene. You may need to find the value that will show the ground at an appropriate height. To be honest, I have not really found the reason why this value needs to be tweaked. I have noticed that similar scenes may require different values to achieve the same result. In this example, I found the that value of 2mm gives the best result but you may find a completely different value works better in your assembly. As you enter the value, the ground will automatically update.

8. The next value, Environment Rotation, allows you to not only rotate the spherical image of the environment independent to the model but also rotate the lighting used in the environment.  Since there are no options to create custom lighting at this time, this is the best way to get a custom look to your scene. For this rendering, The focal point of the image is too dark, we can correct this by rotating the environment around until the main candy is highlight by the overhead lighting. Once again, you may need to play around with the value until you can dial in on the perfect lighting for the scene. In this example, I found the 90° gave the best look.

9. Before moving on to the next tab, make sure that the following options are set per the screen shot below:

10. Select the Camera Settings tab. In the Depth of Field section of the Camera Settings tab, select the Depth of Field option. After select the option you will notice that the view will change and portions of the view will no longer be sharp and crisp.

About Depth of Field

If you like me and are not a photography geek, the term Depth of Field might be a new one. Depth of Field refers to the distance in front of and behind the subject that appears to be in focus. The Depth of Field section of the Camera Settings has a button to set the focus where the mouse pointer selects but for some reason I can never get this option to work. Instead, I often need to play with the Focus Distance value until I achieve the desired focal point.

As you play with the value of the Focus Distance, you will find that the larger the number the deeper in the field the camera will focus. A smaller value will focus the camera closer to the viewer. In the process of trial and error, I found that the value of 102.5mm works best for this scene but you may find a different value is optimal for your scene.

About the F Stop

Another term I had to look up in order to be able to understand the Depth of Field option is F Stop. When I was in high School I took photography and I had a general idea as to what F Stop meant but that was many years and even more beers ago. Luckily Google came to my assistance and I now have a better idea.   F Stop is the measurement used to describe the aperture of the camera. The aperture is the adjustable opening inside the camera lens that controls the amount of light on the film.  The aperture diameter then cause the angle of the light rays entering the lens which has an effect on the depth of field. The F Stop value describes the ratio of the size of the aperture and the focal length. The actual F Stop value can cause some confusion since the smaller the number, the larger the opening. A smaller F Stop produces images with shallower depths of field and a larger F Stop produces a larger depth of field.

So what does that mean in this image? The F Stop value will effect how all of the objects in the scene will displayed. If the F Stop value is small, the candies in the back will not be clear. As you increase the number for the F Stop, the background objects become clearer.  For this particular scene I found that the best value for this scene is 20.0 but yours will more then likely be different.

The scene is now ready to render.

The Final Rendering

The final rendering may not actually be the final rendering. Unless you get lucky and you happen to hit upon the perfect combination of settings, you will probably need to perform the Final Render command many times. You make adjustments to the settings of the scene, render the scene, identify areas that need to be tweaked, update the settings, render again, and so on.  Depending on your CPU speed you may want to set the Final Rendering Quality to a lower quality and reduce the image size to cut down on the rendering time. Then when the optimal settings have been identified and it comes time to create the true final rendering, you pump up the rendering quality and size. To adjust the Final Rendering Quality and create the final rendering, do the following:

1. Select the Output Settings tab in the Settings window. In the Image Output Resolution section, near the top of the window, set the width and height of the image to be created.

2. In the same section, below the Match Background Image Aspect button, select the Image Format field to select the type of image that will be created. Select the file format that will be suit your needs. Just remember that not all file formats are the same. To make things simple, I am selecting JPEG as the Image Format.

3. If this the first rendering and you are not completely sure about the settings, it does not hurt to select a lower quality just to save some rendering time. Select the Final Render Quality field is used to adjust the quality of the actual final image. The other option, Preview Quality, actually refers to the image quality in the main window which is also called the Preview Image. Since this is the first time we are going to render this image, it wouldn’t hurt to go with a slightly lower quality. The Better option still gives us a pretty good image and it won’t take more then a couple of minutes to run on most PCs.

4. At this time, we do not need to apply anymore settings. But if you can spare the screen space, it would be a good idea to just move the settings window off to one side. Unless you get very lucky with the first rendering, you will more then likely need to make further adjustments to the settings.

5.  In the Task Toolbar, click the Final Render button.

6. After clicking the Final Render button, a new window will pop up and the final rendering will be calculated. Small orange squares, called Buckets, dance across the screen building small sections of the image until the who scene has developed. The number of Buckets you will see working on the image is based on the number of cores your CPU sports. As you can see from the image below, my pathetic dual core is evident by the two buckets working their little orange butts off creating the rendering.

7.  Depending on the the quality selected, image size and overall speed of your PC; the rendering could take a few minutes. If you notice the visible image is not up to par, you can save some time but canceling the rendering before wasting time waiting for the process to end. In the top right corner of the the Final Rendering window, there is an Abort Image button that can be pressed anytime during the rendering process.

8. Unless you need to make any additional changes to the settings, the final rendering is complete. If multiple renderings were required to setting upon the Final Rendering, you can compare all of the images created. Directly above the image in the Final Render window, the previous versions can be displayed by selecting a number. In the image below the current image number is highlighted orange. To select the image rendering previous to the current, select one number up from the current. In this case, I would need to select the slot numbered 1 to display the previous image.

9. After tweaking the various settings and the true final rendering has been created, the image is now ready to be saved. In the upper right area of the Final Render window, click the Save Image button. Browse to and select the folder that the image should be saved in and select Save.

The Results

Here is the final result in all its glory. You may notice that it actually is different then the image shown at the top of this post. To be honest, I create the original image a month ago and this time I wanted to try another look. The process for the first image and this one is exactly the same. The only difference was the environment that I used in both. Experiment with a few different environments and see what other cool things you can do to this image. If you want to show off, you can share them on your profile page at SolidWorks Geeks.

Conclusion

Still with me? I know that was a long one but there was just too many steps and I really did not want to split up the series any further. Today we just scratched the surface on what can be done in PhotoView 360 and I look forward to more tutorials on the subject in the future. I hope you learned that it doesn’t take an expert to create stunning renderings that can be used for a variety of applications. I look forward to everyones feedback on this series and let me know if you would like to see more series like this one.

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