Today’s experiment: furthering rendering of 3d printed parts, specifically
The good:
The material is obviously 3d printed, thanks to textures and other files I was able to source online
I was able to add a decal(black smudge) to learn how to work with decals
I was able to change the texture for the top of the box to the texture you might expect for a 3d printed face contacting the print bed
The bad:
Really wrestling with lighting here. The left side of the top surface is just white and no combination of settings / light positions seems to matter
I am unable to tweak surface-level texture placement without great amounts of effort. The seam between the rounded corners on the right side and the right-most face? There is a disconnect, and therefore seam, because the texture mapping does not line up. Again, no amount of settings will fix this unless I put in a huge amount of effort. This is a reoccurring issue at multiple places in the render.
Software keeps crashing. Really frustrating to have to save after every operation (saves take like 60s) just so I don’t have to worry about losing progress (crashing and restarting takes ~2 minutes). Time adds up though and I get frustrated.
I do not like how Solidworks Visualize works with decals. You can either have the decal selected, or see how the decal looks. If you want to adjust, move, or even have the decal selected, the entire thing is covered in a bright orange over half your screen. Makes it cumbersome to work with.
To that end I am looking into other options. Namely KeyShot and Blender.
My understanding of Blender: Steep learning curve. Software is very multipurpose so you will be initially confused by all the stuff that has no relevance to you, yet clutters up your screen and workflow. Takes XXX hours and XX plugins to really get great results.
My understanding of KeyShot: Very common in the industry, very user friendly, very straightforward. However, not free. We are talking $8/mo if I can snag a student email to use for it, and $40/month otherwise. I might be able to pirate it, but who knows if that’ll give me a virus as the crack/keygen apparently causes “””false alarms””” with microsoft defender.
The recessed rectangles are so if the end user wants, they can re-use these containers and just use some masking tape as a new label
Would be convenient for reloaders to track experimental loads for instance
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