Today we're going to be talking about SolidWorks Visualize and how to use it and what it can do and what it's good for. As you can see, we're not in Visualize right now. We're in SolidWorks. This is because I wanted to highlight how you can use certain things in SolidWorks that link over to visualize and help you with your rendering workflow. So whenever I'm thinking about rendering a model, I like to think of it in terms of I am a photographer taking a picture of a subject in certain environments. So when you're doing photography, you need good lighting, you need, good subjects, and you need to have your camera set up in the correct place in order to get a good composition. So we can do some of that here inside of SolidWorks. Mainly we're going to look at materials to start off with. You can see here we have a few materials already in So, what we're going to do is make sure we have appearance as applied to the whole model and that we're happy with them. So we have some blue here applied to the top, bottom and middle and we have an anodized finish. Now we can see we have that anodized zinc finished applied here. We're going to apply that to the rest of the chain and pull here. You can find materials over here in the right side from your appearances. I call them materials. They're called appearances also. Drop down the categorized. You can get a little preview here. So in this case we're going to go find the, this is satin zinc finish because that's about as close as what we're going to we want to have because you also want to always have some good references of what you're trying to achieve in terms of, look, finish, environment, lighting, that sort of thing. So you're not just trying to, go with what looks good on your screen. You're trying to actually simulate something that's happening in real life. So this is a good reference here. I'm going to put that off to my other screen and look at that. Keep that up for future reference. And we can keep going. So I've got my satin zinc finish appearance here. And we start applying that to a few items here. This will link over into SolidWorks Visualize. So I'll put it here on my pole here. And then I'll also put it on the chain. Now you can apply appearances directly to a body in a part on the screen, or to something in the feature tree. So you can also select what level you want to apply an appearance to. Do you want it to be at a face, pattern, body for the part or the whole assembly. We're going to do the part here so that you get this whole chain link. But put in there I'll click. We have some other parts that don't have the appearance applied, also. So we will, patterns going to be good for that. And we've also got some parts in here that don't have a material in them just yet. So we're going to go ahead and do that as well. All right. That's looking pretty good. Something else that carries over from SolidWorks into Visualize, which I find to be super helpful, is cameras. Now, this isn't commonly, used too often inside of SolidWorks... most SolidWorks workflows, but there are cameras in the appearance tab up here, and you can add a camera. And over here on the right we have the camera view. And over here on the left we have, you know, our geometry view. And we can actually manipulate the position and the properties of this camera in order to get a really good composition. I definitely want to have that TriMech logo right up front. And I want to be kind of looking at this like it was in a field. And so I'm going to be kind of coming at it a little bit from here, get close up to it. Maybe were a little bit higher up. You can adjust your perspective. The aspect ratio of the camera. And the target point, which is the camera's all looking as well. So we can just as here I just want to get that to a place or, you know, happy with the composition and how it looks. You can also adjust it by zooming in and out over here. So that looks good. So it's going to do is it's going to save that view for us. We can click over to it and always come back to it. We can see it right here. So if we're moving around looking around we don't lose that view. We just simply click back and we have it here available to us. And that's going to be carried over into Visualize. My camera is locked. Excellent. All right. So it's all actually set up to help us out in Visualize. We've applied some appearances. We've looked at the camera, you know, we've got to check out what we have as far as the appearance of these are reference. So now we're going to pop over and to Visualize and take a look at finishing our rendering and getting a nice, really good photorealistic picture of the end of this. Okay, so now we're over in SolidWorks, Visualize, and this is our rendering software. We're going to go ahead and start rendering out our disk off target goal. So again. All the information with appearances and the cameras and the scenes are carried over from SolidWorks. So when we go to open up our file, it's going to ask us how we want to group our parts. And I like to group by appearance because it helps manipulate appearances a little bit more easily. Do you want to import the appearance, as we do for import the cameras that we set up and everything else? So we're going to bring everything over from SolidWorks. It's really helpful with the inner connectivity between your cat and your rendering software. So as you can see, we here we have the, disc golf goal and side of Visualize, and we're taking a look at it now. So first thing I want you to point out here is we have two modes inside of visualize. One is called preview and one is called accurate preview mode is the rendering is disengaged and it's good for manipulating geometry and moving things around and doing things that don't require appearances. You can switch over to accurate mode, and it'll begin doing some limited rendering to give us an idea of how our final product is going to look. At the end of the day. So let's get started. Setting the scene, setting up our appearances, making sure everything looks good, and getting our render out. So I'm going to start off with the camera view. Then we do have a default camera that we, our camera that we saved inside SolidWorks that was brought over for this composition, which I do like, but I feel like I'm going to go ahead and show off some of the functionality of the camera inside of Visualize here. So when you add a new camera, we can zoom in. And I think I'm going to leave this here for now. I'm going to get the scene set up next, and then come back and adjust my camera to fit the scene. So inside of Visualize, you're given a library of different environments and scenes that you can render against. I really like using the cloud based library that's available to you. So I'm going to go to the environment looking for an outdoor environment in which to render this object. So you just drag and drop this over here. And it pushes that into this outdoor scene. Now we do have this what's called a backplate image remaining that came over from SolidWorks. So we're going to go ahead and remove that so we can see our scene. Great. All right. Now as you can see here, we've got our goal. And here we've got some metal some paint. We're going to need to, adjust this appearances in a minute. But first I'm going to place this in the scene and get my composition just right. One way I like to do that, besides using the camera to position where I want to, besides using the camera to position the composition how I like it, you can also rotate the scene inside of the environment tool here. So let's rotate it around for a nice grassy spot to place this fantastic. Great. I'm going to go back to the cameras and adjust the composition here. I might just the overall aspect ratio. I can adjust what type of camera perspective focal length. You can even do depth of field. We have a blurry background and, in-focus subject. That's great for up close shots. And maybe, that'd be something to explore in a future video. So I'm going to adjust the camera a little bit here. That's looking good. And I see that the TriMech logo here is off to the side a little bit. I'm going to go to my model. I'm going to rotate that a little bit to the right in order to see that fully. There we go. Excellent. Okay. I'm pretty happy with this composition here. So I'm going to go ahead and lock my camera down. So what you do is you can hit lock so that camera is ready to go. I can still go back to my other cameras and look around what my cell received for it. And if I need to zoom in, get details on something, look around. I can do that. So I'm gonna go to this default camera and begin to adjust my materials. So I'm noticing that the pole here is reflecting the environment like it should, but it's a little too shiny for what I want. Again, let's go back to our reference so you can see our reference image here. You know, these seem to be some sort of like a galvanized finish. It's a little bit more matte. And what I have in this picture. So I definitely want to simulate that inside of visualize. So let me go into my library and see if I can find a material that matches that or an appearance rather. Metal. and again these are all available on the cloud. Let's go with galvanized. So I'm going to go ahead and replace this shinier metal with some sort of galvanized finish to see if I get something I'm happier with. And it's closer to the actual reference imagery. So let's go ahead and apply this galvanized material. As you can see, it's applied it to all the parts that had that material on there. It's it's all linked. And I think that's a little bit closer to reality. Let's zoom in and look at I don't have to worry about messing up my camera as I'm looking at this, because I have my other camera saved. So looking up close, this is nice texture. It's a little bit matte, it's a little bit reflective but not too reflective. So I think I like that. All right. Next up we're going to play with the this blue appearance here. Now it came in from SolidWorks. It's just basic blue. So it just has a blue look to it. What I wanted to do is add some texture to this. I want this to be a paint type texture. Now we have different types of textures. We can look at textile, wood, glass, plastic, all kinds of things. I'm going to go with car paint and see what we can make out with that. Now that's looking a little bit too shiny for my liking. And based on our reference images, I don't think that it's that shiny. I think it looks like we have some kind of powder coat, type finish. So I want to first of all reduce this flakes. And I think that's probably causing a lot of that. All right. So far so good. And then I'm going to increase the clearcoat roughness just a little bit. Give it a little bit more realistic of a more of a rough clear coat. That's not quite so shiny. Yeah. I think that's looking good. And again this is all linked. So that's updated to here to the basket. And we've updated here to the foot as well. Fantastic. So we've got our camera set up. We've got our environment set up. So I think I still want to make some edits to this camera, but not in the positioning. I want to make some edits to a little bit of the aspect ratio, as well as some of the brightness, and some other things. first of all, let me just the brightness inside of the environment. Yeah. That's getting a little bit closer to what we want. It's looking it was looking a little dark there. Let's go to the camera and let's go to filters. Now. And to unlock any post-processing. Oh there we go. Now it's looking a little bit more realistic here. Let's go ahead and increase our exposure a little bit. Maybe lighten increase the brightness. A little. And just adjust these to... something we feel is appropriate. So as you can see here, we have a lot of things we can adjust. And that's looking pretty good. Now, we do have a lot of, extra, you know in the scene here, so we're going to change the aspect ratio of this camera a little bit just to make it fit a little bit better. So change that to nine by nine. And that's looking really good okay. So so far we have adjusted our materials, our scene, our camera all to our liking. And we're going to go ahead and get into rendering out our scene here. Now to do this I like to use what's called the render wizard. walks you through all the different, parameters you need to account for while setting up a render. So first of all, this presets are really helpful and kind of giving you a guide. So I'm kind of going for a full HD. I don't need it to be 4K or flat quality. I want a nice digital picture out of this. I like to render in PNG. Jpeg is fine, or even Photoshop. Resolution is looking good. So now the quality is an area where you can really crank up quality of the render, or you can turn it down for speed. Generally you want to trade off between the two. I don't want it to take too long. You can also tell it how long you want it to take to do render. So I'm going to set this for ten minutes, which is plenty of time to give us a decent result. And see what we get. The Denoiser is a, AI enabled tool that removes a kind of a grain effect that happened sometimes in 3D rendering. In this case, I don't think we need it. But if you if you're experiencing some grain of your renders, you might want to try that out. Title this disc. Target. And we will hit render. It's going to bring us over into this out of here, and it's going to do it right in front of us. And we'll see it regress. And as it progresses, the image will get of higher and higher quality. And eventually we will, save it out of the 3D render. Okay. Our renders complete, although ten minutes is probably a little overkill for us, we probably could have gotten a decent result in half the time, but I'm pretty happy with the result. This nice render of our disc golf haul.