solidworks

mr slobs

Has anyone out there used solidworks before? I'm being introduced to it this semester and wondering if learning skills in solidworks will equate to proficiency in 3ds max ? :shifty:

thanks,
mr slobs

Playdo

Yeah, I've used Solidworks a lot. SW and Max have totally different approaches and uses. I'd say the only benefit that you can carry across is the ability to visualise in 3d. You're obviously on a Product Design course if you're learning SW. If so, my advice is to concentate on that and not get involved with Max as it has very little use in that area.

mr slobs

thanks for the response.

.morph3us

I am working with both (my company uses Max and VRay for rendering beauty shots of the CAD data produced by other companies with SW or other), though all i can do is export in the appropriate data formats for max...

The main difference (unless you use nurbs modeling in max) is that SW is parametric (it adds and deletes polys based on various input paramters, such as how coarse your would like your model to be) and max works with a polygonal approach as far as i can see...

So probably it wont help much except getting an eye for 3D stuff.

It depends on what you want to do, it is possible to port models over, but if you want to use them in a game engine or you have lots of these objects in your scene its getting laggy very fast! (or you need to tweak the objects one by one in your mesh to compensate that)

if you have only one object with a few mill polys and you only want to take a beauty shot of it that wont matter too much though...

Playdo

xXm.. is there a lot of business there? I'd have thought with rendering software like Bunkspeed Shot, that most companies would do it in-house.

What's your process getting the Max files into SW?

Btw nurbs in Max .....sucks.

.morph3us

no, get step data into max for rendering
not the other way round

and yes, its going well...
i'm new here, just a few weeks in, so i'm not really that indepth yet, sry...

this'll help you hopefully:
http://www.npowersoftware.com/translators/ptoverview.htm

Playdo

sorry that's what I meant to write, SW to Max. Yeah, I've used npower before, but still had some cleanup to do. I was just interested in hearing a company's approach.