Those of you working in Mechanical Engineering Design might want to pay close attention to this new press release from Luxology that includes quotes from Stuart Brown and Paul McCrorey, two mechanical designers who use Luxology’s Modo401 and SolidWorks PhotoView360 to render their models with startling detail.
Recently, a client who wanted a custom car asked Stuart to create a virtual wooden render of a buck, which is a wooden rig used to help make automobile bodies. After using Solidworks 2010 and PhotoView 360 to realize the buck and then modo 401 for final visualization, Stuart says, “The results showed an incredible visual performance increase, to the extent that I am often asked whether the picture I am showing a client is real or computer-generated.’
In addition to simple rendering, they also extoll the virtues of the mapping and animation tools.
Later importing his model into modo 401 for finishing, Paul says modo’s range of control was much greater than he expected: “For texturing, I used UV mapping to establish the fabric pattern on the back seat of the wheelchair. Displacement mapping was used to generate the treads on the tire. With the rich visualization and animation toolset provided in modo, the possibilities are truly endless. Features like morph maps and vertex weight maps were new to me but proved critical for realistic cloth movement. I used the constraint tools to precisely define the wheelchair’s folding action. Finally, the gradient editor provided extreme flexibility in timing of the animation.”
See some more examples of their fantastic work.
