Alibre User "Shot Gallery"

[simonb65]

That is really "photorealistic"! The only thing that gives it away is that there is no solder. Other than that, it is basically a photo.

I am not clear on how you did the mapping to keyshot materials.... I understood there was a choice of "part" or "material". I did not know you could map colors like that.

I was thinking about adding the solder fillets to the pin parts ... but for what I use the images for (mainly marketing and documentation), it would be more effort than it was worth.

The template mapping is done to the part name. In my case, the parts names are appended with the material/colour. You could just put a keyword in the part name and use that in the template rule. The colours are attibutes of the material in keyshot. for example, in my material library, I've created an electronics group which looks like ...



It is these that the Template Rules point to.

 

[simonb65]

have you drawn the "printing" on the processor an extruded it very thin in AD?

The writing on the component is a separate Alibre part, which was created by importing a .dxf of the artwork into a single sketch, then extruding it by 0.001mm ...

 

[simonb65]

I've been using Keyshot for years and I didn't know you could apply 'template rules' - thanks!

Jeff, there is a great video on YouTube which explains it all ...

. It demonstrates how you can produce a 'standard' model and then apply templates at will to change the final product, maybe to show variants or different finish ideas to your customers/clients.

 

[idslk]

The writing on the component is a separate Alibre part, which was created by importing a .dxf of the artwork into a single sketch, then extruding it by 0.001mm ...

View attachment 26703

Thank You Simon

Regards
Stefan

 

[slipstick]

How did I miss that?! I'm downloading now!

Playing with KeyShot and SimLab

The first image is KeyShot. One material only. The second is SimLab, imported by way of ViaCAD and Silo3D. ViaCAD does nice meshes, and Silo allows me to assign colors to faces. SimLab then allows me to apply amterial to each color.

Does anyone know if the color restriction is due to the version of KeyShot that comes with Alibre, or is it the bridge from Alibre to KeyShot that is limiting the material per part?

 

[HaroldL]

The restriction is with Alibre -- it doesn't allow different colors to be applied to surfaces. Even though you can color Features those colors don't carry over to KS.
You can get around that limitation in Alibre somewhat by creating "skins" for the surfaces you want a different color/material to be applied to and creating an assembly. The "skins" only need to be a few thou thick, but it is enough for KS to recognize it as a different material based on its color.
Another work flow would be to import your part/assembly into MoI and apply colors to the surfaces there, then export to KS and render away. I think Ralf had a real nice image showing the results of that work flow but I can't find the post now. It's probably too old and got lost on the old forum.

Here's an example of a "skinned" assembly, the first two from Alibre, the last one from KS.

 

[NateLiquidGravity]

There is a geometry editor in KeyShot but I don't think it exists in the Alibre version.

 

[simonb65]

You can get around that limitation in Alibre somewhat by creating "skins" for the surfaces you want a different color/material to be applied to and creating an assembly. The "skins" only need to be a few thou thick, but it is enough for KS to recognize it as a different material based on its color.

Just as I showed in post #197 and #202 of this thread!

 

[JST]

The "skins" deal is kinda old news, I think I have been doing that nearly as long as I have been using the program for real development stuff. Mostly for labeling and so forth.

The "feature color" has taken over for some of that, but I do not think that transfers through to Keyshot. At least it has not seemed to do so in any useful way.

 

[slipstick]

The restriction is with Alibre -- it doesn't allow different colors to be applied to surfaces. Even though you can color Features those colors don't carry over to KS.
You can get around that limitation in Alibre somewhat by creating "skins" for the surfaces you want a different color/material to be applied to and creating an assembly. The "skins" only need to be a few thou thick, but it is enough for KS to recognize it as a different material based on its color.
Another work flow would be to import your part/assembly into MoI and apply colors to the surfaces there, then export to KS and render away. I think Ralf had a real nice image showing the results of that work flow but I can't find the post now. It's probably too old and got lost on the old forum.

Here's an example of a "skinned" assembly, the first two from Alibre, the last one from KS.

View attachment 26753 View attachment 26750 View attachment 26752

I have MoI , but the KeyShot that comes with Alibre only brings in BIP files and some other format I never heard of. I haven't been able to find a program that will convert to BIP (that I can afford), or save as BIP. But SimLab Composer works well. I'll buy it later this spring.

 

[HaroldL]

but the KeyShot that comes with Alibre only brings in BIP files

Oh yeah, I forgot that you might be using Keyshot for Alibre. That would limit your options some.

 

[bigseb]

Re: Alibre User "HyperShot Galery"

Nice renders!



I used Blender for the blanket draping. I don't think we will have a blanket feature in AD until probably v15?

Are we there yet?

 

[jfleming]

If, you structure your parts and use a process like this, its one mouse click to apply the material template, over and above what you normally do to get it into Keyshot! and whilst you've defined the material at source, you can still tweek the template mapping and materials as Keyshot evolves and you want to refine the realism of your renderings.

For those interested, I don't even create the PCB manually. I wrote a plugin that imports Gerber/ODB++/GenCAD manufacturing files and it creates the PCB assembly from that data. The only other item in the process is a mapping file which maps the PCB components to Alibre PRT/ASM files and defines their orientation and respective XYZ offsets between the PCB component datum and the Alibre datum.

Whew! That's incredible man! Must have taken forever?

 

[simonb65]

Whew! That's incredible man! Must have taken forever?

Thanks. Takes a while to add new parts to the library and the program to pull everything together was done in my spare time and is still work-in-progress, but to create finished renders is about 6 button clicks and the time it takes to make a coffee!

 

[DBC]

I just finished some back and forth with KeyShot support (09/23/19) and the only way we can get separate materials on part faces is to be able add color to the part faces, which we can't do in Alibre. We can color features but those do not transfer to KeyShot, as mentioned earlier in this thread. We cannot even use a workaround such as doing so in another program, such as MoI, and saving out in another format such as STEP because the version of KeyShot that we have via Alibre has no non-keyshot import functions. So we are out of luck. KeyShot sales said that if I want those function I can have them for an upgrade price of $1495.00 USD to the Pro stand-alone version. Way too much for me and I am sure for many of you. Looks like it will take Alibre development taking the initiative to allow for colored faces. Or as many of you have suggested, making skins, which in my opinion, is far from ideal.

 

[simonb65]

@DBC , I think some of the 'other' CAD package specific Keyshot link plugins support materials and face colours, it just needs Alibre to step up to the mark and provide it for us too.

 

[Ken226]

This thread hasn't had any love in awhile.

After reading through, it appears that Alibre and Keyshot has made a bit of progress since the last post in 2019.

I've been using the "face color" button in Alibre, which lets Keyshot interpret specific faces on a part as a separate part and allows to you apply different materials to that face. For example, a machined face on a painted part.

I just downloaded Keyshot 11 from Alibre's site and it's working great with V25sp1.




This top face of the main casting is one of those machined faces:



I'm pretty happy with the way Keyshot handles this.

 

[HaroldL]

This thread hasn't had any love in awhile.

I think the Media section has taken over for this thread.

I've been using the "face color" button in Alibre, which lets Keyshot interpret specific faces on a part as a separate part and allows to you apply different materials to that face. For example, a machined face on a painted part.

Face Color is probably the most significant enhancement to Alibre as it relates to rendering in KeyShot.

Good render and use of Hammertone finish. I see you've found more of the Carreras Soto models. I find that they are good for practice modeling since most all of my previous work was sheet metal.

I noticed that the screw thread looks to have sharp edges. Here's an hint for you: In KeyShot add some Rounded Edges to parts that don't have an edge fillet in Alibre. I will sometimes add .005" or .13 mm to some parts in my models just to remove the razor edges in the render. It makes them appear to have been deburred.

Select the part in the Scene tab then adjust the rounding in the parts Properties and the bottom of the Project tab.

 

[Ken226]

I think the Media section has taken over for this thread.


Face Color is probably the most significant enhancement to Alibre as it relates to rendering in KeyShot.

Good render and use of Hammertone finish. I see you've found more of the Carreras Soto models. I find that they are good for practice modeling since most all of my previous work was sheet metal.

I noticed that the screw thread looks to have sharp edges. Here's an hint for you: In KeyShot add some Rounded Edges to parts that don't have an edge fillet in Alibre. I will sometimes add .005" or .13 mm to some parts in my models just to remove the razor edges in the render. It makes them appear to have been deburred.

Select the part in the Scene tab then adjust the rounding in the parts Properties and the bottom of the Project tab.

View attachment 37170

Yea, im enjoying the practice and the challenge from working on these Carreras Soto drawings.

Keyshots cloud library has an excellent selection of finishes available. I found dozens of hammertone colors.

Thanks for the tip on rounding the sharp edges. It works quite well, on both the ACME style and the ISO threads. It took me a minute to find the correct tab, but it was easy to apply once I found it.






These are my render settings. Anything obvious I should change? I still don't understand the "print size" setting and how it relates to "dpi".

 

[HaroldL]

Your Samples look okay, I usually watch in the real time render window to see what the sample count is when I don't see any visual improvement in the image. I then set that as the samples in the final render, it's usually in the 200 - 300 range.

I set my DPI to 300 and adjust the image size to something that I would print the image to. I don't have a printer that will print a higher dpi. Even for the renders I did at work we would only set dpi to 300 and image size to nothing larger than 8 X 10 (I don't recall the actual setting), so it would fit on a folding sales brochure. We also output to PNG with Transparency since the images were used on the web as well as for print medial.

I set my image size to something in the range of 6 X 4 (4 X 6) to 10 X 8 (8 X 10). I sometimes forget that I first need to set the image resolution in the Image menu before I can set it in the Render dialog. I end up with a resolution at about 1920 X 1480.

For the machined parts try using Radial Steel texture. It's a real bear to set up and make look good but the effort is worth it in the final render. It makes the parts look like IRL.