In my last blog article, I showed how we could adjust the appearances on our rescue spreader to make it look more life-like in our final render. Let’s continue to work on those renders and add some dimension and drama with our camera settings in SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

With other packages, it’s often necessary to bring the final render into an image editing application, such as Photoshop. There, users will make the final tweaks required before the image is ready for a website or other publication. By using the camera settings in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, we can often reduce or eliminate any post-processing that may be required prior to publication.

For this image, we’d like to concentrate on the Holmatro logo on our handle and really make it stand out. Before we do so though, it would be nice to keep the previous view and orientation that we used in our last render. To preserve that view, we’ll copy and paste it, so it shows up as an additional camera in our camera tab.

We also have the option to save that to a file if we’d like to re-use the orientation and camera settings on a future file.

We’ll create a new camera view, so we can orient the spreader in our desired position. One of the nice things about using camera controls is that it gives us much finer control over the camera position than we can typically achieve by using just the mouse.

In this case, I want a head-on view of the Holmatro logo on the handle, so I’ve set my longitude to 90 degrees. The latitude will allow me to finely adjust the vertical angle, and the Position XYZ gives me further control over the position of the model in the viewport.  Focal length will affect the zoom level, and perspective will affect how much perspective distortion we have in the view.

Let’s move on to some of our post-processing options now.

By adjusting the post-processing options, we can add some more drama and emotion to our photo with effects like vignette, which will simulate the dark areas around the edge of a photo caused by the lens. In addition to that, we can adjust the color with a color filter or by adjusting the saturation. Settings for darken, lighten, exposure, gamma correction, and brightness will affect how the lighting appears in our final photo. 

If we have an emissive light source in our render, we can really make it stand out with the bloom effects that are available in SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Finally, we can really focus on the nameplate on the handle with our Depth of Field options. This will simulate the depth of field or “bokka” that is produced by a camera lens. It allows us to focus on one area of the photo, while everything else appears less in focus.

By using these camera settings to our advantage, we’ve negated the need for additional post processing in photo editing applications. Now, we have a fantastic image that we can showcase on our website or in our publications such as brochures.

Check out our blog for more tips and tricks on SOLIDWORKS Visualize, or watch our on-demand webinars.