[FTC]: 2 PTC Questions

[jasonbrooks]

Hi Everyone,
Two PTC questions that I hope someone can help me with.

1) How do you add Wireties in PTC? We have a ball harvesting mechanism that uses wireties around a tube.

2a) How do you render your PTC model so it looks right?
2b) How do you save high quality PTC model renderings?

Thanks in advance!

[Andrew Remmers]

A - Why are you doing Wire Ties? seems like more work than its worth to me, even though there are ways of modeling them.

B - Check inbox

[Team.0110.CAD]

A - The wire-ties can be modeled as a solid object with sketching and extrusions like other custom parts would be modeled. I would start with a cube as the "head" of the tie, extrude that, and have a separate sketch for the rounded part that goes around the tube and extends tangent to it since that part of the tie is thinner. Making the tie itself extremely detailed with the ridges, etc, can be done, but it seems unnecessary, especially since nobody will be focusing on that specific part of your model up close (I wouldn't imagine so, anyway).

B - Rendering a model can be a rather intensive process, if you want it to be. There are many options within the rendering extension of Creo that allow for extremely customized images. I'll go over an overview of the most basic settings, but feel free to come back with specific questions.

On a part level, material properties and how they look when rendered can be edited from the Tools menu, under Model Appearances.

Here you can search for default appearance settings such as aluminum or black matte plastic, and apply them to specific surfaces of a part or the entire part. You can also edit the existing model appearance to fit your needs. Most of the default part appearances in the kit of parts are usable, though many have an excessively high reflection values (even the metals, but especially the plastics) that look odd in renderings.



Within the assembly level, in the render settings which can be accessed either through View > Model Setup, or through adding the render toolbar to your user interface, there are many more options to tinker with. The first I'll go over is scene.

Within View > Model Setup > Scene there are four panels to become familiar with. The Scene panel itself includes what your current scene looks like, and many pre-loaded scenes that come with Creo. Often these scenes are sufficient, and you can simply double-click on one of them to set it to your current model.



The next panel, Room shows all of the specifics of the area your model is in. When clicked, it will display a likeness of the room the model is in in the model window so you can better orient the model for rendering. Here you can also play with what each surface in the room looks like, as well as the distance between the model and each surface. In general, I recommend snapping the floor to the model by clicking the button next to the floor measurement, shown in the picture below.



The next two panels, Lights and Effects, control the environment that the model is in. You can place spotlights, omni-directional lights, etc, and control their brightness and other properties. You can also play with effects such as depth of field and general reflection settings. There is a lot to do within these two panels, I recommend playing with them until you find something you like. If you have any specific questions about these, feel free to ask.

Finally, on a program level, you can set how you want your model to render. This applies more directly to your question 2B.

From within View > Model Setup > Render Setup, you can change the quality and output settings of your render. On the top of this window, you can quickly change the settings in general by changing the quality to either high or maximum (the default is draft, which can be used to quickly preview how a render will look).

In the Options tab, you can change how accurate the reflection, refraction, and shadow is, change the quality of anti-aliasing, and enable final gathering. All of these settings, if increased, will increase the quality of your render, but will also slow it down significantly. A high-quality render can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour on a good computer, depending on your settings.

I generally don't play with the Adv tab, because it is more advanced than I care to tinker with, and in my experience our renders come out nicely without messing with these settings.

In the Output window, you can change where your render is saved to (the default is "Full Window", which just displays the render on your screen. The most common file-type to save these as is JPEG). You can change where the file is saved to and saved as after changing the "render to" option to a picture file-type. The "Show Image Boundary" is useful to see whether or not your model is in an area that will get cut off from the render. Down in the Image Size section, you can set how large you would like your file to render. The default is 600x450 for JPEGs. A high-resolution 5"x7" print is 1500x2100 pixels, and an 8.5"x11" would be 2550x3300 pixels; you can set these by changing the size to custom.

The watermark tab allows you to add a watermark to your image. By default, it has a PTC-related watermark that you may want to disable before rendering.

Finally, I would like to let you know that there is an example of one of our team's renderings from an old robot design in my picture above, and if you would like to use the scene we used in that rendering, we have decided to make it available; just let me know if you would like it. It comes with all of the lighting and room settings it needs, so it would be a quick load-up and you'd be able to get right to everything else. (I have edited this post to add the picture below; I didn't realize how small it would be next to my username.)



Let me know if you have any questions.

[jasonbrooks]

It would be great if you could send the settings that you used in that image! I am playing around with the settings now, but I'm curious to see how yours look with our model!

[alphadog0309]

Matt (our CAD guy) seems to be sleeping haha I let him know you wanted the settings and he's gonna post them first thing in the morning!

[jasonbrooks]

Ok, thanks so much!

[Team.0110.CAD]

Here is the link to the scene file, let me know if it works.

Under Render Setup, set quality to maximum, then increase reflection and refraction by 2, and make the shadow and anti-aliasing settings maximum.

[jasonbrooks]

Hi Matt,
Everything looks really dark when I do everything you said above. Any idea?

[Team.0110.CAD]

Did you set the scene using the model setup menu? You cant just load the scene unfortunately; you need to find it in the window underneath and double-click the scene to set it after you load the it. The default scene is rather dark, so this is most likely the issue. Let me know if its something else.

[jasonbrooks]

So I see now! I need to find a more powerful computer before I continue...it locks up and closes every time I try to render it.

One final question while I install PTC on a new computer...are the wheels automatically set to reflect off the floor like in your model? Ideally, we love how your renders look so we would want to do something like that.

Thanks for all the help!

[Team.0110.CAD]

Yessir, that should be set. It's a property of each surface within the room, much like the reflectivity of materials on parts.

[Andrew Remmers]

That's beautiful, Can haz full res render please?!

That is of course if you don't mind!

- Andrew

[jasonbrooks]

Yerp your renders really are beautiful!

We keep running into problems where PTC just closes and locks up due to insufficient RAM. About how many gigs do you think one needs to render the models using the settings you gave me? I have 4 gigs installed, but like I said, it locks up :/

[Team.0110.CAD]

I don't *think* ram is the issue. I have 8GB installed on the system that I use to render our models, but I don't use all of it while Creo is rendering. It only uses about 2GB of RAM; however, it does take quite a bit of processing power. I've got a quad-core CPU @ 2.83GHz, and each core runs from 75% - 100% while rendering. Even if you have a less powerful computer though, it shouldn't crash, it should just take longer to render. I have heard there are some issues with Creo and Windows 7, though I haven't had many. At what point in the render does it lock up?

Also, we'd be happy to share some of our renders at full resolution if you'd like. We have many on our Facebook page, here, and I would be happy to send some full-res versions around, just send me a message.