Creating a Photorealistic Render of a Disc Golf Basket in SOLIDWORKS Visualize

Recently, The TriMech Group has partnered with the Disc Golf Pro Tour to help support the growth of one of the most electric sports alongside its passionate community of athletes and fans. In previous articles, our team has been showcasing powerful SOLIDWORKS modeling techniques to build a disc golf basket. With the basket fully built, it’s time to turn our attention to photorealistic rendering to see how the basket will look out on the course.

Considerations to Achieve Photorealistic Renders

When creating a rendering of a 3D model, it is important to have the mind of a photographer. The goal is to create a nicely composed and high-quality image of the subject matter. To this end, it is important to think about lighting, camera positions, environments, appearance properties, and other factors to achieve this goal.

A good hack to use is to have reference imagery of a similar object and the result you are trying to achieve. This way, as you adjust all the variables in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, you can tell if you are getting closer or further to the desired results. Achieving photorealistic renders is ultimately an art and not a science!

Start in SOLIDWORKS

SOLIDWORKS appearances, environments, cameras, and backgrounds carry over to SOLIDWORKS Visualize from SOLIDWORKS. Even though we will most likely adjust these within the render, they are a great starting point for setting up our composition.

The Display Manager on the left side of the graphics window will show appearances already applied to the model while the Task Pane will let you apply additional appearances. New appearances can be applied by clicking and dragging from the Task Pane onto the model.

SOLIDWORKS appearances in the Task Pane

In this case, we will apply a satin zinc appearance, but be sure to use your reference image to help with appearance selections. You can also add in a camera from the Display Manager to allow you to adjust the composition before sending it into SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Adding a new camera to the SOLIDWORKS scene

Opening the Assembly in SOLIDWORKS Visualize

Once you select your model to open, you will be prompted for the things you want SOLIDWORKS Visualize to import from SOLIDWORKS. In this case, we will bring over everything, so we have all the model information available to us. There are additional import modes that you can leverage depending on how you want objects grouped or if you want to ignore certain objects from SOLIDWORKS.

With the project open, you will have two different modes available in the graphics area: Preview and Accurate. Preview mode is great for positioning and manipulating a model. It turns off the resource-heavy rendering, so it is easier to position models and cameras in the right spot without having the CPU or GPU cranking in the background.

Switching between SOLIDWORKS Visualize render modes

Adding Additional Cameras

Since we imported everything from SOLIDWORKS into the Visualize project, we have access to the cameras we already created or can create a new one. On the Camera tab, you can see the existing cameras along with a preview of their viewport, or add a new camera using the plus button. When creating a camera, adjustments can be made to brightness, contrast, and other properties, much like a real camera.

Placing the Model in a Realistic Environment

SOLIDWORKS Visualize includes a cloud-based repository for stock rendering environments but also allows you to use ones personally captured or downloaded from a third-party service. For our render, we will use the “Suburbia” stock environment.

Adjusting an environment’s properties

You can drag and drop the environments from the library into the graphics window for them to be applied. The environment’s rotation, scale, and brightness can be adjusted to have it be appropriately placed in the scene.

Final Changes to Appearances

Arguably, the most important aspect of 3D rendering is mastering appearances and materials. While we did a first pass before we imported the model, SOLIDWORKS Visualize has a much deeper and accurate library of materials to use with our render. Additionally, SOLIDWORKS Visualize provides a much more robust set of properties to adjust appearances to get us to a photorealistic render.

At this point, I typically turn on Accurate render mode to get a clearer picture of the final render. We notice that the satin zinc material added in SOLIDWORKS is much too reflective and we need to change it. Instead, we will replace it with a galvanized appearance from the cloud-based library.

Applying the galvanized appearance

For the blue color of the top band and base, we can keep the original appearance from SOLIDWORKS. All we need to do is adjust the properties to make it look more lifelike. We can first change the material to be a “Car Paint” base, then adjust the Metal Flake to zero, and finally, bump the Roughness up slightly. These changes will make our appearances reflect real-world conditions better.

Adjusting the appearance for the top band

Completing the Final Render

With the camera and appearances set to our liking, it’s time to render. SOLIDWORKS Visualize has a built-in Render Wizard that helps walk users through all the necessary settings before rendering. You can select a preset from the list for your outputs and adjust the parameters to your liking.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize Render Wizard

Depending on the preset selected and your hardware configuration, renders could take a few seconds to a few hours to complete. When working with multiple complex renders, we recommend using Visualize Boost to streamline your content creation process.

The final disc golf basket render

Looking to take your photorealistic rendering skills to the next level? Register for an upcoming training course here.