Solidworks assembly to 3DS Max

[David Simms]

Hi all,

I've been contacted by a previous employer to do some renders for a project I was working on before I left over a year ago. The project consists of multiple pieces of furniture saved as their own solidworks part files, placed into an interior scene (assembly file). I originally imported the whole assembly into keyshot and made do with my computer chugging along struggling to cope with the tens of furniture items in the scene. I also didn't enjoy using keyshot for interior rendering which resulted in blotchy walls and uneven lighting.

I would like to tackle the project this time using 3DS Max and V ray, possibly using V ray proxies to make life a little easier on my computer. Another issue is the models all have textures straight out of solidworks which aren't realistic, so i would like to re-texture each item with vray materials, and finally if i can do all of this, whilst keeping the layout of the furniture consistent to what is found in the original solidworks assembly that would be great.

Having not used 3DS Max since I was in college many moons ago, I'm a little anxious but i would hugely appreciate any advice anyone can offer me on how to tackle this task. Literally any workflow tips would be fantastic.

 

Thanks in advance

David

[heni30]

It will take you several moons to pick up Max and Vray again to where you feel comfortable and are efficient.  Would strongly suggest collaborating with someone.

[Nicolai Bongard]

I do not have any experience with the assemblys, but when you get your geometry imported you can right click in empty space and press vray scene converter to automatically convert standard materials to vray ones. Then press M to open up the material library and then you can use the "get all scene materials"-button to get all your not converted materials into the material editor for further editing. Then it should be a matter of tweaking the materials to your liking, and replacing the textures. When everything is tweaked you could select geometry and right click and create v-ray proxies from the contextual menu.

[David Simms]

On 4/20/2021 at 7:29 PM, heni30 said:

It will take you several moons to pick up Max and Vray again to where you feel comfortable and are efficient.  Would strongly suggest collaborating with someone.

You were definitely right with this, especially the part about me being efficient. It took me far longer than it should have done but I learned some new things along the way. 

6 hours ago, Nicolai Bongard said:

I do not have any experience with the assemblys, but when you get your geometry imported you can right click in empty space and press vray scene converter to automatically convert standard materials to vray ones. Then press M to open up the material library and then you can use the "get all scene materials"-button to get all your not converted materials into the material editor for further editing. Then it should be a matter of tweaking the materials to your liking, and replacing the textures. When everything is tweaked you could select geometry and right click and create v-ray proxies from the contextual menu.

Thanks for the advice. I imported the models and went through each unique object quickly applying a multi sub object material consisting of multiple of the same vray triplanar wood texture oriented at different angles. With this I could get the textures right really quickly which was far nicer than my original approach a year or so ago.

I couldn't find a way to replace the untextured copies with the textured ones, however. In the end I went through the entire scene replacing them manually which I felt wasn't very efficient but at that point I just needed to get the job done. Any advice on how to replace objects like this would be appreciated.

In the end I didn't really need to take advantage of proxy objects, but future projects might be far more taxing on my system, so it's very much still on my to do list to learn at least.

What seemed to cause me the most grief was working out if I should work with layers or groups, or both. I started with groups and at one point found myself making groups of absolutely everything which made the scene a pain to work with. I then switched to working with layers and got the scene better organised, but not perfect. How do you guys utilize groups and layers in your workflows, or is it something that changes from scene to scene?

 

Thanks

 

 

 

 

Edited April 26, 2021 by David Simms