Solidworks Surface Modeling

 Having gotten used to the Solidworks workflow I decided to move on to something a bit more challenging - surface modelling. For the subject I chose to model a car. I began by sketching out the profile, and then by sketching guides to extrude this profile along (using the boundary surface modifier):

This resulted in a mesh (having 3 dimensions but a thickness of 0). The blue and lines coming out of the mesh, "combs", show the curvature at that particular point. During manufacture this would correspond to the amount of bend that point would have to undergo to achieve the required shape:

 Having brought this mesh into photoview for a test render, I realised that the scale of the mesh was incorrect. To fix this I added a scale modifer to the stack. From there on I added thickness to the surface and modelled a cockpit and adjusted some of the colours. The image below is a screen shot of the finished shell part, and therefore will not be identical in colour or geometry to the render.

This was opened up in photoview for the following render:

But what is a car without wheels? I started a new assembly with the car shell and a new wheel part, which was built seperately:

The wheel was locked in place by using perpendicular, coincident and concentric mating pairs. I only added wheels on the back to begin with. The following renders were calculated in photoview:

Front 3/4

 Right

Rear 3/4

Rear Tyre, Depth of Field

 This is where the problems began. I wanted to incorporate front tyres too, but the current ones looked too small (on both the front and the back). The front of the car also dropped lower than the base of the rear tyre, meaning that I would have to enlarge the rear tyre to sustain the profile. However to do this I would need to alter the initial sketch profile of the surface cage. When I tried this I got many rebuild errors due tot he scale before adding the other features. So in the end I decided to bring the wheel out from the body of the car, resulting in a caricatured/remote controlled look. The front tyre was a copied version of the rear tyre with the scale changed. The wheels were then rigged to the axles, and then an assembly belt was added. This meant that if and wheel was rotated (i.e if it were moving along the ground), the opposite tyre would rotate at the same rate and the other tyre pair would rotate at the correct speed (faster or slower depending on the diameter ratios). The final assembly and belt can be seen here:

Opened in photoview for the following renders:

 Satin Finish Front

Gloss Finish Front

3/4 Black

3/4 Final

Early Days in Solidworks

For these images I build the mesh in Solidworks and rendered in Photoview 360.
This model was not made to represent any object in particular, but came out resembling a mix between a tyre hub, an ash tray, and a cylindrical bearing axle. It was my first attempt in Solidworks, and so it uses most of the basic sketching and featuring tools. To name a few (roughly in order used): circle, polygon, extruded boss, fillet, chamfer, shell, extruded cut, dome, circular array.
The model is not fully dimensioned, as I was just getting used to the interface and malleable workflow of Solidworks. A screenshot showing one of the sketch dimensions is posted above.

Here I used a checkered studio material, and applied Depth-of-field to the PhotoView 360 Camera. The scene is a 3 light set up with a soft HDRI image for an environment. I feel the DOF may be too strong.





Here was my first go at adding materials, a flecked car paint. Environment was altered, and gamma slightly adjusted.




Here the environment was again altered, and I changed the focal length to enable a more realistic DOF in a later render. A bloom of 95% threshold and 4% radius was also applied in post processing.





Here is my final image. The material is shown to be the correct scaling on the mesh and the differences between the filleting and chamfering can be seen on the top faces and edges of the hexagonal extrusion. Diffuse reflections are also well shown. Bloom was added for a more "showcase" image. The render size is 1600x900.