Chinese New year is just around the corner, a lot of retail shops are already started their selling on CNY decorations since before last Christmas. Various designers compete with each other to come out with the decoration with stunning appearances. But often times when engineer want to create an artistic design it will result in complete failure since engineer is more about precision while artist is more about free form design. But don’t worry, SOLIDWORKS has the ‘Autotrace’ feature which can trace the free form design from picture and convert into a sketch. The ‘Autotrace’ feature by default is turned off, you can turn it on by going to options > Add-ins and check on the ‘Autotrace’.
Now we will go through the steps to create the artistic content by using SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS Visualize. Firstly, we will use the model we created previously. You can find the steps from the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKo86QLTEJQ
Instead of a standard Chinese character, we want to use a picture to get the result as below:
You can see that the wording is livelier and less boring. Below is the step by step video on how we create the result:
From the video, we had skipped some of the steps by showing the completed Autotrace sketch because some fine tune is needed afterwards. Nevertheless, you can see how easily a complex sketch can be done with minimum effort.
With this feature, it is possible for us to utilize the graphical content created by other profession such as artist and put it into our CAD model. Furthermore, SOLIDWORKS Visualize can be utilized as well to transform our CAD model into a photo realistic content. Below is the result from rendering by using SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional:
With this, we would like to wishing you all a prosperous Chinese New Year 2020,
GONG XI FA CAI!!