GoEngineer Blog

Color is a crucial element in visual media as it influences how viewers perceive the final product. Understanding the components of color and how you can control these within SOLIDWORKS Visualize will improve your renders. While color theory can be a deep topic, we will stick with the basics and how they can be applied to Visualize projects.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard is a powerful photo rendering tool. A complimentary seat of SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard is included with each SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium license on active subscription.

Lighting plays an important role in creating photorealistic images, and the tools available in SOLIDWORKS Visualize vary between the Standard and Professional versions. SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard provides a simple-to-use lighting system that is friendly to new users, whereas SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional builds on that with additional options such as point or area lights for finer control. Visualize Professional also features the option to create a Sunlight Environment for simulating outdoor lighting conditions.

I recently helped a customer who was having difficulty with SOLIDWORKS decals not showing up when the files were imported into Composer. (Introduced in Composer 2022, Composer supports SOLIDWORKS decals.) So, if you’ve found yourself in the same predicament, this blog explains how to import SOLIDWORKS decals and what to do when they don’t appear in Composer.

Textures add depth and interest to everything from food to art, and the same is true for Visualize Appearances. Without textures, surfaces in Visualize can look flat or unrealistic, so let’s look at ways we can add and manipulate textures in SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

GoEngineer's latest Community Design Contest challenged SOLIDWORKS designers to produce their dream desk accessory. Entries ranged from pen cups to headphone stands, but the winning design was a striking and hyper-personalized desk organizer from Mitchell Sherry titled, the "Bring Back the Cool" desk organizer.

SOLIDWORKS Composer files (like SOLIDWORKS files) contain important model information that can be used to manufacture a model. This information can also be used to reverse-engineer a model, potentially compromising your intellectual property. In this article, learn how to protect files and your intellectual property from unscrupulous (or unknown) viewers.

SOLIDWORKS Composer imports SOLIDWORKS models so users can create graphical content and share projects with a wider audience. However, sometimes models import with missing actors or components - usually due to components loading in lightweight mode within SOLIDWORKS or import settings within Composer that exclude surface bodies.

PhotoView 360 for SOLIDWORKS is being retired after version 2023 SP5. If you currently use PhotoView 360 and have already updated to SP3, you might have seen a message about this. Starting with SOLIDWORKS 2024 SP0 (released in November 2023), the PhotoView 360 add-in will no longer be included with SOLIDWORKS Office, SOLIDWORKS Professional, and SOLIDWORKS Premium. Users will instead have access to Visualize for all of their rendering needs.