Superior rendering for accurate representation of product designs.

Virtual Studio+ is included with Solid Edge Classic in V18. It resides inside the familiar Virtual Studio environment and allows you to render your images quickly and accurately at any stage of the design process. By providing you with the ability to simulate a wide range of sophisticated materials, colors, textures, scenes and real lighting situations, Solid Edge Virtual Studio+ lets you create high quality photo-realistic renderings of parts or assemblies at light speed. Latest technologies for generating artistic-based renderings for a pencil drawn look are also part of Solid Edge Virtual Studio+.

Features

• Easy to apply database of materials and textures
• Full control over properties such as transparency and reflectivity
• Extensive options for lighting distribution
• Hard, soft and transparent shadows
• Fully customizable foregrounds and backgrounds
• Complete scenes to simulate product environments
• Artistic-based renderings for concept reviews
• Animated fly-through's

Benefits

• Reduce product costs through improved communication
• Reduce the need for costly physical prototypes
• Make faster and more informed

Extensive materials database

Solid Edge Virtual Studio+ provides you with an extensive selection of pre-defined materials that can be applied to individual or multiple components with a simple drag and drop operation. Textures such as patterns, bumps, wrapped images, grids, stencils and transparencies can also be assigned to specific materials, along with additional user-defined control for color, reflectance, highlight, ambient light effect, roughness and diffuse light effects. Photo realistic scenes allow you to simulate the environment in which your products will be used.

Realistic scenes

The addition of surface colors, materials, textures and transparencies help with evaluating prototypes and making design decisions. And, with Solid Edge Virtual Studio+, you can take your design proposals to the next level, creating realistic scenes that use lighting distribution, hard and soft shadows, foregrounds and backgrounds to simulate the environment in which the product will be used.

Backgrounds can range from simple or graduated color schemes through to custom images, while a variety of foreground modes allow the application of effects such as fog, light scattering medium (such as dust through a bright window) and snow. Realistic scenery such as table tops, tiled floors and water can also be dragged into the view.

For maximum realism, your product can be placed inside an "environment" consisting of 4 walls, a top and a base, or a cylinder with a top and a base. By applying custom images or materials to each wall of the environment, you can visualize exactly what the product will look like in the situation in which it will be used, including the effects of lights, reflections and shadows. To complete your scene, choose from the many interior, exterior, and colored light options. You can set the ambient lighting value, simulate the effects for natural sunlight, or add point, spot or distant lighting. Spot and point lights can be positioned anywhere in the scene and you can control the intensity and luminescence drop-off. The target and illumination cone from the spot light can also be adjusted.

For more photo-realism, you can control many different effects to fine tune your images:

• Add transparent or semi-transparent material shadows, such as when light passes through a glass
• Apply anti-aliasing for crisper images
• Adjust radiosity to control the effects of indirect lighting
• Add depth que fading to simulate the effect of depth of field, with the image fading to a set color
• Light scattering to show light rays reflecting off dust or smoke in a room

By interactively exploring various lighting conditions and viewing the product from different positions, you can get immediate, realistic feedback of what the final product will look like. And, of course, with the work being done up front, it is easy to create high quality images for marketing and presentation purposes.

Rendering options for early stage development and concept reviews

Solid Edge Virtual Studio+ lets you create images that are appropriate for the many different stages of the design process. A unique technology allows the easy creation of impressionistic and stylized images to support industrial design type rendering for early stage visualization and concept reviews. Designers have the ability to generate a variety of expressionistic effects that make the image appear as if it were done by freehand sketching. There are a number of artistic render modes available, including cartoon and hand drawn. No longer do you need to worry about creating the wrong impression with a full photo realistic image of a mere concept. Sketch-based rendering is just one more example of how Solid Edge matches the right tool for the job at hand.

Animated fly-through's

Solid Edge Virtual Studio+ further extends Solid Edge's fly-thru capabilities, allowing you to create animated views of your product designs, using any of the available rendering options. Presenting a product idea using animated video is a powerful addition to any design review, as well as for promotional materials. Improved top and bottom line Solid Edge Virtual Studio+ is more than just a tool for image creation. With more effective communication, you will reduce product costs and increase efficiency by reviewing designs before costly physical prototypes are built. Through the use of better product presentations, and the increased potential for creativity, you can give your customers the best first impression of a new design and improve your chances for winning new business. Your customers can instantly see the effects of different materials, colors textures, and lighting and your product can be visualized in its natural environment. Win more business, speed design reviews, get a head start on marketing product concepts, generate higher quality sales and marketing materials, improve your service and maintenance documentation and reduce your overall time-to-market with Solid Edge Virtual Studio+.