Textures? Rendering? How is this done TODAY?

joey_amen932

So, I just spent the past several weeks learning this program and modeling something up in it, for the sole purpose of being able to see how various designs will look on all the different surfaces in a 3D space before I start painting the real-world object.  Now I'm ready to start importing my design images and am realizing that there's no way to put an image on a surface, only to use it as a drawing guide for a sketch.  All the answers I find when searching say to do textures in a rendering program.  OK, that's fine, except none of the rendering apps people mention are available in the OnShape app store anymore.  I'm feeling very frustrated as that was a key factor in me selecting this application, the fact that they advertised integrated connections to rendering apps.  So what is the simplest way to go about this now?  I don't have time to wait for them to finish retooling the rendering suite they bought.  I don't even need to actually render tbh; I just want to see images on my assemblies somehow so I can get an idea of how the overall design is going to look before I have the lasercutting done for my paint stencils.

Note that if I must export/import to another program, I need the assemblies intact, not lumped into a single mesh, so that I can apply different textures to the different surfaces.

Also, yes, I've seen the improvement request for Decals that has been sitting there since freaking 2016.  I already commented on it.

Brien_McCormick

Hi Joey,

I'm sorry you are having trouble. You are correct that the RealityServer rendering app is temporarily unavailable, as it is in the process of becoming fully integrated into Onshape.

If you are just trying to put an image on a surface and not necessarily do a full render - the image import to a sketch is what I see at the easiest solution. 


Of course, this will only show up in the Part Studio and not in the Assembly. If you needed to see the sketch lines in the full assembly, you can create sketch elements from an image using a program like Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/), then use a Split command and create an appearance on the part. This is a helpful tutorial showing this process: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1conXdu03jg 

Otherwise, you will unfortunately need to use a 3rd party application to create a full rendering. Some popular options are Blender and Keyshot.

Blender
https://www.blender.org/features/rendering/ 

Keyshot
https://www.keyshot.com/resources/education/ 

Sorry again that you are having trouble. Hopefully one of these solutions works for you!

~Brien

Evan_Reese

I use Keyshot and the Onshape Connection plugin for this. If you are just evaluating the design and don't care about watermarking on the renderings, you could maybe just do a free trial of Keyshot.

alnis

If you would like to stick to free software, I recommend using the Collada export from Onshape to take the model into Blender (open source). Collada preserves materials and structure to some extent. Then, you can use something like the BlenderKit addon to get a library of ready to go materials.