Looking for user feedback and support on this topic-

I am looking for user support for those of you creating motion study's and generating animation renderings/ray traces. After creating some cool animations recently for my clients I have found it to be a real struggle to be productive rendering the animations to video and or Targa frames. For example, a 720p animation rendering can take up to 20-25 hours base on your assembly components.

Quite frequently It can take a few trials at a lower resolutions and or wire frame rendering to get the draft results you like faster still taking a great deal of time. On many occasions the final high res rendering still needs some tweaks and motion study/key frame adjustments to get it right after all those hours of rendering. All in all your workstation can be tied up for long periods of time.

Outside rendering services for SW are available but they are also limited to rendering on one workstation. There is an enhancement request that I put in a while back and commented on again today. If users can help support the network rendering enhancement request that would be fantastic. If you have not yet gotten to animation rendering with SW I would also appreciate your support if you are considering this feature in the near future.

Modo the developers of PhotoView 360 have had network rendering functionality for several years already. I have no idea if Modo's network functions can be written into SolidWorks and PhotoView 360, is this possible that would be ideal.

There are several third party network rendering applications out there like Next Limit Technologies: Maxwell Render, Luxology: Modo 501 (SolidWorks Kit), Luxion: Keyshot, Bunkspeed: Shot PRO including Bunkspeed Cloud Solution and how about V-ray. They have perfected this process and would be worth a consideration also as a plug in running behind the scenes built into SW. Keeping the cost in mind these third party apps can get up there as an investment. Staying very brief, I will wrap up this topic knowing there is a great deal more info on this subject.

If you are looking for an outside rendering service I highly recommend Anna Wood, RenderBay LLC at renderbay.com, 480.518.6049. Anna provides a fantastic service for rendering PhotoView 360 including Modo software. Modo 501 is capable of network rendering up to I understand 50 nodes/computers at this time. Again SW PhotoView 360 is limited to primarily one workstation rendering.

SolidWorks thank you for your fantastic animation capabilities, please consider network rendering as an enhancement to incorporate in SW 2012.

Thank you,

Steve