I have encountered numerous unexpected behaviors from PV360 since I installed SW2011. I had to take a weekend just to find acceptable settings in this new, forced down our throats software.

I still have anomalies I can't find a solution to yet after 2 weeks of trying to find one. For instance:

Transparent materials like polycarbonate. Do they render as they should? NO! Even if you set the object to the default settings for polycarb and don't change a thing, when you render it the part comes out BLACK!! Some transparency that is. At least Photoworks rendered see thru objects as see thru, you could even set components to transparent in an assembly and it would render like polycarb should.

In fact if you play with the transparency setting at all, in your appearance properties, your part gets blacker and blacker. I have dozens of parts and assemblies I successfully rendered last year for our catalogs and literature. I opened several of these known good files, and whalah, ALL BLACK.

Thanks a lot guys. Our 2011 product line is looking real good now. Can't use a bit of the work I did last year, and oh well, Photoworks is gone now, so sorry. Looks REALLY good on my perfomance record.

This is just the tip of my iceberg. How bout this? Render objects (once you can find a decent appearance setting scheme) in a standard view and it's not too bad. But don't you dare go rotating the part outside those standard views, you will get another nasty surprise. I had to tell my customer I have a software glitch, just disregard the funny looking, mismatched component.

Wanna see, have a look. First pic is rendered in standard view. Second pic has been rotated to be looking from the right end of the part. WTH ?  Same part, same appearance and PV settings. Way to go.

This is only a smattering of the problems I have with PV360.

I wont go into how 2011 SP1 totally crashed my SW install. How it failed to install E-drawings, and rendered it useless and inoperable. Or how it screwed up my  ability to export PDF files not only from SW, but it screwed up pdf output in AutoCAD as well. WHAT? Yes, it screwed up my install of AutoCAD, go figure that one out. I had to roll back my pc to the point prior to the sp1 install, then REINSTALL SW 2011.

I don't mind change. I don't mind changing to new software. I have gone thru many versions of SW with you guys. What I mind is you guys pulling a MS and releasing software you know is not ready, and putting my job at risk in the process. Don't even come up and say I am inexperienced and can't handle it. I have been using SW since 1998.

Yes I am pissed.

gruff