SolidWorks PhotoView360: Don’t Try This With MultiBody Parts / Bonjour? Oui Oui!

If You Can’t Get PV360 Dialog to Open: Try Installing Bonjour Print Service

• If you can’t get PV360 to work: (i.e.; it says down in the bottom left corner of SW that it’s loading info…. then flashes a window for split second before ultimately doing nothing), then look in your “Uninstall Programs” dialog for the “Bonjour,” program.
• If Bonjour is missing, then try going to Apple, download and install the free program for Windows.
• Worked like a charm for me! I had removed Bonjour because I thought I was doing a little cleaning of bloatware, but turns out that’s a necessary program for this.

Trying to Get Photorealistic Patterns on Multibody Part Bodies? Quit Wasting Your Time.

• If you’re trying to get multiple bodies in your multibody/weldment part file to display different Appearance patterns (like adding different wood grain orientations to various bodies), it’s not going to work. At least not as of SW2015.
• Same with trying to save any changes to Appearance mappings:
  • Like applying a pattern to a body instead of surface mapping;
  • Or changing the size of the pattern to say, make wood grain look tighter;
  • Or changing the angle so end grain won’t appear on the long side of a 2×4; etc.
• These appearance tweaks you labored over per each body in your multibody part WILL NOT SAVE, even though there’s a save button you can push. And even if it looks as if you’ve got the patterns to go the right direction or resize or whatever, just preview a PV360 render and you’ll see it’s completely wrong.
• Apparently this is a problem SW has specifically decided NOT to solve since multibody parts was a thing.
  • SOLUTION: You will have to save out your bodies to an assembly, and then edit your appearance mappings at the part level.

Screenshots

Notice how in these screenshots some of the boards with “Spruce” appearance look to have long grain showing, but when PV360 render preview is turned on, every spruce board shows end grain only.

SolidWorks PhotoView360 – Can’t save Appearance Mappings: Some of the “Spruce” boards appear to have long grain, but in the PhotoView360 Render, they all have end grain

SolidWorks PhotoView360 – Can’t save Appearance Mappings: Some of the “Spruce” boards appear to have long grain, but in the PhotoView360 Render, they all have end grain